Editor’s note: This piece is a guest editorial from William Black, an organizer of the Pages & Places book festival in Scranton, PA, in October. Here he describes a number of other developments happening in his hometown. -KG
If you know Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the setting of NBC’s The Office—the U.S. version of Slough, the depressed and depressing overcast English city in which the Wernham Hogg Paper Company was doomed to eternally, if comically, fail—then your impression of the city is sunnier than the one most Scranton area residents have held of their hometown for decades.

I say this as someone who, at age seventeen, fled the area as fast I could. The Great Depression was slow to reach what had been a boomtown built on hard coal and locomotives. As late as 1937 rich New Yorkers took the train to Scranton to shop on Lackawanna Avenue and dine at the Casey Inn Hotel, where one could still get real silverware laid across the fine china from a real linen napkin.

But when the market for anthracite did finally collapse, it signaled a long, nearly fatal tumult for Scranton. Beginning in the 1940s, the city lost, on average, 1,000 residents a year. The loss of population was so swift and so devastating that the city hasn’t had a downtown grocery store since the 1960s. A recent look at photographs from the 1980s confirmed my impressions of the time: the city was dreary and dirty, distinguished by sooted-over architectural details and an abundance of garbage in the streets and on the sidewalks.

Yet now there’s a palpable sense that Scranton’s time is just beginning.  Several of the city’s most significant architectural landmarks have been rehabbed or restored and will, within months, be occupied by several hundred new downtown residents, most of them between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. This month, the Commonwealth Medical College, the first new medical to open its doors in Pennsylvania in decades, is matriculating its second class.  The University of Scranton has begun construction on a large, and expensive, new science research center.

And Scranton has begun to carve out a new identity for itself as a center of arts and culture.

Much of the credit for the turn-around goes to Mayor Chris Doherty, who leveraged Scranton’s proximity to New York and Philadelphia, what’s left of the splendid boom era architecture, and its air of great untapped potential into $400 million of investment in a little more than eight years. That’s enough for a pretty attractive facelift.

But there’s something else going on, too, another force that has laid claim to a city with a reputation for drab isolation—a grassroots effort driven men and women between thirty-five and forty-five years old to remake the city in their own image.

Some of these men and women are developers who, growing up in the 1980s, have never suffered the deprivation that made earlier generations of Scrantonians, who lived and then died on the dwindling market for coal, cautious, even pessimistic, with their investments.  Some are entrepreneurs who have committed themselves to the kinds of boutiques and restaurants they used to leave town to enjoy.

What gives me the greatest hope, however, is the seemingly spontaneous, even reflexive effort by disparate people to build new and serious arts and cultural traditions downtowns.

Groups of college students whose classrooms are twenty or thirty miles outside of town have chosen central city locations to convene their writers and artists groups, and they’ve brought along a new generation of university faculty that has begun moving into the city, despite having to commute to school. A then-high school student with a fondness for old movies opened the Vintage Theater, which has become Scranton’s for-the-people by-the-people art house cinema and the new generation’s first choice venue for readings, salons, and other art-centric events.

And then there are the festivals.

Scranton has long been a city of ethnic festivals—Irish, Italian—but six years ago Marko Marcinko, a jazz musician who at a fairly young age was performing in New York City and in the Pocono region’s world class jazz scene with some of the biggest names in the business, launched the Scranton Jazz Festival, a three-day affair that has made good use of Marcinko’s connections and drawn increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia , and beyond.

More recently, the Pages & Places Book Festival, of which I am co-director, was created to make two significant contributions at once.  First, by doing what exceptional book festivals do, Pages & Places strives to offer a high end, daylong cultural event.  By “high end,” I mean that Pages & Places is bringing to Scranton the caliber of personnel and seriousness of topic that one would expect to find only on elite college campuses or at, say, New York’s 92^nd Street Y.  This year, for example, Christopher Hitchens is joining Jay Parini, the author or editor of more than 40 books, in a discussion about the people, books, and debates that have most shaped American civic life.  Joseph Sebarenzi, who was president of the Rwandan parliament in the days after that country’s hideous genocide, will participate in a conversation about how societies rebuild, or reinvent, themselves in the wake of catastrophe.  An Icelandic novelist and an Argentine novelist and their translators will talk about the ways that ostensibly national literatures inform each other, in a panel moderated by their publisher, Open Letter Press’s Chad Post.

