For writer and Amherst College alum Dan Chiasson ’93, being part of this year’s LitFest — the annual literary festival at the college — is more than just an opportunity to see former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or to share his new book. It’s a homecoming to the place that fostered his writing talents.
“Reading is a great adventure and it is something we all struggle to make time for, but I think events like this one remind us,” he said.
LitFest will return this year from Thursday, Feb. 26, through Sunday, March 1, at multiple locations at the college. The festival’s guest speakers include former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in conversation with writer Cullen Murphy ’74; novelist and Harvard professor emerita Jamaica Kincaid H’96, in conversation with Jennifer Acker ’00; and poets Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Evie Shockley, in conversation with Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation.
In a statement, Shockley said, “A celebration like LitFest is important because it helps us remember that writing and reading are acts of sustained thought, intense imagination, and deep pleasure. We are able to have these experiences asynchronously and in physically separate spaces from one another, as books circulate through the material world and from screen to screen, all the time. But what a joy it is for people to come together in one place and share the emotions and ideas that literature conveys as a collective!”
Chiasson, who teaches English at Wellesley College, now serves on the editorial board of Amherst College’s literary magazine, The Common. An author and a poet, he has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker for more than two decades. He credits his time at Amherst with preparing him for his writing career.
“There was no better place, I think, to … talk about literature and take apart sentences and lines and images,” he said. “It’s a very communal experience in a college classroom. If you love poetry, that can be pretty isolating, I think, sometimes, to find a community, and people struggle when they get out of colleges and universities to replicate that community. But we had those small seminar rooms and small tables, and we would just pick apart language and think about what made a poem special, so that was extraordinary.”
Some of his favorite teachers at Amherst were English professor and literary critic William H. Pritchard, art history professor Nicola Courtright, and classics professor Rick Griffiths.
“All of these figures taught that there is real dignity in looking at small-scale observations,” Chiasson said. “None of them were big on themes or subjects. They were mostly interested in small observations about language or visual composition.”
Chiasson first took part in LitFest in 2021, when the entire event was on Zoom — “one of the best Zoom events I did,” he said.
This year, he’ll be returning in person to take part in the panel “The Self in the World: Forging a Politics of Belonging” on Saturday, Feb. 28 at 11 a.m. in the Friendly Reading Room at Frost Library. He’ll be joined by Aatish Taseer ’03 and Helen Whybrow ’90, two writers who are also Amherst alums.
In a statement, Whybrow said, “In our current world of media overload, censorship and manipulation, as well as uncertainties about where messages originate, it feels so good to take this time to slow down, be together in person, and talk about words and stories in a way that has some intention and gravitas.”
As part of the panel, Chiasson will discuss the way the theme relates to his book “Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician,” which came out earlier this month. The 592-page book explores how Senator Bernie Sanders — whom Chiasson called “the best president we never had” — went from a civil rights activist to an influential figure in American politics.
Chiasson grew up in Burlington, Vermont, and much of his childhood bookended Sanders’ term as the city’s mayor: he was 9 when Sanders was elected and 17 when he left office.
“It really impacted my life pretty profoundly,” Chiasson said. “In fact, I think the reason I ended up at Amherst College had to do with the stimulation of living in a city that was changing and that was respecting the arts and that was respecting young people. It wasn’t all a picnic, but it was really quite amazing.”
As it happens, this festival has another connection to the Green Mountain State: novelist Jamaica Kincaid, who lives in Vermont, is a close friend of Chiasson’s — in fact, she’s his son’s godmother. She and Chiasson met while he was working on his Ph.D. at Harvard University.
“She heard that I was a Vermonter, and that made it an instant bond between us,” he said.
Besides his role in the festival, Chiasson is also looking forward to coming back to Amherst to go to La Veracruzana and to “maybe check in with some of the local bars,” he said. On a more serious note, though, he sees the festival as a valuable — and timely — way to pay tribute to the value of literature and writing.
“Those values are being lost,” he said. “We’re even conceding ground to machines to do our writing for us and our thinking for us. People like you and me, who are in the business of being human writers, are awfully precarious right now. I just think there’s never been a better time, really, to celebrate writing done by humans — in this case, exemplary, extraordinary, inspiring writing done by humans.”
For more information about LitFest, including a full schedule and registration links, visit amherst.edu/about/literary-amherst/litfest. As of this writing, tickets to the event with Secretary Buttigieg are sold out.