What If I Told You One Of This Fall’s Coolest Festivals Was In A Bog In The Pine Barrens?

Among the books that every person living in this part of the world ought to be made to read — I’m thinking Buzz Bissinger’s A Prayer For The City, Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia, Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, the list rolls out before us like a red carpet — is John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens. It is not, perhaps, an obvious choice, the Pines being a 1.1 million acres of mostly undeveloped land rural New Jersey, but McPhee’s thought-provoking book works on the Philadelphia mind with two chisels: One that highlights how much of an adjunct to wilderness Philly has really always been, and another that draws a line from us to “The Pineys” and back again via our sectarian, almost cultish roots. After all, The Piney, as a sort of regional “type,” has always been but a first cousin to the Hoagiemouth. First published in 1978, it’s remarkable how little has changed (although that has been the remarkable thing about the Pine Barrens for 200 years now), but even that is now up for grabs in Chris Christie’s Wild Wild New Jersey.

The Pine Barrens in production. 2017 release date. www.pinebarrensfilm.com facebook.com/pinebarrensfilm instagram @pinebarrensfilm Guiding the viewer through the New Jersey Pineland's winding, rust-colored rivers; its dark, sandy forests and slowly developing towns, The Pine Barrens creates a contemplative, complex, portrait of a place out of time. Encounters with “Pineys” in the haze of tall-tales around campfires, punctuate a landscape removed from contemporary experiences of reality. With the Pinelands as a primary character, the film explores the symbiotic yet sometimes destructive relationship between man and nature. Aiming beyond journalism, The Pine Barrens is a meditation on nature and place, and their contributions to identity. Impressions and artistically interpreted moments are experienced through a veil of wonder and left largely unexplained. The Pine Barrens explores the inseparable nature between experience and perception and the forest's natural ability to blur the lines between them. director/producer, David Scott Kessler musical score by The Ruins of Friendship Orchestra

It’s in this moment, where the future of the Pine Barrens is up for grabs, that the humble Middle of Nowhere fest will take place in Whitesbog Village on September 17th. Just as any number of legislative moves and other initiatives — chalk them up to modernity itself — threaten to make the still-wild, still-unknowable Pines as boring as the rest of America, there’s also some young disciples of McPhee and “Pineys” themselves making some noise in the opposite direction. Middle of Nowhere is an articulation of what they see in the Pines. Curated by David Scott Kessler (whose long-in-coming doc, The Pine Barrens, is poised to show the wonders of the Pines to the world) and Kristen Neville, the fest will feature said documentary, along with music from The Ruins of Friendship Orchestra (who did the soundtrack), harpist Mary Lattimore, and The Last Whipporwill. There’s also an art exhibition opening during the fest — a group show, likewise focused on the Pines — and so far as we can tell, no lodging whatsoever. Like two centuries of Pineys, you’re just going to have to make do.