All this sounds pretty elitist, doesn’t it?

Well, it ought to. That’s the idea, in fact. The festival’s founder and driving engine, Liz Randol, recognized what was already afoot in Scranton and identified the lack: of a cultural event that didn’t just serve the city’s extant population but brought to town precisely the kind of people—heavy weight writers and intellectuals and the people who go out of their way to hear them speak—that wouldn’t otherwise visit a small post-industrial city.

But this is not at all to say that Pages & Places is disregarding of Scrantonians. Quite the opposite. The Places part of the festival’s title signals the other half of its mission.

Places operates in two essential ways. First, all of Pages & Places highbrow panels are set in familiar local businesses—bookstores, boutiques, bars, restaurants. Likewise, the festival’s planning committee and board of directors are made up not of arts and culture administrators but area businesspeople, in fact many of the very same entrepreneurs I referred to earlier. The goal of this approach is to offer a singular cultural event that is, from its conception through its planning to its execution, as integrated into the larger working of the city’s revitalization, and as available to its residents, as it can possibly be without compromising the seriousness of its content.

Second, Pages & Places has implemented partnerships designed to draw local and regional cultural institutions beyond their borders and into the community. These partnerships began as cross-promotional endeavors, but these relationships are now driving toward bigger and more substantive partnerships on events to take place downtown rather than behind the walls institutions.

Scranton is a smaller, and therefore a lot easier to impact, than other post-industrial cities still struggling to invent new and functional identities.  But those of us who are starting to feel really good about our city’s emerging new image.

William Black teaches literature and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University but has accepted a post as Writer-in-Residence at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania, in order participate in Scranton’s revival.  He is Co-Director of the Pages & Places Book Festival to held in Scranton October 2. He can be reached at bill@pagesandplaces.org

Guest Blog: Louise Knight

Louise Knight will join Pages & Places for a writing forum “Writing Biographies” at 9:00am on Saturday, October 2nd at Farley’s Eatery and Pub (300 Adams Avenue). Click on tickets to reserve your seat.

Do you know someone who was born to one life and chosen to live a completely different one? This is what Jane Addams (1860-1935) did, and it is one reason I decided to write my new biography about her. What interests me most is how and why someone does this, and what she learns about herself and the world as a result.

Some people change their lives by moving up the class ladder, so to speak, but Addams did the opposite. Born to wealth and privilege, she rejected as anti-democratic the class isolation and condescension that was part of her birthright. As a result, at 28, she decided to co-found Hull House, the nation’s first settlement house, in Chicago, in a predominantly immigrant, working class neighborhood and spent the rest of her adult life living there.

And she got a big education. She learned about their low, unreliable wages, the resistance employers raised to union organizing, and the ways that corrupt politicians dominated their local politics. And she learned about their vision for what the United States could become – a place that did not send young men to war, that provided social security pensions to widows and their children, and that gave all workers the eight hour day so that they could pursue other dreams in their leisure hours.

Along the way, she invested so much of her family inheritance in the capital and operating costs of the settlement house and gave away so much of the rest to neighbors in crisis, that she became a self-supporting working woman, earning her living through lectures and published writings.

Addams spread the word about what she learned; she became one of the most widely respected reformers in the United States and later, because of her peace work, in the world. In her 70s, she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She has often been stereotyped as “saintly,” but to her mind she was simply living the life any citizen of a democracy should live. She makes an interesting point. In my book I try to explore what she meant.

Louise W. Knight’s full life biography, JANE ADDAMS: SPIRIT IN ACTION will be published by W. W. Norton in September 2010, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Addams’s birth.

Shakespeare Meets the Selfish Gene

Copyright: Seed Magazine April 3,  2006 : FEB/MAR 2006 issue

According to Literary Darwinist Jonathan Gottschall, there’s a malaise among literary scholars today that can be cured with a dose of the scientific method. “Almost 99.999% of literary hypotheses aren’t tested in that way,” says Gottschall, and as a result “there is no progress of knowledge because nothing can be wrong.”

