So, out at Pepperdine this week, I finally met Wilfred “Bill” McClay, the indefatigably cheerful humanities scholar. I told him how excited I was that he would be one of the headline speakers at the Walker Percy Weekend. He said that he’s been hearing from friends from all over the country who had heard about the festival, and who wanted to know if he was planning to be there.

Yes, Bill is planning to be here — and he’s planning to speak. I suspect he will also plan to eat crawfish and drink cold beer, too. He’ll be joined by Peter Augustine Lawler, Micah Mattix, Ralph C. Wood, Ari Schulman, Caleb Stegall, Leslie Marsh, Patrick Connelly, and others. It’ll be a weekend of ideas, storytelling, Southern culture, front porches, crawfish, beer, music, bourbon, and the fellowship of people coming together to celebrate the writing and legacy of one of America’s great novelists and men of letters.

We’ve sold a surprising number of advance tickets, I’m told this morning by one of my co-organizers. Mind you, this is the first year of the festival, and we’re doing it on a shoestring budget. We’ve only planned for a limited number of tickets — this, so we can make sure we have enough food for festivalgoers. If you’re not planning to buy tickets until the last minute, it’s possible that you won’t be able to buy a ticket at all. We would hate it — hate it! — if you traveled all this way and we couldn’t let you in to eat crawfish, roasted oysters, and all the rest, or go on the progressive front porch bourbon promenade, because we wouldn’t have laid in enough for all the festivalgoers.

You can certainly come to the festival and hear the lectures and tour the town without buying the full package, which includes the evening dinners in the park. But those parties under the live oaks are going to be the showcase, a time for us all to eat, drink, and be merry together. If you think you’re going to want to be a part of that, please buy your tickets online, as soon as you can, so we can do everything in advance that we need to make it fun for everybody, not just the early-birds. Right now, we’ve sold about a quarter of the limited number of tickets. If we sell out early, we’ll revise our plans and get more food and drink lined up — but we can only do that if we have enough time to turn the ship around in time. The early bird gets the crawfish.

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