1The fourth annual Newburyport Literary Festival brought together 70 authors for 48 events at 10 separate venues Saturday. And it was all free.

There were stories of unbearable tragedy and loss, of quirky local history, of belly-laugh humor, of poetic majesty and of finding common humanity.

The bulk of the events seemed to play to capacity or near-capacity audiences

The festival celebrates writing and reading, and this year honored a writer and a reader: children's book author David McPhail and retired Library Director Dorothy LaFrance.

One McPhail fan journeyed all the way from Austin, Texas, to meet and hear him.

"Children's authors don't realize how many lives they touch," said Andrea Mercier, a transplant from Amesbury to the Lone Star State.

Mercier also arrived with a trove of Texas-related items to donate to the festival's fundraising silent auction, including a baseball signed by Hall of Fame pitcher and Texas native Nolan Ryan.

The festival kicked off Friday evening with a tribute to Dorothy LaFrance and to libraries in general.

Powow River Poet Rhina Espaillat and best-selling novelist Julia Alvarez, both immigrants from the Dominican Republic, told the audience about meeting librarians when they first came to the United States who passed along their love of the written word.

Alvarez said she came from a storytelling tradition, not a reading one, and that she was indifferent to the printed page until a librarian in New York was able to make a connection.

"She convinced me that the stories that I loved, those stories were in these books," she said. "I just had to find a way to get into them."

LaFrance said the head librarian's post that she held for 30 years "was not a job, it was a privilege."

"I accept this honor on behalf of all Newburyport librarians," she said, "those who came before me, those I served with and those who come after."

McPhail tribute

Saturday evening's closing ceremony was a multi-faceted tribute to McPhail.

The Joppa Juniors jazz dance company put their spin on Andre Dubus III's narration of McPhail's "Pigs Aplenty, Pigs Galore."

Television reporter and anchor Jay Schadler of Amesbury drew a sometimes humorous portrait of the writer and illustrator who has been his friend for 17 years.

McPhail, he said, "has figured out the art of making magic without using tricks," but he also said the author can be a bit eccentric and it's good that his wife, Jan Waldron, is more practical.

"Jan's real skill is keeping David just minimally tethered to the real world," Schadler said.

But above the laughs was genuine admiration.

"His work and art remain constant, vital and alive," Schadler said.

After viewing a brief documentary about McPhail by filmmaker Peter Vandermark, McPhail pronounced himself "deeply honored" by the accolades.

He recalled his boyhood on Newburyport's Lime Street, including mischievous visits to the Public Library on State Street.

The ceremony — and the festival — concluded with Maureen Daley of the Newburyport Montessori School reading McPhail's "Mole Music," with accompaniment by young violinists Madeline and Claire Werner.

The festival's traditional Saturday start is coffee with the poets at 8:30 a.m. with Espaillat, Patricia Callan, Alfred Nicol Jose Reyes and Daniel Waters, moderated by Deborah Warren. This year's offerings also included topics such as "Women at the Helm — Journeys at Sea," and "Writing About Family: Fiction or Nonfiction."

In "Memoirs with a Message: Moving from a Personal Life Experience to a Public Message," Julia Fox Garrison and Meredith Hall told a packed City Council chamber audience at City Hall how they had dealt with severe trauma.

Garrison suffered a major stroke in July 1997 at the age of 37 and Hall's family cruelly ostracized her after she became pregnant in high school.

Garrison said her book wasn't meant to be cathartic, but it turned out to be just that.

Hall said she endured decades of her own silence before deciding to tell her story.

"You'll know as a writer when to say, 'This happened to me,'" she said.

Mov ie making

Novelists Elinor Lipman and Anita Shreve had lighter stories later in the day.

At a presentation called "Fiction to Film," the two writers recounted the uncertain and sometimes frustrating process of having their books turned into films.

The 2007 film "Then She Found Me," with Helen Hunt and Bette Midler, was based on Lipman's first novel of the same name, which was published in 1990.

"Did you all do the math on that?" she said of the 17-year gap, then discussed the machinations, the highs and the lows and helplessness of getting print turned into film.

Introducing a less than 10-minute clip from the movie, she said, "what you're going to see is pretty much the only part that's taken from the book."

Shreve has had three books made into films: "The Pilot's Wife," "The Weight of Water" and "Resistance."

While she, too, had a number of missteps along the way, she had a fond memory of watching the filming of a scene from "The Weight of Water" on the set.

"Seeing scenes I had made up in my living room played out in front of me was magical," Shreve said.

The theme of the festival was "Reading for a Lifetime," and during her Saturday morning workshop Alvarez talked about her writing for young adults.

Her writing, she said, "comes from the pebble in my shoe," the little things she can't get out of her mind.

Alvarez lives in Vermont. Her young adult novel "Return to Sender" grew out of requests to translate for Spanish-speaking workers on the Green Mountain State's struggling dairy farms.

She imagined a story in which a young Vermont boy becomes friends with the daughters of a Mexican worker on his father's dairy farm.

Alvarez, best known as a novelist for adults, specifically asked festival organizers if she could discuss young adult fiction.

During her presentation, she discussed the proliferation of "celebrity authors" among adult audience.

She told an anecdote of a boy who was absolutely absorbed in a young adult novel. Asked if he would like to meet the author of the book that so fascinated him, he replied "What for?"

"Young adult is about the book," she said, "not about you."