TWAINFEST

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In 2010 I joined with Walter Ritter and Veronica Murphy to create what is now the largest FREE literary festival in San Diego.  2019 will be its 10th year.

It's a one-day event that celebrates Mark Twain and his 19th century contemporaries with more than two dozen readings, performances, music, games and special events.  For every event a festival-goer participates in they receive a ticket.  The can exchange every 5 tickets they collect for any book in the Twainfest Book Emporium. 

Here's a list of carnival-like games and performances based on literary themes that I created for Twainfest. 

• THE QUOTATION MACHINE: Deposit any question into the machine and Mark Twain will answer with sage advice.
• TELEGRAPH CRUNCH.  Learn how to text in the time of Twain.
• CHORTLE THIS! Honoring Lewis Carol, festival-goers create new words where only definitions exist.
• NEVER-ENDING STORY: Prompted by an opening paragraph in "Adventure," "Mystery," and "Gothic Horror" genres, festival-goers add their own creative juices to keep the story going.
• WHEEL OF FICTION: Festivals-goers vie to fill in missing words from 19th century novels and poems.
• ELECTION of 1872:  Vote in the Presidential election between Ulysses S. Grant and New York World publisher Horace Greeley.  All you have to do is pass literacy test.
• CALAVERAS JUMPING FROG: From a special catapult, you can send beanbag frogs flying into buckets.  A tribute to the frontier article that made Twain famous.
• TWAINFEST GAZETTE: Reporters are recruited to sniff out the news for a second edition. 
• GREAT MOON HOAX of 1835: a lecture on the series of satirical articles that saved the New York Sun from failure when the public accepted them as true. Twainfest-goers then had a chance to compete with their own hoax news stories.
• DR. TODD MEDICINE SHOW: With his "Elixir of the Muse" you can purchase a bottle of the essence of your favorite author.  Guaranteed to unblock creative constipation.
• FRANKENSTEIN'S LABORATORY: Though Viktor Frankenstein never revealed the secret,  festival-goers are invited to try to recreate the experiment that infused life in the moribund.
• MADAME CAPRELL'S SEANCE: The bedridden medium connects you with the spirit of the famous departed.
• CELESTINE DE LA NOIR: using specially designed 19th century imagery, Celestine reveals your past, present and future.