Hunter Runnette spent five months pulling together a lineup that includes Pulitzer winners to a working psychic medium. His pitch to skeptics: come to everything, know nothing going in, and trust the ride.
Friday through Sunday, October 23 through 25, field: A Festival of Ideas, Entertainment, Learning & Discovery brings eleven sessions and more than twenty speakers to Shakespeare & Company’s campus in Lenox. Hunter Runnette, the festival’s founder, spent 18 years on Jacob’s Pillow’s board, years he now describes as the real training ground for building something like this. “I had worked for a long time at Jacob’s Pillow, back in the days when it was quite board-driven,” he says. “Having those 18 years of a very close family, all believing in one thing in one place, I’m using that as my springboard.”
The festival actually began as a different project entirely: an ideas festival Runnette and Lynn Hunt, now president of College of the Atlantic in Maine, built for the Authors Guild. When the Guild changed focus, Runnette kept going, but insisted on returning to his core inspirational concept. “I said, well, as long as we can go back to the original idea, which was to not have it as a literary festival, and not have it selling books or celebrity, we can make this whatever we want,” he says.
His real model, he says, is the Hay Festival in Wales, a sprawling two-week gathering held, coincidentally, about the same distance from London as Lenox is from New York. “When you see what that Hay Festival has done in 40 years outside of London, it’s extraordinary,” Runnette says. “I knew if my community benefited, then my county would benefit.”
Runnette describes his approach as “programming the bleep out of it,” advice he took directly from Hay’s CEO when he met with her last year. With only five months to pull the weekend together, he says, that advice carried him through every moment of doubt. “Every time there was a glitch, or we were a little nervous, I just kept saying, keep programming it. We’ll figure that out later.”
What he and his staff have now assembled is wide-ranging. Opening night, October 23, belongs to artist Maira Kalman, the New Yorker illustrator known for a visual style she’s described as falling in love, repeatedly, with ordinary daily things; she’ll talk about her new book, Joy. Saturday features Kai Bird, the Pulitzer-winning Oppenheimer biographer, discussing his new book on Roy Cohn with his wife and co-author, Susan Goldmark, and a session pairing psychologists Carol Gilligan and Niobe Way, whose decades of mentorship and friendship grew out of Gilligan’s 1982 feminist landmark In a Different Voice.
Historian Annette Gordon-Reed, who won the Pulitzer and National Book Award for her work on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, appears opposite essayist Brent Staples, another Pulitzer winner, for a conversation about race and American memory. Saturday closes with novelist Colm Tóibín fielding a live version of the format Adam Moss built in his book The Work of Art, walking an artist through exactly how a piece of work actually gets made.
Two writers with deep regional ties anchor a Saturday session on an unlikely shared subject: gardening. Saidiya Hartman, the MacArthur- and Guggenheim-winning scholar who splits her time between New York City and the Berkshires, and Jamaica Kincaid, the novelist and essayist who lives in North Bennington, Vermont, will talk with Columbia professor Farah Jasmine Griffin about what their own home gardens have taught them about memory, care, and, in Kincaid’s case, the literal legacy of colonialism in Antigua.
One session in particular captures what Runnette means when he talks about the festival’s willingness to sit with uncertainty. Writer Laura Buchwald, whose Ghost Table Trilogy novels treat the afterlife as a working premise rather than a metaphor, will interview Joanne Gerber, a research medium who has worked with the University of Arizona’s VERITAS program and will perform live readings for audience volunteers. He calls these unscripted discoveries the real engine of the festival, more than any single marquee name. “Almost every one of these kinds of festivals, there’s always something I never expected, from someone I never would have read or even thought about.”
Sunday shifts toward current events and science: journalist Jonathan Alter and strategist Shaniqua McClendon handicap the midterms; bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel and biotech executive Tony Coles, old friends and classmates, take on AI and healthcare policy with Hastings Center president Vardit Ravitsky moderating; and The Body Keeps the Score author Bessel van der Kolk closes the festival in conversation with fellow psychiatrist Ronald Siegel on psychedelics and trauma treatment. British painter Tom Hammick gives an illustrated artist talk built around the music and poetry that shape his work.
Runnette is explicit that he doesn’t want people choosing sessions based on who they already know. “Come to everything,” he says, comparing the experience to what good theater does at its best. “It’s sort of the closest thing to worship in a healthy way, because we’re all in the same room waiting for something that happens to each person individually.” He keeps returning, he says, to the idea of Rashomon, the notion that a room full of people can hold contradictory truths at once without needing to resolve them. “We’ve lost it in our society, to be okay with so many different perspectives.”
The ambition is long-term. Runnette wants Field to grow the way Hay did, adding a second Lenox venue next year and expanding gradually from there, eventually including programming for kids modeled on Hay’s own children’s tent. For now, his pitch to newcomers is the same one he gives everyone who asks what they should see. “Give it a shot,” he says. “You don’t even need to bring anything. Bring your empty mind for a day.”
Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, MA
Friday–Sunday, October 23–25
Full schedule and tickets at fieldlenox.org.
