The Better Off Read Summer Book Festival is back for its third year with a special celebrity-sponsored basket raffle.
The free-to-attend, all-ages literary festival coming to Artpark on Aug. 31 is meant to encourage reading, promote writing, and celebrate storytelling. The event will feature a large discounted book sale, more than 70 local vendors, food trucks and other concessions, complimentary attractions, fun surprises, and much more.
The $1 per ticket celebrity-sponsored basket raffle features donors: Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Matthew McConaughey, Kerry Washington, Chris Pine, Anna Kendrick, Mark Wahlberg, Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, Stephen Colbert, “South Park,” “Bob’s Burgers,” Colleen Hoover, Neil Gaiman, David Byrne, Wilco, Pearl Jam, Blink 182, songwriting icon Bob Dylan, filmmaking legend George Lucas, global superstar Billie Eilish, and many more.
This event means the absolute world to me. Plus, it’s nothing short of a genuine dream come true for me to have so many of my favorite movie stars, authors, comedians, musicians, and more supporting it. Numerous people have asked me how I’ve been able to get so many big celebrities to donate …
And, well, it’s kind of a long story.
I spent my whole life hoping I’d become a writer, but I don’t think I ever believed it would actually happen. For years and years, I just wrote stuff for my friends. Jokes, poems, short stories. I’d write my heart out night after night and then pretty much just post it all on social media. Nobody was paying me to do it, but I honestly still found it incredibly rewarding. Because it made people happy. It felt like every day I’d bump into someone around Lewiston, and they’d just immediately tell me how hard they’d laughed at something I’d written, or how much they’d enjoyed one of my stories.
I just kept at it and tried even harder. And, along the way, things I never thought possible started happening. I began gaining thousands of followers on Twitter including a few famous people and comedians I idolized. I had a screencap of something I’d written go viral on Reddit and receive over a million views in less than a day. I got invited to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts. Twice.
Back in 2019, after a dozen plus years of just kinda grinding it out, the priest from my former Catholic elementary school reached out to me. He’d been following my writing online for years, and he asked if I’d be interested in helping him out at the non-profit publishing company he ran out of Stella Niagara. I accepted, and it quickly spun into a full-time job working alongside him. About one year later, he announced his plans to retire at the end of 2020. And he asked me if I wanted to take over the company.
For so long, I really was just a goofball who liked writing stuff that made his friends happy.
But now, all these years later, as the director of a non-profit publisher, I get to make it part of my actual job to work toward spreading the joys and benefits of reading to the local community and beyond.
So that’s why I throw this festival.
It’s to encourage reading, promote writing, and celebrate storytelling, because those things changed my entire life.
And so, now, to finally answer the question that we originally started with: how did I get a ton of the biggest celebrities in the entire world to donate to a small-town book festival?
Well, in all sincerity, as silly as it sounds, I just did what I’ve always done.
I wrote to them.
The third annual Better Off Read Summer Book Festival takes place on from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Aug. 31 at Artpark. Visit www.betteroffreadfestival.com for more information. The event would never be possible without the help of my incredible assistant and friend, Marlee Jaeger.