Words and music

Kristin Chenoweth said she never set out to be a writer - performing has always been what she has been about. A Tony Award winner for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and the creator of Galinda, the Good Witch, in Wicked, Chenoweth figured singing and acting were her things, until an editor saw a piece she wrote for Glamour about her growing up.

"I thought I would get my Kennedy Center honors and then write my memoirs eventually," said Chenoweth by phone from Los Angeles. "But it's been fun to tell a few stories and have sort of an interim memoir [her new book A Little Bit Wicked]. I'll get to that tell-all thing later."

Chenoweth will be one of about three dozen authors, musicians and magazine folk presenting their wares this weekend at the 2009 Free Library Festival, an indoor-outdoor extravaganza at the main library near 19th and Vine Streets. There will be musicians and artists, food by restaurateur Stephen Starr, storytelling and authors of all stripes.

One of them will be Philadelphia-born satirist and journalist Joe Queenan, who has written a new memoir of growing up working-class Irish in the city, Closing Time. Though Queenan hasn't lived in Philadelphia since soon after attending St. Joseph's University in the early 1970s, he clearly has at least a perverse affection for even the rough neighborhoods - East Falls, West Oak Lane, Olney - where he grew up.

"Growing up without money, you meet interesting people along the way," said Queenan from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. "My kids, who grew up in the suburbs, would never meet people like I wrote about in the book.

"Philadelphia is a much nicer city than when I was growing up. One of the big improvements is that Frank Rizzo died and the poison and hatred instilled in the city died with him," said Queenan. "It was a mean place when I was growing up, racially polarized to a great extent. Philly in the 1950s and 1960s was also boring. It changed a lot in the 1980s. People bicycling along the Delaware, people picnicking in parks, people didn't do that in 1955 and 1967. Things have changed for the good."

Philadelphia did have some semblance of an intellectual life in those days, said Daniel Hoffman, the former U.S. poet laureate (1973-74), who will be reading from his works at the festival. His late wife of 57 years, Elizabeth McFarland, was poetry editor of Ladies' Home Journal from 1948 to '61, when it was headquartered on Washington Square and published such poets as W.H. Auden, John Updike, and Marianne Moore. Hoffman himself has long been a fan of another once-Philadelphia-based poet, Edgar Allan Poe.

"He has been a feature of Philadelphia intellectual life for decades now," said Hoffman, who taught at Swarthmore and Penn and is now retired and living in Swarthmore and believes that Philadelphia, serendipitously, has had a cache of good poetry over the years.

"Poetry takes advantage of the innumerable riches of the English language. We are blessed that there are so many synonyms that are five degrees off from each other," said Hoffman. "We have a sophisticated and educated population around here that appreciates that part of the English language, even though poetry is a private thing and comes out of a single person's genetic makeup. So let's say it is a happy accident that we have a community of poets in Philadelphia."

Marco Roth, the editor/publisher of n+1, a five-year-old literary journal, will have a booth at the festival, hoping to attract that intellectual Philadelphia community. He was living in Philadelphia, teaching writing in adjunct jobs at universities, when four friends and he threw in $2,000 each to create what they thought was missing in the literary world.

"There were few places at the time where you could publish certain things and be seen," he said. "You couldn't write a funny review in the New York Review of Books, and most people couldn't write a personal essay in the New Yorker. The journals for that had died," he said. The magazine, which is now based in New York, is open to all of that, and n+1 has survived even in a tough financial world, publishing online and, in print, with about 200 pages twice a year. "We're hoping to attract Philadelphia readers with such an unusual event as this festival."

Among the musical acts performing at the festival are Trout Fishing in America, the reggae musician Father Goose, and folkie Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary. Other authors will include poet Amiri Baraka, New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, best-sellling pet writer Vicki Myron, Olympic swimmer Dana Torres, and food writers Christina Pirello and Molly O'Neill.

The 2009 Free Library Festival is free and will be held from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Tents and stages will be set up in front of the library on 19th Street, which will be closed to traffic. Authors and representatives of various publications will be in venues both inside the library and on the street.

Kristin Chenoweth will be at the Bank of America Main Stage at 1 p.m. Saturday.

Joe Queenan will be in the library's Skyline Salon at 1 p.m. Sunday.

Daniel Hoffman will be in the library's Independence Foundation Poet's Corner at 1 p.m. Sunday.

N+1 will be at the Literary Marketplace throughout the Festival.

For a full schedule, go to freelibrary.org/bookfestival or call 215-686-5322.

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