For McDole, though, the first part of the interaction is emblematic of SunLit.
"This whole festival has been built on handshakes," says McDole, who runs the festival's sponsoring organization, Keep St. Pete Lit. ""It's basically relationships and partnerships we've built over the years. People want to be involved in literary arts. People want to be involved with the festival. It's conversations in coffee shops, on the street."
She could not be more correct, and if you're a little amazed that a two-week party celebrating words comes together courtesy of serendipity, well, that's the vibe surrounding McDole. She can make things happen, usually in the least conventional way possible — and those things work. SunLit is the poster child for that; in four years, it has grown from an event ancillary to the Antiquarian Book Fair into a destination unto itself.
In the first year, Keep St. Pete Lit partnered with the book fair, the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance, T. Allan Smith and Mike Slicker of Lighthouse Books.
"The Antiquarian Book Fair approached the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance to be the umbrella organization for a literary festival surrounding the ABF," McDole says. The programming included a pub crawl (this writer participated) along with a smattering of other events that McDole's organization helped promote. After the first two years, the fest became a KSPLit event.
"John Collins [of SPAA] handed the reins to us, saying, 'This is your wheelhouse'," says McDole. Last year, SunLit featured 22 events over 16 days; this year they're hosting 18 events, starting with the kickoff party and ending with Wake Up: The Buddhist Writings of Jack Kerouac on Apr. 22 (which is also the final day of the Antiquarian Book Fair). Click here for the full schedule.
Most of the events are interactive, too. McDole uses the word "smorgasbord" and that's not inaccurate. If you haven't been to a Keep St. Pete Lit event and maybe think it's a bunch of people reading and lecturing, think again. Sure, they have readings a-plenty, but they also have a not-just-for-kids tree-climbing event, opera, an historical walking tour, a short film, Tiny Bacteria, made by local women filmmakers… the list goes on.
"There's a cross-pollination of disciplines," McDole says, and, again, this is vintage McDole (one of KSPLit's first major events was Fantastic Ekphrastic, an interdisciplinary evening of words, visual art and drama). But she's not content to keep things the same; she's lived other places where she saw great events, but they were essentially recycled every year and suffered from the "we've always done it that way" mentality.
""There's the threat of constantly using the same stuff over and over again; nothing original happens. We don't want to be regurgitating the same programming over and over again. We're trying to create new content; that's why merging the different art forms work — bringing opera in with poetry, bringing in tree climbing with books. We're bringing in realities that wouldn't ordinarily mingle and creating a new, dynamic experience."
So how is it a festival can not have all the same events and still draw people to it? McDole cites two things: one, as curator she looks for things that excite her.
“We’re creating content I would want to be a part of as a reader and a writer," she says. “I love this city and these are experiences I want to have, and hopefully other people feel the same way."
Two, that word “experiences.”
"Literature goes everywhere — literature goes into space, it goes into the deep sea ocean; you can literally pair literature with anything and it works," she says. "Reading takes you everywhere; that's what I hope this festival represents."
Cathy Salustri is the arts + entertainment editor for Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact her here.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 5, 2018.