Katherine Longshore vividly remembers when Sharlya Gold, a children’s book author, visited her class at Bloomfield School in 1981. At the time, Longshore and her peers were making their own story books, stapled together and illustrated by hand. Gold, who was participating in the Humboldt County Children’s Author Festival, wrote a note in Longshore’s project: “I hope you enjoy writing your own books.”

“I still have the book,” Longshore said in a recent interview with the Outpost. “It really stuck with me – that this is something that people actually do. People actually write the books that are the stories that I love to read.” 

Longshore eventually published a young adult novel herself and returned to the festival as an author. She visited Arcata High and McKinleyville Middle, where Longshore led a small workshop with students who were interested in writing. 

“It was like the highlight of my career, to feel like it kind of came full circle,” Longshore said. Now, she is a member of the Humboldt County Children’s Author Festival committee and serves as its communications person, working to connect authors from around the nation to Humboldt’s youngest readers – even those in the most rural corners of the county. 

Every other year, the festival brings 25 authors from far and wide to as many Humboldt students as possible. Each author travels around the area to visit two or three schools, where they lead writing workshops, teach art classes, play music or simply talk about their book with the students. Afterwards, all 25 authors gather for a public book sale and signing celebration at the Humboldt County Main Library in Eureka. 

For the festival’s 50th anniversary this year, the writers will visit 59 schools in total, on Oct. 17 and 18, then convene at the Humboldt County Main Library in Eureka on Saturday, Oct. 19, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. See who’s who here, and where they are going here.

As it turns out, being a children’s book author is a darn cool job. Many full-time children’s authors spend half their time considering what it’s like to live as a child and the other half meeting actual children. Because writing children’s books isn’t usually a profitable job, some authors supplement their income via school visits. Those can cost a school hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on who the author is and where they are going. 

But the Humboldt County Children’s Author Festival is different. Something about it inspires authors to visit for free.

“Our festival is unique,” Longshore said. “As far as we know, there are no other children’s author festivals that operate this way in the entire country.”

There are a few things that make it special. 

“One of the things that I really like – I do a lot of speaking – and one thing that’s very different about speaking in Humboldt is that I get to speak to these tiny schools out in the middle of nowhere,” said Gennifer Choldenko, a veteran author of the festival who is returning this year.

The festival is also unusual because it is entirely volunteer-powered – from the organizers to the authors, no one gets paid – and it has survived a remarkably long time. [CORRECTION: The authors do get a small honorarium, funded by a grant from the Humboldt Area Foundation.]

“Places will try to do it, and it lasts maybe three years and then collapses,” said Wendelin Van Draanen, an author who is new to Humboldt’s festival this year but has been visiting schools for more than two decades. “So 50 years is extraordinary.” 

It’s a big undertaking. Planning the whole thing – from securing travel and lodging, to selecting the authors, to coordinating with schools – takes the full two years in between each festival, Longshore said. But the event has drummed up more and more popularity over the years, drawing donations, sponsorships and support from dozens of local businesses, nonprofits and community members. Though the authors aren’t paid for the school visits, their travel expenses and accommodations are covered. 

Over the years, the festival has brought no shortage of whimsy and joy to the county. Linda Lorvig, a coordinator who has been involved with the event for more than 30 years, recalled some of her favorite memories of the festival during a recent phone call. There was the time Bruce Hale, an author whose books sometimes concern insects, visited Kneeland School and the superintendent pranked him by setting out edible bugs for lunch with the students. 

“He grabbed all of the different bugs and put them on his plate, sat down and ate the bugs, and kept commenting: “crunch, crunch, ooh, these are just like popcorn!” Lorvig recalled. “The kids just sat there, I guess, in awe of an author that would do that.” Some kids ended up trying the bugs, too.

There are the legacy authors, like Robert D. San Souci, who used to write a thoughtful inscription in every book he signed. The line at his table was always long, Lorvig said, and San Souci often stayed to autograph books long after the event was over. He almost missed a plane because of it once. 

“He was a wonderful man. He loved coming here to see us,” Lorvig said of the author, who passed away in 2014. “He said we were his family up here.” 

Perhaps that’s why the festival has survived for half a century; it’s become a celebrated piece of Humboldt’s community, which knows how to show the authors a good time. (It is said that one author, Pamela Service, was so charmed by the area that she decided to move to Humboldt from the Midwest after visiting for the festival.) This year the authors will visit the Redwood Skywalk and stay at the Carter House Inn.

“We do have such a beautiful county and such a good community here that I think that that’s really appealing, even to somebody who might not normally consider doing school visits without some kind of recompense,” Longshore said.

Of course, the main purpose of the event is connecting authors with young readers, which is valuable to both.

“I’d never met an author when I was a kid. It would have made such a difference in my perception, I think,” said Van Draanen. 

Meeting an author “has a long-lasting impact that goes far beyond that day or that book or that year, even,” Van Draanen said. “It impacts kids in a way it’s almost hard to describe.” Van Draanen is best known for her 2001 chapter book “Flipped,” which has been translated into several languages and adapted into a film. But Van Draanen especially loves meeting fans of her 18-book Sammy Keyes series, which is about a witty 13-year-old who solves mysteries.

“There’s an immediate love that you feel for each other – like I’m the creator of this thing that impacted them so much, and they are somebody who has embraced it and has led it into their heart and their life,” Van Draanen said. “There’s no way you can really describe how that is. It’s awesome.”

The author visits – and children’s books in general – are also an opportunity for kids to learn and talk about current events and misunderstood topics.

Maureen McGarry, a local watercolorist and art teacher, will be a participating author for the first time this year. Her self-illustrated book “Louie Learns a Lesson” is about Aleutian Cackling Geese, which migrate from Alaska to Humboldt Bay each winter. They were once endangered but have since bounced back – both thanks, in part, to humans. 

“It is a conservation success story – that we actually can fix some of the messes we’ve made, and how important it is to focus on doing that,” McGarry said. 

“That feeling of empowerment is so important for, especially, young people to feel.”

Meanwhile, Choldenko plans to share her new book “The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman” with the middle school-age students she visits. One character in the book is in the foster care system. 

“It’s hard enough being a foster kid without kids thinking you’re weird, and so gaining some compassion in the audience [is a goal],” Choldenko said. “I think there’s not a lot of understanding about what it is like.” 

At the end of the day, though, what matters to Choldenko is telling a good story. 

“I want to create characters that the kids really respond to, that they see parts of themselves in, or see kids that they know in,” she said. “My first job is to make kids love reading.”

All are invited to the book signing celebration on Oct. 19 at the Humboldt County Main Library in Eureka. Throughout the month of October there will also be a display about the history of the festival at that library, and the Morris Graves Museum will open a poster display from festivals past.