Lit Crawl Boston Crawls Again: How It Began, How It Evolved, and How It's Returning In Person on June 10
By Jessica A. Kent
May 24, 2021
By early March 2020, the Boston Book Festival’s annual Lit Crawl was well on its way to a fourth year of fun, eclectic, and non-traditional literary events to be held in Central Square a few months later in June 2020. The presenters were committed, new local partnerships and venues were locked in, and logistics had already fallen into place.
And then, as we all know, the world shut down.
Now, in anticipation of Lit Crawl’s return on June 10, 2021 as an in-person event — the first major in-person literary event in Boston since the pandemic — I spoke with James Sullivan, Alysia Abbott, Carlin Carr, and Norah Piehl of the Lit Crawl planning committee to find out how Lit Crawl originated here in Boston and how it evolved, what it was like planning a live event during a pandemic, and what attendees can expect for June 10.
Lit Crawl Boston Launches in 2016
Lit Crawl Boston evolved from a one-day reading series called Litstock, held in 1999 in Golden Gate Park, which soon grew into the Litquake festival. The first Lit Crawl, featuring non-traditional literary events in non-traditional spaces, was held in San Francisco’s Mission District in 2004, spurring events in Austin, LA, London, New Zealand, Ireland, and New York City.
Lit Crawl Boston’s Artistic Director James Sullivan had become friends with the Litquake organizers when he lived in San Francisco before moving back to Boston. On a visit back, Sullivan ended up attending a Litquake event, and spoke to the organizers after. “I said, ‘How come nobody's done one in Boston yet?’ and Jack [Boulware, Executive Director] said, ‘Because nobody has offered to be the person to get it going.’ I came back here, and it put a bug in my ear — Boston should obviously have one,” said Sullivan.
Sullivan’s first pitched the Boston Book Festival on the idea, but they directed him to the newly-established Boston Literary District and founding coordinator Larry Lindner, who was transitioning leadership to local author Alysia Abbott. “It seemed like a really great way to engage people with sites within the District, and bring business to shops and venues in the District as well,” said Abbott about the ask to help launch Lit Crawl. “And it made a lot of sense that a number of our partners could participate in some way.”
“That's how Lit Crawl ended up on Newbury Street,” said Sullivan of Lit Crawl being planned within the Literary District’s footprint. “Alysia, Larry, and I went out to different venues, and reached out to different reading groups and organizations, just like we do today. And we got it off the ground by the seat of our pants. It was super fun.”
The inaugural Lit Crawl Boston was held on Thursday, October 13, 2016, the night before the Boston Book Festival. True to Lit Crawl form, it wasn’t just Trident Booksellers hosting literary events; a barbershop, Bukowski’s Tavern, the Converse store, a boxing club, and the School of Fashion Design hosted, too. There were performances of James Joyce and Jane Austen (in a hat shop and a leather goods store, respectively). GrubStreet hosted a round of Exquisite Corpse, Ploughshares hosted Literary Balderdash, and Meredith Goldstein hosted “Love Letters” trivia. Nick Flynn read poetry backed by a folk duo, and the night capped off with a candlelit reading of some Poe in the Central Burying Ground on the Common, across from the Poe statue.
“In Boston, you have such a young population, and so the idea of taking literature outside the academy and these sort of staid spaces and having it be at these fun and improvised spaces just really worked with the community,” said Abbott.
In 2017, Lit Crawl again took place in Back Bay on the eve of the Boston Book Festival in October, and expanded its offerings to include literary Mad Libs, food writing, Grown-Up Story Time, MassLEAP poetry, and a performance by Regie Gibson. The second year built on the success of the first, and, as Sullivan remembers, the vast majority of events were well attended. But changes were on the horizon.
Lit Crawl’s Transition Year
In 2018, things at the Boston Literary District shifted: Abbott stepped down as Director (though she still remains on the Lit Crawl planning committee), and oversight and funding shifted for the Literary District to the point where the Lit Crawl — now an established brand and event — needed new governance. The Boston Book Festival had always been involved in an advisory capacity, and considering their experience with running literary events at scale, they were the obvious choice.
The Lit Crawl wouldn’t just extend the Boston Book Festival brand, it would add to it, too. “We wanted Lit Crawl to have its own identity,” said Norah Piehl, the Executive Director of the Boston Book Festival, of the change. “We wanted it to still be part of the Boston Book Festival ‘family of festivals,’ but to be identified as something different than the Boston Book Festival, which has such an identity in Copley Square and Back Bay.”
The only stipulation is that the Boston Book Festival would move Lit Crawl from October to the Spring as a mid-year event. On June 6, 2019, the Lit Crawl again came to Back Bay, featuring another evening of readings, literary games, workshops, and more, with a new afterparty featuring Robert Pinsky and live jazz.
The quirky, eclectic nature of the Lit Crawl wasn’t going anywhere. “We've always wanted it to be very interactive, a little unexpected. In the call for submissions we tend to discourage straightforward readings. We want things that are really pushing the format of what a literary event can be,” said Piehl. “I think another really important function of Lit Crawl is that it helps solidify our relationships with so many of the different organizations that are doing great work around books and storytelling all year long, and giving them a great showcase and a platform to do that.”
2020 and the Move to Cambridge
Because the Lit Crawl was no longer required to fit within the footprint of the Literary District, there was now the flexibility for a move. “Lit Crawl is supposed to feel like a pop-up event that's happening in unusual places,” said Sullivan. “So when I first proposed doing it in Boston, I was hoping that it could move from neighborhood to neighborhood.”