Gottschall, who is 33 and holds a Ph.D. in English, recently co-edited The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Northwestern University Press, 2005), a collection of essays that unites humanists and evolutionary scientists, including luminaries such as novelist Ian McEwan and biologist E.O. Wilson. Together, they argue that an understanding of the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, psychology and culture can produce powerful new perspectives on storytelling.

How do you define Literary Darwinism?

All literary theory—Marxism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism—is ultimately based on a theory of human nature. A Darwinian literary approach takes its guidance from theories of human behavior and psychology that are now emerging in the evolutionary sciences.

How robust is the academic community of Literary Darwinists?

A better phrasing might be, “How anemic is it?” There are maybe two-or-three-dozen people affiliated with the approach in the whole world. And, out of that, maybe a dozen viable contributors. We’re a very marginal group.

What drew you into the field? In my second year of graduate school, I walked into a used bookstore and came across Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape, an early attempt to look at the human animal the way a zoologist would. I found the idea of studying humans just like any other animal to be very powerful. Morris’ book, although out of date, changed me. I started looking at literature in an altogether new way.

What did you find when you started reading literature through this new lens?

The Iliad was particularly significant for me because I was reading it while also reading Morris and other texts on sociobiology. As a result, Homer’s evolutionary themes were jumping off the page. Right away I was seeing the drama of naked apes competing for social status and material resources; as well, they were competing directly and indirectly over women…You know, Einstein once said that theory defines what we can see. If Literary Darwinism has anything going for it we should start to see things in literature that weren’t seen before, or seen as crisply before. I say this because I feel that I saw things in Homer that even 2,600 years worth of Homer scholars hadn’t seen.

Do you expand on these insights in your forthcoming book, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge, est. 2006)?

Yes, I use an evolutionary lens to flip conventional commentary on Homeric disputes. Instead of suggesting that winning women is merely a proximate goal masking competition for wealth, power and prestige, an evolutionary perspective suggests that honor, political power and social dominance are the proximate routes to the ultimate goal of women—for Homer’s heroes and for ordinary men.

So, do Literary Darwinists tend to read books in search of innate or universal patterns of human behavior?

There’s a lot of that, yes. But I hope that’s not all. Ideally, Literary Darwinism will combine the biologically universal with the culturally particular. The idea of this approach isn’t to demote nurture. For me, it’s a more balanced perspective that says nurture is very important but so, too, is nature. We have to pay attention to what the scientists have discovered, which is that there is a human nature.

Is human nature somehow made more fit—or biologically resilient—by way of storytelling?

This is one of the really big questions right now. Although yet to be tested scientifically, there are two camps of thinking on this. One, the human capacity to tell fictional narrative was designed into us for a specific reason; it enhanced our fitness and helped us leave behind more offspring. The second is that storytelling has no function whatsoever; it’s just a side effect of human intelligence, an evolutionary byproduct. The human capacity for narrative is universal among human cultures, however, so most people think it has to have a function. But the jury is still out.

What are some of the misunderstandings about a Darwinian approach to literature?

First off, that it reduces everything to genes and suggests nurture is unimportant. Another is that it’s deterministic—that it suggests that everything about humans is encoded in their genes and there’s nothing we can do to change that. And the most recent feedback is that Literary Darwinists have science-envy. I like this one! I mean, why not envy the sciences? The fact is that they’ve outstripped the humanities. They’ve been spectacularly successful at accumulating knowledge that’s durable and testable. So I’m all for science-envy as long as the result is constructively building on the example of the sciences, rather than superficially aping them.

View the original article online here: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/shakespeare_meets_the_selfish_gene/

Who are we, afterall?

By Roland Tec

Writer/Director/Composer,

We Pedal Uphill (Stories from the States: 2001-2008)

Almost every time I take part in a post-performance or post-screening audience Q&A, I am asked some form of the following question:

Is this work autobiographical?

This question has always made me uncomfortable. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it’s because as a playwright-turned-filmmaker, I am most comfortable when talking through the voices of others and talking about (or as) myself feels foreign. I am sure that at some level all work is autobiographical. And at some other level nothing really can be. The moment we start writing in the voices of our characters—if we remotely know what we’re doing—they control their own dialogue. We don’t.

