StoryFest — The Westport Library’s annual literary festival — kicks off its 8th year on Monday.
That’s also Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
There is a Westport tie-in.
Actually, several.
At 7 p.m. Monday (October 13), Julian Brave NoiseCat launches his new memoir, “We Survived the Night.” He’ll join Ramin Ganeshram, executive director of the Westport Museum for History & Culture, for a keynote conversation.
The book’s official release is the next day.
Julian Brave NoiseCat
StoryFest — the largest literary festival in Connecticut — draws scores of authors and hundreds of readers, writers and fans each year. With an interdisciplinary career, NoiseCat’s work aligns with the mission: a celebration of storytelling in all forms, across all types of media.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and The New Yorker. In 2021 he was named to Time Magazine’s “100 Next List of Emerging Leaders.”
NoiseCat’s film “Sugarcane” was nominated for an Academy Award. It follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to in British Columbia.
The writer/filmmaker will be introduced Monday by Valerie Seiling Jacobs. It promises to be more than a cursory recitation of his bio.
Valerie Seiling Jacobs
In 2012, Jacobs — a longtime Westporter and corporate lawyer for over 2 decades, who had pivoted to a second career teaching writing at Columbia University — met NoiseCat in her small “University Writing” class.
It was a demanding, intensive course. The first-year student immediately stood out.
“He was so focused on improving his writing,” she recalls.
The topics he chose — social justice, climate change, Native Americans — were important to him. But he wove them into larger stories, Jacobs says.
That’s what his current writing does too, she says. “It’s personal and investigative, while serving a larger purpose.”
For the next 3 years, Jacobs read his work in the Columbia newspaper. A few years later, she saw an article on Native American rights in The Guardian.
“It was fascinating. Then I noticed his byline,” she says. She reconnected with her former student.
His writing showed up often in her news feeds. She saw “Sugarcane” in New York. She was proud — but not surprised — when it won awards, including Sundance Film Festival and Critics’ Choice.
They corresponded occasionally. When she learned he’d be at StoryFest, she told him she lived in Westport. They arranged for Jacobs to introduce him.
NoiseCat’s new book has received plenty of advance praise. Rebecca Solnit called it “a beautiful, wrenching, important masterpiece, both a memoir and something that reaches far beyond the personal.”
Oprah Daily named it one of the best books of this fall.
More than a dozen years after Julian Brave NoiseCat took Valerie Seiling Jacobs’ intensive writing course, she is not at all surprised.
StoryFest runs from October 13 to 20. It opens with NoiseCat’s book launch, and ends with a 10th anniversary celebration of Shonda Rhimes’memoir “Year of Yes.” Tickets for the NoiseCat event are $30, and include a copy of the memoir. The price is the same for 1 or 2 seats, and 1 book, A signing follows the talk. Click here for full details of StoryFest ’25,
I watched Sugarcane, even a little research would demonstrate that this movie is not a “documentary” which should be true to basic facts. The movie suggests that Catholic priests and nuns were routinely throwing children in trash burners (google Michelle Stirling or Nina Green for a different opinion). His grandmother at 20 (years after attending the school) is the only known case, and she spent a year in prison for it – the movie doesn’t really cover this. The people he interviews are labelled “survivors” as if it was Auschwitz. Typical of liberal elites, the guy grew up in Oakland with a successful mother, has degrees from Columbia and got a scholarship to Oxford, became a social justice/climate change activist, and made a hit-job on the Catholic church because that’s so au courant. And by the way, the unsubstantiated (and incendiary) claims of “mass graves” has led to the burning of over 100 churches in Canada. Someone should ask Julian about this, but I doubt anyone will.
Oh… The Westport Museum of History and Culture that has no connection to Westport and is privately owned. Let me go get my precious Westport artifacts from over 100 years ago to donate to this museum that has nothing to with Westport! New residents- don’t be fooled by the museum’s name!