A weekend for the writers and readers | News, Sports, Jobs – The Adirondack Daily Enterprise

Tri-Lakes writers and readers will no doubt have a packed schedule this weekend. Why? There’s not one but two festivals for literature lovers planned around the region: The Adirondack Center for Writing’s Kicka** Writers Festival in Saranac Lake — which the Enterprise is sponsoring — and the Adirondack Family Book Festival in Lake Placid.

The ACW’s festival kicked off yesterday with a meet and greet and a reading at Pendragon, but the festivities are continuing today with more than a dozen events at venues all around the village. There are workshops designed to help writers hone their skills; a panel on publishing in the North Country, featuring Andy Flynn, the editor of our sister newspaper The Lake Placid News; a bookfair at the Saranac Lake Free Library; a talk by the first openly gay woman to climb the Seven Summits, Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, and much more. Saturday’s schedule will be capped off with an installment of the Howl Story Slam, hosted by Greg Barris — with anybody allowed to tell a story as long as it’s true, you never know what you’ll hear. That’s part of the fun. A full schedule for the festival is available online at adirondackcenterforwriting.org.

The Adirondack Family Book Festival is today only, free to attend, and runs from 9:45 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the John Brown Farm Historic Site.

On the schedule are events for all ages that span multiple genres. There’s an all-ages writing workshop at noon, a program called “Searching for Jumbies: Meet Caribbean Monsters with Tracey Baptiste” at 1:20 p.m., and a presentation called “Truth in the Fiction: The Power of Authenticity in Novels for Teens,” presented by Kekla Magoon and Laura Ruby. There’s also a youth panel discussion on the schedule — “Youth Voices: A New Generation of Readers and Creators” — and book signings with authors starting at 3:50 p.m. The full schedule is at adirondackfamilybookfestival.wordpress.com/schedule.

Whether you’re a published author, aspiring writer or avid reader, this is a great weekend to get out there and enjoy all that the Adirondack writing community has to offer.