Always Something to Do in Salinas: 2016 John Steinbeck Festival Celebrates Main Street and Sea of Cortez

The National Steinbeck Center will celebrate John Steinbeck’s life, time, and work May 6, 7, and 8 in Salinas, California, the writer’s home town. The 2016 John Steinbeck Festival—“From Salinas to Sea of Cortez: Steinbeck on Land and Sea”—boasts an all-star lineup (the Steinbeck scholar, poet, and fisherman Robert DeMott; Steinbeck’s biographer William Souder; Susan Shillinglaw, the Steinbeck center’s executive director) and a variety of topics, including Steinbeck’s 1940 voyage to the Sea of Cortez, Latino culture and writing in California, and the living heritage of Main Street Salinas. Says Shillinglaw, “There’s ‘always something to do in Salinas,’ as Steinbeck wryly noted in an essay by the same name, and there’s much that is ‘festive’ in the 2016 festival, with Steinbeck Rotary sponsoring Main Street’s first ‘Steinbeck’s Home Brew Fest’ and a beer garden on the NSC patio. In his 1955 essay, Steinbeck noted that the town’s motto was ‘Salinas is,’ adding, ‘I don’t know what that means, but there is no doubt of its compelling tone.’”