I’m the kind of writer who yearns to disappear behind his characters. Like the Wizard of Oz, I don’t want the curtain to be pulled back. Ever. A big part of the appeal to me of writing dialogue is the thrill of putting myself into the skin of someone else. So the notion that my entire body of work might be interpreted through a lens that takes into account my various shades of otherness (in my case those might be Child of Holocaust Survivors and/or Gay Urban Male) makes me cringe.

In my most recent film, We Pedal Uphill, three of the major characters are African-American. I am not. One of them is a Republican. I am not. One of them is a woman and a mother. I am neither. And yet I am often told by audience members who are themselves African-American mothers that I’ve captured something that rings true. I am pleased, of course, to receive this praise. I accept it wholeheartedly. But it’s nothing compared to hearing that someone’s been deeply moved by what they’ve seen.

In a sense, I think all the characters brought to life in We Pedal Uphill are struggling with questions of identity. When it comes right down to it, it’s difficult to separate identity from one’s actions. How do I see myself? First as a father? As a patriot? As a citizen? As an altruist?  As an opportunist? Or perhaps, as an outsider desperate to fit in. Or desperate to be left alone.

Over the past eight years, people everywhere in this country couldn’t help but find themselves caught in some of these struggles. Some were large. Some were small. Some seemed insignificant at the time yet years later take on the enormous weight of history. On the other hand, sometimes (if we’re lucky) what feels at the time like a living hell can be a source of strength as we look back years later.

My hope for this film – as we travel the country and talk to audiences afterward – would be that it could encourage us all to take a closer look. A closer look at our surroundings, our lives and our hearts. We might just find that we’re surprised (and delighted) by what we discover!

Roland Tec’s film, We Pedal Uphill, screens for one night only this Friday, August 13^th at the Vintage Theatre in Scranton at 7pm.

Join Co-Directors Elizabeth Randol and Bill Black on

Wednesday, August 11th

from 5:30 pm-7:30pm

at Brixx Restaurant to discuss ideas and strategies for incorporating the second annual Pages & Places Book Festival

into your curriculum, as well as creative ways to engage and involve your students before and during the festival!

A little danger is a poetic thing. A little poetry is a dangerous thing. Poetry is a little dangerous. We’re all heard variations on it but in what way is poetry dangerous?

When Robert Frost said, “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat,” what did he mean? How do Frost’s farm life and contemplation of the passing scene and the passage of time take life by the throat? Or is he speaking about how we engage with life in the act of writing poetry? How could that be dangerous?

I keep coming back to that word–dangerous. “To write is to live twice,” Anais Nin tells us. Is menace, then, implicit in the very act of writing?

Is poetry dangerous only for the poet, or is the reader at risk as well? What are the hazards we must consider as we engage with either writing or reading poetry? Sharon Olds observed that, “This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.” Is that force, that inevitability, that lack of agency something to fear?

What poems do you consider dangerous? The political? The erotic? The blasphemous? The personal? Where in a poem does the danger lie? The topic? The metaphors? Or is language intrinsically fraught with peril? What poets come to mind?

Come armed with something to write on and with. We shall explore writing beyond the comfort zone.

Karen Blomain, local author and poet, will be hosting writing workshops at the Pages & Places Book Expo at Farley’s Restaurant on Saturday, October 2nd at 2:30pm and 3:30pm.

Elizabeth Randol’s commitment to city includes founding of book festival

SCRANTON TIMES-TRIBUNE

BY STACY BROWN (STAFF WRITER)

Published: July 27, 2010

A little blind faith, a lot of love of community and some charm.

How else could a Cleveland-native-turned-Scranton-enthusiast bring 15 nationally and internationally known writers and other professionals to the Electric City for a book festival that’s still in its infancy?

“It’s the only way,” said Elizabeth Randol, Ph.D., who moved to Scranton in 2001 to accept a position at the University of Scranton and has never longed for her Cleveland roots.

“I had no connections here and I didn’t know a soul but I completely fell in love with the city and what was going on,” Dr. Randol, 39, said. “When I got here, I was a real outsider but I wanted to learn more about the city. So I hopped in full-fledged and, once I did that, I really had a love for the community.”

