Local literati at Lee’s Summit fest

Sidling up to local authors was real easy in Lee’s Summit last weekend. For the second year, Metropolitan Community College-Longview hosted a literary festival. All day Friday and Saturday, poets, novelists, children’s book authors, nonfiction writers, bloggers and other scribes of all stripes peddled and read from their works and talked about the act of stringing words together.

Attendance was pretty sparse during the two hours I spent at the fest on Saturday. For a good chunk of their presentation, only I and one other person were in the room for a discussion of The Poetic Life by poets Eva Ridenour and Judy Stock. That’s always awkward. Event organizer Susan Satterfield said more people turned out on Friday, when MCC students could pop in between classes.

Katie Horner was Saturday’s “special speaker.” She might seem an odd choice for a literary festival, but the KCTV5 meteorologist is also the author of Brainstorming, a book for parents on how to deal with their kids during severe weather. I had to leave before she rocked the mic, but I passed her on my way out, and she looked as prim as she does on TV.