What a Book Festival Taught Me About Why Stories Matter
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A particular kind of vulnerability comes with sitting behind a table full of your own books.
Not the vulnerability of writing them… that happens alone, in the quiet, where no one is watching, and you can rewrite a sentence eleven times before anyone knows it existed in any other form. I mean the other kind. The kind that shows up the moment you're sitting in a folding chair, in front of strangers, next to a stack of you — your imagination, your late nights, your whole unguarded heart, bound and printed and priced at ten or twenty dollars a copy.
Fellow YA Fantasy Author Sydney Frusti and myself with her book Lily’s Passage at the 2026 Payson Book Festival.
People walk by. Some stop. Some don't. Some pick up a book, read the back, and set it down again without a word. And you sit there, in the sun or the fluorescent lights, entirely visible, hoping someone will see what you saw when you were building that world in the dark.
It is, without question, one of the most exposing things I do.
And also — somehow, at the very same time — one of the most whimsical.
Two Things Can Be True
I used to think confidence and vulnerability lived on opposite ends of something. That you either walked into a room fully armored, or you walked in soft and unprotected, and you had to pick.
Book festivals taught me that's not how it works at all.
I show up in flowing sleeves and a little bit of sparkle, because that's me… that's Amberlight Valley walking around in human form. I light up when someone asks about the trilogy. I love talking about Brigid, about Cerri, about the woods that raised them. There's a whimsy to the whole thing, a delight in getting to exist, for a few hours, as the person who made this.
But underneath the sparkle, every single time, there's a quieter voice asking: will this matter to anyone but me?
Both of those are true in the same breath. The confidence doesn't erase the vulnerability. It just… holds hands with it. Walks it through the door.
Why We Keep Showing Up Anyway
Here's what I've come to understand, table after table, festival after festival: stories matter because they ask us to be witnessed, and witnessing is one of the most sacred things we can offer each other.
When someone stops at my table and says "the way you wrote about grief in that scene… I felt that," they're not just complimenting my writing. They're telling me they were seen somewhere in those pages. And in that same moment, I am being seen too — as someone who put something true into the world and trusted it would land somewhere.
That exchange is small. It happens in maybe ninety seconds, standing in a hallway, surrounded by other authors and their own stacks of vulnerability. But it is not nothing. It might be the whole reason any of us do this.
The Whimsy Is the Armor, and It's Also the Truth
I don't think the whimsical, confident version of me at a festival table is a mask over the nervous version. I think they're the same person, layered like they always are in Amberlight Valley itself — where the wonder and the ache exist side by side, where the forest is beautiful and it remembers everything hard that happened beneath it.
Showing up soft and showing up sparkling aren't in competition. They're both just… me, doing the brave thing. Sitting behind the table. Letting the stories be seen, so that maybe, in turn, the people who read them feel a little less alone in whatever they're carrying.
That's why stories matter. Not because they're perfect, or because everyone stops at the table. But because every single one of them is an invitation — come, be seen with me for a moment — and every so often, someone says yes.
Dalea Faulkner is an author, filmmaker, and creative living in the White Mountains of Arizona. Her Amberlight Valley trilogy is available now. Her world is always, in some way, the mountains.
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