Some Storied Expectations

Even if you’re not an avid reader, the atmosphere around the UCLA campus this weekend may make you wish you were. The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books returns for its third year to the Westwood campus, featuring about 350 exhibitors and four stages for entertainment.

Although 100,000 people are expected to flock around the booksellers, signers and storytellers, among those most anticipating the whole affair are the authors themselves. Coming face to face with swarms of children and adults who appreciate the art of writing is heady stuff, even for a best-selling writer.

“Writing is so inherently isolating,” said East Coast author Cari Beauchamp, who attended the festival last year. “After years of working and wondering if anyone will even care, I spent an entire day feeling valued.”

On Sunday, Beauchamp, author of “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood,” is scheduled to participate in the Glamour Days: Old Hollywood panel. She’s especially excited, she said, because she’s been corresponding with fellow panel members Richard DeMille and Gavin Lambert for years but has never actually met them.

Clive Barker, who recently emerged from self-imposed solitary confinement after finishing his latest book, “Galilee,” also welcomes the chance to converse with readers and other writers.

“I just finished 14 months of really not talking to anybody,” said the fantasy-horror fiction writer. “It’s important for me to do this [festival], to draw parallels and express my opinions with other writers as well as hear their opinions on the issues of the day.”

Bebe Moore Campbell, whose “Singing in the Comeback Choir” is a bestseller and whose earlier book, “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine,” won the NAACP Image Award for literature, said she hopes to find inspiration at the Festival of Books.

“I want to have a good time and listen to other authors, I want to leave here and be inspired to do what I do in a better way.”

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, author of “A Woman of Independent Means” and “Home Free,” believes that the festival puts writers in a unique position, allowing them to “come togetherin a community of readers and writers.” Hailey will moderate the panel A Woman’s Story: Female Voices in Fiction, which includes authors Olivia Goldsmith (“The First Wives Club”), Whitney Otto (“How to Make an American Quilt”), Elizabeth Berg (“The Pull of the Moons”) and Amy Ephron (“A Cup of Tea”), convening Saturday at 3 p.m. Offering a hint of the territory her panel will cover, Hailey said her own foray into fiction with “A Woman of Independent Means” 20 years ago was a timely one.

“I feel strongly that I was lucky to have come of age at a time when women were beginning to find their voice. . . . Women were expressing all kinds of things they had not dared to say out loud and finding their own lives fiction-worthy too.”

Preeminent author Sidney Sheldon said he has only one reason for attending the festival--to support literacy. He said the Festival of Books is his first book festival and that he even postponed his yearly trip to Europe to attend.

“There are 30 million adults who cannot read or write,” said Sheldon, a former spokesman for the National Coalition for Literacy. “I think it’s shocking.”

Sheldon, scheduled to speak in Collins Court at 10 a.m. Saturday, doesn’t have a set topic because, he explained, with such an important issue, “there’s so much to talk about.”

“I really think the foundation of the future of this country depends on this, and that’s why I’m so in favor of this festival,” Sheldon said. “I wish every big city would have one. We’ve got to encourage people to read.”

The Festival of Books was always intended as a family and community happening that would promote literacy. From its debut in 1996, the event became a “celebration” of books in every sense of the word. Organizers expected about 25,000 people the first year; 75,000 showed up.

“It’s the kind of event that people feel really good about,” said Narda Zacchino, festival co-chairperson and associate editor at the Los Angeles Times. “The people who come feel good about it and so do the exhibitors and sponsors. And we at the L.A. Times feel good, because it’s celebrating the written word.”

Even Ticketmaster has something to feel good about. While admission is free, the demand for seats to the author panels made it necessary to require tickets. Free tickets are available through Ticketmaster through today and, because CEO Fred Rosen is a “passionate believer” in the festival, Zacchino said, he waived the service charge. Some tickets will also be available at the door.

“The first year for this festival was a huge leap of faith,” said Zacchino, who recalled that the biggest obstacle was finding enough people who believed that Los Angeles could pull off such an event. Even some of the exhibitors were skeptical, postdating their booth rental checks for after the festival.

Three years later, the event has become the second-largest book festival in the country, behind Miami. It is the “defining event” in the Los Angeles literary world, said author April Smith, who’s been a participant all three years.

“The rest of the world perceives Los Angeles as a bunch of superficial surfers,” said Smith, author of “North of Montana.” “This reinforces our identity.”

Book agent Sandra Dijkstra, among the original festival committee members, gets a lot of satisfaction now seeing New York publishers who are “completely overwhelmed and surprised” at the size and enthusiasm of the Festival of Books crowd. “I love to watch their jaws just drop open when they see all these people who’ve given up a day at the beach to come and look at books,” she said.

Although some soothsayers have predicted that the advent of the Internet and CD-ROMs would mean the demise of books altogether, the Internet has become yet another source for book buyers, evolving into a kind of home shopping network for readers. .

“You can order any book in the world through the Internet, you can even talk to authors,” Hailey said. “TV was viewed as a threat to movies and books when it started. . . . I don’t see the Internet as the competition.”

Barker, who’s written his share of screenplays, concurred: “There is a huge and, I have to think, growing audience for smart books--not the sort of stuff that looks like afternoon soaps or the first draft of a screenplay--books with paragraphs, long words and, most of all, ideas. It’s the ideas content of books that enthralls me. So the idea that 100,000 people are going to come along and get their books signed, bringing their treasured, battered old paperbacks along, it’s wonderful.”

BE THERE

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, UCLA campus, Westwood. Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission, free; parking, $5. (800) LATIMES, Ext. 7BOOK. Internet site: https://www.latimes.com/festival

* FOR YOUNGEST READERS: Entertainment, literary adventures for children at the Book Fair. Page 40.