Keith Donohue at the Gaithersburg Book Festival

Part 2 of my adventures at the Gaithersburg Book Festival:

After getting her kids and hubbie settled in the children's village, Ali (AKA, novelist Allison Leotta) and I walked across the City Hall grounds in time to hear novelist Keith Donohue speak. Despite his novels being prominently displayed on my bookshelves, I have not read him yet. I've always wanted to, but you know how it is. So many books, so little time. Soon, Keith! But it was terrific to have a chance to hear him speak and read.

At the top of this post, you'll see video of Keith's opening remarks to the audience, before he began reading from his most recent novel, Centuries of June.  (Incidentally, he starts by referencing Eleanor Brown, who had introduced him.  Ms. Brown is the author of the delightful The Weird Sisters, which I reviewed here.)

The first video clip ends right as Keith was about to read the opening pages of his novel.  I have to confess that I did film him reading for about 12 minutes, but the little FlipCam I use is a very limited tool.  The biggest problem is that it has no ability to focus.  Second biggest is that it only  holds two hours of video.  Ultimately, I deleted the first reading in order to film more authors later in the day.  Consequently, we skip the first reading and head directly into the Q & A:






As you can see, the first Q & A segement leads into another brief reading, which can be seen below:






And here is the final Q & A segment:

Ali and I chatted briefly with Keith after his presentation, and he was very friendly. I kept running into him all day after that and we kibitzed briefly each time. It was nice to see authors sticking around beyond their narrow time-slot and attending their colleague's presentations.  I saw this over and over all day.  And there were other writers in the audience--ones who weren't speaking or signing at the festival--like Ali who was there hanging out with me.  Case in point, sitting in the row in front of us was novelist Rebecca Coleman, but more on her in the next post...