Carmel Gets a Writers Conference
by Bridget Kinsella -- Publishers Weekly, 8/3/2007 10:35:00 AM
Just about six weeks ago when Carmel residents Jim and Cindy McGillen set out to launch the Carmel Authors & Ideas Festival in September—this September—they were told it couldn’t be done. Now the semi-retired couple (he from running a distribution company and she from running the local NBC TV station) have signed marquee writers Frank McCourt, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Elizabeth Edwards, Seymour Hersh, among others, for the event which will take place at the Carmel Sunset Center. And instead of contacting publishers, they couple went directly to authors in some cases and through speaking agents in others.
“No offense to Toledo, but I was not asking people to come to Toledo, I was asking them to come to Carmel,” Jim McGillen said.
When Douglas Brinkley, editor of The Regan Diaries, got the call from his speaking agent, he didn’t need to be convinced to participate. “The thought of literature and Carmel sounded great to me,” said Brinkley.
The McGillen’s have modeled the Carmel festival after the very successful annual writer’s conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, where they have had a second home for a decade. “It’s not just literary it’s very social. It’s just a great week in Sun Valley,” McGillen explained. “I thought, boy, we should do that here [in Carmel].” The Sun Valley conference is on a one-year hiatus this year, but McGillen said he and his wife were not looking to compete with that event.
Tickets to the Carmel festival are $500 and limited to 750 attendees. The weekend’s activities are still being finalized, but will include over 30 authors. McGillen said he wanted two authors right from the start: McCourt and former 49ers coach Bill Walsh, who published his memoir and another book on football in the 1990s. “When they both said yes, it was a go,” said McGillen. (Sadly, Walsh passed away this week.)
The criteria McGillen used to invite authors to the conference is not that they are the biggest or the latest bestselling authors, McGillen explained, but that they are compelling, inviting and entertaining. McGillen said if he does not deliver an event that all the authors and the attendees want to return to the next year, then he will not have done his job. He expects the conference to become an annual event.
“When you write books you have to pull for people like that,” said Brinkley.