That move was supposed to be to Central Square for June 2020, and by March 2020, many of the big steps of moving a multi-site literary event were already completed. “We had really secured a lot,” remembers Carlin Carr, Director of Operations and Outreach for the Boston Book Festival. “We had seven or ten different spots that we had partnered with — really cool different spaces all throughout Central — and so we were moving ahead, the train was definitely rolling. We had the presenters, so we were really in the throes of ready to put on a Lit Crawl.”
Piehl also remembers that “we had an intern who had been brought on dedicated to the Lit Crawl project, and she and Carlin were going out and hitting the pavement and talking to different people. And then pretty quickly after mid-March we were like, ‘Yeah, this isn't going to happen.’”
A year-long pandemic forced event planners to rethink their approach to nearly everything, and while literary organizations did eventually move their programming online — the Boston Book Festival went all virtual in October 2020 — the Lit Crawl wasn’t in a place to pivot to a virtual event that quickly. They did host a handful of virtual events over the summer, including “There's a Book for That: A Bibliotherapy Event," to keep connected. “We thought that it might not be a substitute for Lit Crawl, but something to give people to say, ‘Look, we're still here, we're still supporting you as readers, we're still doing things, and we're going to figure this all out together,’” said Piehl.
Still, as the Lit Crawl team kept up communication during the year with the presenters and venues, they found many spaces closed and emails went unanswered. So if there even was a 2021 event, would it be able to pick up where it left off?
Planning an Event During a Pandemic
2021 brought both hopes and uncertainties about vaccines and reopenings, and in January, the Boston Book Festival board greenlit an in-person Lit Crawl on June 10, 2021 — not knowing what it would look like, or if it would even happen. “As an organization, we are about bringing people together around live events around books,” said Piehl. “So if there's a way that we can figure out how to do this in person in a way that people feel comfortable with and is safe, let's try to make that happen.”
That meant planning a Lit Crawl fully outdoors, perhaps as a series of pop-up events in parks and outdoor spaces — but the difficulty of managing that quickly became apparent. And would the city of Cambridge even allow that? As it turns out, they had a better idea.
Enter Starlight Square — or, rather, Parking Lot 5 which was turned into an outdoor community gathering place, pitched as such the day before Governor Baker declared a State of Emergency on March 10, 2020. The “Square within the Square” was reimagined and the lot turned into an outdoor theater and pop-up “popportunity” space, hosting events and vendors during summer 2020. It filled the need for outdoor spaces for arts organizations when their own indoor spaces had to be shut down, and provided the perfect option for Lit Crawl.
“Having Starlight Square already there and already running was amazing, because that really centered us, it gave us a focal point, and it gave us some vision,” said Carr. “When we went to Starlight for the first time, we could breathe a sigh of relief. It felt like we could see Lit Crawl again.”
Even with the Starlight Square stage booked, the team still wanted a “crawl” aspect to the evening. The way forward seemed less in parks and alleyways, and more in reaching out to restaurants with patios and outdoor dining spaces — which led to the booking of The Dial, Area Four, Naco Taco, and Artifact Cider.
“We were pleasantly surprised by how excited the venues were to collaborate,” said Carr. “It's not easy for them to hand over these valuable patio spots these days. I think that there's something more that everybody feels they want to be a part of. They want to be a part of the community and the neighborhood, the arts. That connection is really what's been able to drive some of this happening this year.”
There will be a few changes for 2021, of course, to keep the community safe — the biggest being advanced registration for nearly all of the events (unlike past years, this year’s attendees can’t simply show up and crawl), and a ticket charge for events at participating restaurants, with the idea to help spur on their business after such a detrimental year.
As for presenters, with a few exception, all of those who were booked for last year are returning, including the Mystery Writers of America, Broad Universe’s women and non-binary writers of spec fiction, Julia Lisella and Jennifer Martelli of the Italian American Writers Association, Tell-All Boston’s memoir reading series, a bibliomemoir session featuring Kim Adrian, Adam Colman, Alden Jones, and Kim McLarin, Mass Poetry with Poems to Go, Grown-Up Story Time, Poetry of Science debuting its poet/scientist collaborations, the South Asian storytelling show “Voices” by Off Kendrick, the COVEN with a literary trivia wheel, the Here Comes Everybody Players, Sandra A. Miller and Erica Ferencik with a session on fears and treasures, and a writing workshop in Graffiti Alley hosted by Alexis Ivy and Heather Nelson. Additionally, the partnering bookseller for Lit Crawl this year will be All She Wrote Books, an intersectional, inclusive feminist and queer bookstore located in Assembly Row in Somerville.
Being all outdoors will not only have a different feel but a greater visibility to it this year as well. “I love the idea that people will be walking down Mass Ave. or Main Street and see different literary performances happening at these different restaurant spaces,” said Piehl, anticipating that night. “And if they don't already know about Lit Crawl, they’ll wonder what's happening and get really excited about the fact that people are out, people are reading from their books, people are telling stories, people are composing poems on the fly.”
As for now, while planning is still being held via email and Zoom, Lit Crawl is full speed ahead for Thursday, June 10: The full schedule was released last week, the program is off to the printer’s, the interns are busy, and volunteer training is on the calendar. And with restrictions lifting, there’s an eagerness to “get back to it,” as we’re all saying: back to seeing one another again, back to being out and about at local businesses, back to seeing performances, but also back to sharing and experiencing art together as a community, reading the words we’ve written to others, and receiving the words others have written to us. But also having a little fun while doing it.
Lit Crawl Boston will take place on Thursday, June 10, 2021 in Central Square, Cambridge, beginning at 5:45. The full schedule and more information can be found here. Registration is required for most events, and pre-paid tickets are required for restaurant-hosted events.
*Full disclosure: The author of this article is also part of the planning committee for Lit Crawl.
Jessica A. Kent is the founder and Editor in Chief of the Boston Book Blog.