Dr. Randol quickly emerged into the public eye promoting women’s issues and gender equity initiatives for the Jane Kopas Women’s Center at the University of Scranton. She authored a grant proposal that was awarded $191,000 by the Federal Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women. She developed more than 50 educational and training programs for the center from 2001 to 2006.

TV show host

Many local residents came to know Dr. Randol as the producer and host of a monthly political program, “Eye on State Government,” on WVIA-TV from 2004 to 2008.

Dr. Randol also served as chief of staff to the Lackawanna County Board of Commissioners, where she was responsible for the daily management and oversight of county operations. She now works as policy director for the state Treasury Department and leaving Scranton is not an option, Dr. Randol said.

“When I took this job, I made it clear I wasn’t moving to Harrisburg, I was staying in Scranton,” Dr. Randol said. “This is my home and I love it here.”

Dr. Randol has been a busy advocate of the city, particularly downtown Scranton. She has participated in the Women’s Center Promoting Awareness of the College Transition program and the Scranton Area Garden Exchange, a program in which community members, students and social service agencies work together in an effort to end hunger and improve nutrition.

Most notably, last year, Dr. Randol founded and organized the first book festival, Pages and Places, in downtown Scranton. The inaugural festival, which took place last October, was held in nine city venues including The Scranton Times Building.

“I’m a huge book nerd. It is my pastime,” Dr. Randol said. “The idea of the book festival was to help us tap into some local talent and bring national talent here as well. I wanted to make sure we held all of our events downtown so that we could show off what’s been happening in Scranton.”

This year, Christopher Hitchens, an international best-selling author, and Kelly Askin, a former legal adviser to the judges on the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, will be among the 15 nationally and internationally known professionals taking part in panel discussions during the festival’s second installment scheduled for Oct. 2.

Fundraiser set

A fundraiser for the festival will be held Thursday, July 29, at Jack’s Draft House in Scranton where organizers will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of “To Kill A Mockingbird.”

The celebration will include a reading of the famous novel by several local celebrities, including Lackawanna County Court Judge Tom Munley, who will read the part of Atticus Finch.

“We thought that this is a significant book in American literature and it’s a nice way to bring together people and it was also the first book selected for the Scranton Reads program,” Dr. Randol said. The reading at Jack’s Draft House will take place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Admission is free, but donations to help support the festival are welcome.

“I’ve been taught by the generosity of the Scranton community,” Dr. Randol said. “This is a unique place and by doing the festival and other things, I hope to be able to give back to this community.”

Article originally appeared on the Scranton Times-Tribune website at: http://thetimes-tribune.com/arts-living/elizabeth-randol-s-commitment-to-city-includes-founding-of-book-festival-1.904027

Maybe you have a few dollars to spare….loose change begging to be utilized for a higher purpose. Or perhaps some of our panelists this year strike you as the perfect way to contribute to higher conversation.

Either way, this is your chance to donate to the 2010 Pages & Places extravaganza. Whatever you can spare is exactly what we need.

Your contributions are tax deductible so give guilt free.

Click here to visit our online donation site.

Thank you!!

Enjoy an evening of classic literature in a casual atmosphere!

Readings from To Kill A Mockingbird will be performed by local notables including:

Judge Tom Munley as Atticus Finch

Wendy Wilson as Scout

JACK’S DRAFT HOUSE

Thursday, July 29th

5:30pm

802 Prescott Avenue, Scranton

The event is free and open to the public. Donations will support the Pages & Places Book Festival

www.pagesandplaces.org

Sponsored by the City of Scranton, Pages & Places, and the Albright Memorial Library

The word’s out on second edition of Pages & Pages festival

By Rich Howellsrhowells@scrantonedition.com

Reporter/Photographer

In what is shaping up to be one of the biggest events of the year for the city of Scranton, the Second Annual Pages & Pages Book Festival on Saturday, Oct. 2 will be host to a large roster of events and international literary names, including the controversial, international bestselling author Christopher Hitchens and Scranton native Jay Parini.

At the center of the festival on Courthouse Square will be an all-day book expo from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. featuring publishers of all sizes selling their latest releases, live author readings, performances and displays from nonprofit community partners of the festival, historical tours of the area and a Kid’s Fest with free activities for children and families.

Five author panels will run from 9 a.m. to 6:15 p.m. at various downtown locations.

