“Humor is just another defense against the universe.”

The film director and writer Mel Brooks said that, and since he’s about to turn one hundred and is still thriving, we take it as solid advice. The universe has been throwing a lot at us lately, so we’d like to give a shout-out to a couple of Festival authors who keep us laughing through the chaos.

Carl Hiaasen’s humor is the kind that makes you snort, spit your drink, or do something else mortifying when reading one of his books in public. His savagely funny bestsellers, including Strip Tease, Sick Puppy, Stormy Weather, and Squeeze Me, take aim at the corruption and environmental degradation plaguing his beloved home state of Florida, and his flamboyantly ignorant villains bear a more than striking resemblance to real-life bad actors who make the news each day. “There’s nothing you can invent in a Florida novel that won’t eventually come true here,” Hiaasen has said. And the rest of the country is catching up. His latest novel, Fever Beach, features a band of bumbling white supremacists who just happen to live in Florida; we can imagine these losers anywhere. Satire gets harder to pull off when your caricatures more and more reflect real life.

Hiaasen draws much of his material from his years spent as a reporter and columnist for the Miami Herald, where he was such a gadfly that a Miami city commissioner introduced a resolution officially denouncing his work. Hiaasen calls it one of his proudest moments, and while at the Herald he earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations and won the Damon Runyon Award and the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He has also tweaked critics with his bestselling books for young readers, including Hoot—which won a 2003 Newbery Medal—Flush, Scat, and Wrecker. Some of these titles have been removed from school libraries, and one character’s pro-vaccine stance in Wrecker caused such a tizzy that several events were canceled during Hiaasen’s 2023 book tour. Despite—rather, because of—all that, we look forward to welcoming him with open arms at the Festival next month!

Cartoonist and memoirist Alison Bechdel has a quieter way with her humor, but it’s just as satisfying. Her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008 in alternative newspapers, was a countercultural institution among lesbians and discerning non-lesbians everywhere. In an age when honest depictions of gay women were rare, the strip brought readers into the lives of Mo, Lois, Ginger, and friends as they navigated love, work, politics, family, and the angst of being gay in an intolerant world. Ms. magazine called it “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” Dykes to Watch Out For gave us what famously became known as the Bechdel Test, which judges movies based on whether two female characters have a conversation that’s not about men. “Last movie I was able to see was Alien,” gripes one of the cartoon’s characters. “The two women in it talk to each other about the monster.”

Bechdel broke into the mainstream with her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, a melancholic yet somehow still hilarious account of growing up with a closeted father who took his own life at age forty-four. It won the Stonewall Book Award, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and was named among the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. It was adapted for the stage in 2015 and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Bechdel followed Fun Home with two more graphic memoirs, Are You My Mother? (about her fraught relationship with her mother) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, about her lifelong obsession with fitness fads.

Bechdel’s latest book, Spent, is a playful work of autofiction about a cartoonist named Alison who runs a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont and pens a syndicated comic strip called Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For. “After spending so many years working very hard to write the precise truth about my life,” Bechdel said in an interview, “it was just a blast to make shit up.” We can’t wait to shoot the shit onstage with her at the Festival next month.

COMMUNITY EVENTS

Julia Alvarez at Collected Works

Tomorrow, Saturday, April 18, at 6:00 p.m., Julia Alvarez, 2024 Festival alum, and Carmella Padilla, author and Festival Co-Founder, will be in conversation at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse in Santa Fe on the occasion of the release of Visitations, Alvarez’s latest poetry collection. Learn more here.

Join us Wednesdays at Sky Cinemas

Throughout April and May, the Festival is hosting, with Santa Fe’s Sky Cinemas, a series of films featuring the work of 2026 Festival authors. Future films include Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin, and No Straight Lines, featuring cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Click here for more info.

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair

Janet Bailey | Juliet Erickson

Andrea Fellows Fineberg | Jenny Kimball

James McGrath Morris | Carmella Padilla

Jenna Scanlan | Mary Sloane

Maria Gale, Ex Officio

Founders
Clare Hertel | Carmella Padilla | Mark Bryant