After 15 years of staging annual literary festivals — and just weeks before its 2024 event was to open — Bookstock announced on Monday that it is closing down. The Woodstock festival scheduled for June 21 to 23 is canceled.

Cofounder and board chair Peter Rousmaniere told Seven Days that disparate visions for the festival prompted some participating organizations to pull out. He declined to name them. “It was a decision on their own, which I respect,” he said.

More than two dozen local organizations have participated in Bookstock, Rousmaniere said in press release, and, “We asked a lot from them.” Some have moved on, he continued. “This development is understandable. But this makes the festival not viable.”

Finances were not a problem, he told Seven Days.

Disagreement centered on the size of the festival. Those who prefer a smaller event aimed at a local audience disliked the direction the festival had been moving in the past two years as it had grown and attracted out-of-staters, Rousmaniere said in a phone interview. “Last year, 80 percent of the people who came to the festival were from outside the immediate area,” he said.

He and the other three board members envisioned fixing the festival among the array of cultural amenities that would attract people to move to Woodstock. “It was really set up, in effect, to draw people into town,” he said, “and organizations that are in a small town like this are necessarily focused on their own constituents.”

Calls to the Yankee Bookshop, Pentangle Arts and the Norman Williams Public Library, three of the six festival cofounders, were not immediately returned. The other cofounders are North Chapel, the Woodstock History Center and the Thompson Center.

The tension wasn’t new, Rousmaniere said. “It had been there for a while, and we thought we could manage it, and we just couldn’t.” The three-day festival that has featured as many as 60 authors and drawn 1,500 attendees to multiple venues each year required 60 volunteers and intricate logistics that Rousmanier likened “to a complicated watch.”

Bookstock began in 2009. “We wanted a really lively, inspiring, fun event” that allowed authors and audience members to interact, Rousmaniere said. Over the years, Bookstock has hosted more than 400 authors, ranging from Pulitzer Prize winners to emerging local writers. Author events were free.

Artistree Gallery’s “Unbound” exhibit typically kicked off the weekend, adding a visual-arts element to the literary affair. More than a dozen tents erected on the town green housed exhibitors — writers’ groups, publishers, self-published authors — and a used book sale.

Events moved online in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When Bookstock returned in person, in 2022, it did so as a nonprofit organization supported by a $20,000 start-up grant from Woodstock’s Economic Development Commission. The grant was renewed in 2023 and allowed Bookstock to hire three part-time staffers.

This year’s author lineup was to include three-time National Book Award finalist Lauren Groff; National Book Award finalist and Norwich-based high school principal Ken Cadow; former Vermont poet laureate Ellen Bryant Voigt; author, sociologist and policy maker Nikhil Goyal; and Vermont children’s writer Tamara Ellis Smith.

Cadow told Seven Days in an email that he received an email on Sunday from Bookstock, announcing its demise. “I am certain that it was a very tough decision, and it seems as though they had gotten quite far with planning, and were doing so in good faith,” Cadow wrote. “I think it’s a sign of how thin people are stretched who try to work for the greater good!”

Rousmaniere hinted that Bookstock may return: “We’re proud of what we’ve done, and maybe there might be something that comes back after people sort things out in the town.”