Best Session to Attend at Arkansas Literary Festival

“The book was so much better than the movie.”

We’ve all heard that comment, or maybe even said it ourselves after seeing a film based on a book we took the time to read.

Attendees of this weekend’s Arkansas Literary Festival have a chance to view a movie that is just as wonderful as the book it was based on and even meet the book’s author.

Author Carolyn Briggs wrote “This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost” and she will be at this weekend’s festival.

One review aptly described Briggs book as “a riveting memoir of one woman’s immersion into fundamentalist faith, and her decision twenty years later to leave it all behind.”

Briggs insightful memoir was made into a wonderful film called “Higher Ground”, released in 2011, directed by and starring Vera Farmiga.

“Higher Ground” was one of Roger Ebert’s Top 12 films for 2011.

I never give away the ending of films, but I will say the symbolic ending to “Higher Ground” still remains in my thoughts two years after I first viewed the movie.

The Arkansas Literary Festival will screen “Higher Ground” at 10am this Saturday at the Argenta Community Theater in North Little Rock. At 1pm that day, Briggs will be on a panel at the Argenta Theater to discuss her book and how it came to be made into a movie.

Briggs is a college professor in Iowa, but she has strong Arkansas ties as two of her children live in our state, one living in Fayetteville and one living in Little Rock.

The Literary Festival is scheduled to have many fine sessions with authors from across the country. But I strongly encourage you to attend Carolyn Briggs sessions. Her personal story on the nature of faith and finding one’s place in the world is one not to be missed.

Click here for the complete schedule for this weekend’s Literary Festival.