Writing and publishing workshops will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Farley’s Eatery and Pub and a panelist book signing will be held from noon to 4 p.m. on Courthouse Square.

The first Pages & Pages Book Festival pulled in about 1,500 people last year, according to co-director Bill Black and this year organizers are expecting even more with all they’ve learned from the previous outing.

“Scranton, despite undergoing really hard economic times, is undergoing a radical change,” Black said.

“It’s becoming more a cosmopolitan place.

“The book festival, we think, is a really significant contribution, along with, for instance, the jazz festival, to the Scranton that is vibrant and attractive to the kinds of people that every city in the country needs to attract and maintain,” he continued.

The panels and their participants will be a major draw for the festival.

The first panel of the day is “The World on Our Bookshelves: The Import of Literature in Translation” from 9 to 10:15 a.m. at ArtWorks on Lackawanna Avenue.

It will discuss the insularity of American literature and why American readers and writers are not participating in the global literary conversation.

The panelists will be three international writers who publish with Open Letter Press, one of American’s leading publishers of literature in translation: Bragi Olafsson from Iceland, Mathias Enard of France and Charlotte Mandell from America.

The second panel is “The Remains of Death: Society in the Wake of Catastrophe” from 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. and the Banshee on Penn Avenue.

It will be comprised of panelists who have addressed the complex and wrenching experiences of genocide, war and natural catastrophe from different perspectives and engage them in a discussion about the social nature of disaster.

Confirmed for this panel so far is Kelly Askin, a senior legal officer for International Justice in the Open Society Justice Initiative who served as a legal advisor to the judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda from 2000-2002.

The third is “The Brain and Culture: How Advances in Neuroscience are Changing the Way We Imagine Ourselves” from 1 to 2:15 pm at the MAC Gallery on Wyoming Avenue.

This panel will discuss how neuroscience has changed traditional approaches to the humanities, as well as the bases for social and political policy.

Panelists will include Charles E. Connor, a professor of Neuroscience and director of the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University; and Jonathan Gottschall, a teacher at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania and author of “Literature, Science, and a New Humanities.”

The fourth is “Authors of Argument: The People, Books, and Debates that Shape American Civic Life” from 3 to 4:15 p.m. at the Scranton Cultural Center on North Washington Avenue.

This panel will explain the ever-changing ideas of America and democracy and engage the debate over whom and what has had the most substantial influence over the re-scripting of American values, institutions and identities.

Panelists will be Christopher Hitchens, the English-American author of international bestseller “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” and columnist for “Slate” and “Vanity Fair,” and Jay Parini, a teacher, poet and author of “Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America” and “The Last Station,” which was adapted into a major motion picture in 2009.

The final panel of the day will be “From Feminist to Feministing: Documenting Women’s Lives” from 5 to 6:15 p.m. at the Electric Theatre on Spruce Street.

The panel will discuss feminist literature and the women’s movement and will feature either Gloria Steinem or Robin Morgan, both nationally-known feminist writers and activists who have played crucial roles in women’s liberation in America.

Confirmed panelists include Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of Ms. magazine and contributing editor of More magazine, Jessica Valenti, author of “Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters” and the blogger who founded Feministing.com, and Tamera Gugelmeyer, writer and executive director of the Sisterhood is Global Institute.

“While the people and the topics are really pretty broad, there is some cohesion here,” Black explained.

“All these subjects are about what it means to be human or what it means to be American. There are basic questions about identity that are being answered.”

Black says that while he hopes the Pages & Pages Book Festival will pull in the 25 to 35-year-old crowd many cities around the county are hoping to attract and maintain, the festival is meant for all ages and interests.

“It’s a book festival, and in that regard, it really seeks to do, as well as we can, what book festivals do,” he said.

“On the other hand, it is also about contributing something specific and unique in the country to Scranton’s ongoing revival. Those are our two founding principles.”

The Expo on Courthouse Square is free and open to the public.

Tickets for the panels are $12 or $15 the day of the event and can be purchased on the festival’s website, www.pagesandplaces.org.

For the original article: Click here http://www.timesleader.com/golackawanna/news/The_word_rsquo_s_out_on_second_edition_of_Pages__amp__Pages_festival_06-27-2010.html