For one weekend each June, Narrowsburg becomes a literary republic. Authors, artists, performers, booksellers, and readers descend on the small Delaware River town, filling its storefronts, theaters, churches, backyards, and odd corners with conversations about books and ideas. There are bigger literary festivals in America. There are certainly more convenient ones to get to. But convenience has never been the point of the Deep Water Literary Festival.
“The magic of it is that it’s not Chicago or New York or LA,” says festival founder Aaron Hicklin. “It’s a town of 330 people, a one-stoplight town with a very short Main Street.”
Now in its eighth year, the festival returns June 19-21 with “Time Shift,” a theme that explores how literature, art, and storytelling respond when the world seems to be changing faster than our ability to make sense of it. The lineup includes Joyce Carol Oates, Siri Hustvedt, Francine Prose, Amal El-Mohtar, Marlon James, George Packer, Ben Fountain, Fab 5 Freddy, and “Radiolab” creator Jad Abumrad, among others.
For Hicklin, the theme emerged from a feeling many people share: That the old language no longer fits the moment. “We’re living through a period when the future feels like it’s arriving early,” he says. “Climate change, technological leaps we haven’t quite mastered, enormous disparities in wealth—all of that creates a feeling of instability.”
That sense of dislocation is reflected in much of this year’s programming. Historical fiction revisits the past through new lenses. Memoirs reconstruct lives through memory. Speculative fiction imagines futures that feel uncomfortably close. “A lot of the writing we’re seeing now is examining the present by looking either backward or forward in time,” Hicklin says.
The festival opens Friday night with what may be its most anticipated event: a keynote performance by Jad Abumrad titled “When Time Breaks.” Inspired by the only surviving audio recording of Virginia Woolf, the multimedia presentation explores how artists respond when history suddenly accelerates.
Hicklin first worked with Abumrad during Deep Water’s 2023 Orwell-themed festival, when the broadcaster appeared alongside his son in a performance examining how different generations read 1984. “It was riveting,” Hicklin recalls. “Very much how I’ve always wanted to see the festival—as a place where you can pull together different media in the service of exploring an idea.”
That ambition helps explain why Deep Water has never been content to function as a conventional literary festival. “I wanted to get away from the model of an author sitting on stage talking about their latest book,” Hicklin says. “I wanted to make it more of a festival of ideas.”
While author conversations remain at the festival’s core, Deep Water has long incorporated theater, visual art, music, and installation work. This year’s lineup includes Farm Arts Collective‘s “Scattered Seeds of Troy,” a reimagining of “The Trojan Women” through the lens of migration and displacement, as well as a new immersive installation by artist Raphaele Shirley.
Shirley’s work, “20F,” transforms a dark gymnasium into an environment of light, smoke, mirrors, and sound. It’s a follow-up to her memorable appearance at last year’s festival, when hundreds gathered to watch pink smoke flares drift across the Delaware River valley.
“Maybe you haven’t read the author on stage and feel intimidated,” Hicklin says. “But you’re not going to be intimidated by watching pink smoke float across Narrowsburg or walking through an installation. It’s a way of making the festival fully inclusive.”
That philosophy extends to the festival’s relationship with the region. This year Deep Water is partnering with organizations like Farm Arts Collective and the North American Cultural Laboratory, integrating local artists and performers into the program.
The result is less a literary conference than a town-wide cultural happening. “The festival owns the town for that weekend,” Hicklin says.
That’s not entirely hyperbole. Without the infrastructure of a major city, organizers rely on every available space. Writers stay in local homes and Airbnbs. Events spill across Main Street. Audiences wander between venues, often stumbling upon something unexpected.
For Hicklin, those surprises are part of the appeal. “People feel they’ve found something that’s hard to get to,” he says. “You have to work a little to be there.”
The reward is a festival where a conversation about Virginia Woolf might be followed by an experimental performance, a tintype portrait session, a discussion of speculative fiction, or a swim in the Delaware River. Not a bad way to spend a June weekend contemplating the strange elasticity of time.
