WordFest Blog 7, October 18th by Noah Richler

Calgary is a city that likes to party, hard. The boom here is an honest one—there’s work, and whether your collar is blue or white there’s plenty of it. The boom here is not about brokers pushing paper that may or may not be worth anything at all; it’s about having a job, maybe two, and working enough hours or days that when you do get to party you dress to the nines and head to the bars and celebrate. Hell, even the cover band at Murrieta’s, on 1st Street, still playing Kansas’s “Against the Wind” after all these years, looked spiffed up for the occasion and as if they were having a good time.

Rawi Hage, IMPAC Dublin Award winner and Giller nominee at the book signing table in the Vertigo Studio after Friday night’s Showcase.

It’s hard to get Calgarians to sit, take in one author let alone three or four when times are like these and for several days, now, the Vertigo Studio has been filled near to bursting. And, with the poetry bash Friday night, and the Festival’s move to Banff the next day, the Calgarian partying started. This is a hell of a romp, and Anne Green is the slender dark figure moving with the grace of the trained dancer and horse rider, climbing the stairs from the Vertigo Studio lobby and casting a superintending glance over the Pages bookstore tables, and the crowd exiting the theatre during the interval. All’s well, but you can understand if the WordFest Executive Director looks a little shell-shocked. It’s all been a crazy rush, and something of a miracle.

At the sandstone city library on 10th Avenue, where the Alliance Française hosted the Francophone Radio-Canada program, Vous m’en lirez tant, Saturday afternoon, Anne Green was in attendance and the subject came up. (Did you even know that there was a francophone community in Calgary? Did you know that Jean Chatelain makes fine croissants?) Anne and her team of volunteers deserve credit, heaps of it, because the truth of it is that Calgary is a city that likes to party and one that is also a work in progress. And just as the homeowner tends to the walls and the roof of his home first, and only after that puts carpets on the floors and art on the walls, the actual task of building the place is not complete. Building the city is the priority. Culture, at least for the time being, is the afterthought. Let’s repeat the thanks Anne Green and her team garnered during Vous m’en lirez tant, for it should certainly not be taken for granted that there would be a literary festival without her—or Amanda, working a hospital doctor’s shifts in the Festival Transport room, booking vehicles for authors who suddenly become incapable of flagging a taxi or finding a venue two blocks away when there’s a Festival on; or Jocelyn, who mounted this blog for me; Don, who, in the Artist’s Liaison room, managed to communicate endless good cheer and efficiency, Emma Knipe who seemed to have answers to every question, big and small—and Kathie Stell, who was the Festival’s tireless and talented photographer.

Jocelyn Hebert (right) and Don Gorman in front of the clippings in the Artist Liaison Room (it was a busy place).

Festival Director Anne Green (right) and Artist Liaison Emma Knipe can't believe it's Saturday in Banff and they are still standing.

Saturday’s transports were to Banff, where, each year, Anne Green and the Banff team arrange The Banff Distinguished Author Series, closing events and a party at the The Banff Centre. Past lecturers have included Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood and my father, Mordecai. This year’s was Austin Clarke, the author of the 2002 Giller and 2003 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize-winning novel, The Polished Hoe, and incomparable short stories about the experience of 1960s West Indian immigrants to Toronto that Patrick Crean collected in the Thomas Allen collection, Choosing his Coffin. Clarke’s most recent novel is More. I haven’t read it yet—it concerns a new generation of Caribbean- and African-Canadian experience in the city—but I know that because of Clarke’s unintimidated precision, that I shall.

The Calgary WordFest is far from the largest in Canada, but Green & Co should congratulate themselves on yet more evidence of their prescience. (Maybe this is why Hal Wake, the wry director of the Vancouver International Authors’ Festival, makes a point of visiting.) On Friday, America’s Rachel Kushner was certainly happy, having been nominated for the United States’ National Book Award for Telex From Cuba, her first book. Sensibly, she was delighted merely with the attention nomination brings. (The tension of prizes, in the book world, creates as much pain, aggravation and disappointment as it does rapture to the selected few. It’s hard, for most writers, watching the stormy journey of a book it may have taken years to write and that often sinks with little trace for no good reason.)

There was too much I was unable to attend, this year. I was unable to hear Kushner, or Steven Galloway, author of the excellent and crystal clear short novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, or Fred Stenson, the author of The Great Karoo—to name only a few.

Neil Bissoondath (sitting) and Joseph Boyden, two of the stars of this year's show: "Next year in Calgary!"

I know I’ll be far from the only one making a point of coming back. -30-

WordFest Blog 6 by Noah Richler

Spotted at the Alberta Boot Company, amid the rows and rows and rows of off-the-rack and only-to-order cowboy boots: English mystery writer Elena Forbes, wanting crocodile skin cowboy boots though not, as far as could be determined, leather for binding victims in masochistic and symbolically positioned sexual acts of sexual deviance, this the province of her motorbike-riding, dark and charismatic bachelor detective, Mark Tataglia.

English mystery writer, Elena Forbes.

Note today’s excellent potted review of Forbes’ second Mark Tataglia review in the Globe & Mail book section, which says of Our Lady of Pain, that “Readers of Forbes’ debut, Die With Me, have been waiting for the return of Mark Tataglia. And what a return!  In this intelligent, beautifully constructed novel, the victim is London art dealer Rachel Tennison. She is found in Holland Park on a snowy February day, naked and frozen, her body positioned symbolically […] Forbes provides a terrific plot, great characters and plenty of atmosphere.

As a student and twenty-something, Forbes, the daughter of 1960s bohemian London parents, thought to hell with such free living and became an investment banker but soon was bored of it—and turned to writing. We are better off for it. Forbes, by the way, is salubrious company and has that odd gift—probably irritating to some in possession of it but undoubtedly useful if you are writer—of being easily confessed to. At breakfast at the Avenue Diner on Stephen Avenue, now my local, she talked about one reader confessing to some of the acts she had to explain that she imagines, rather than experiences. Had to hold myself back from confessing my own dark secrets (drink too much coffee, don’t know the names of the Montreal Canadiens second-liners anymore), so charming is she.

And Forbes’ portfolio is too, probably, in these troubled times. Stock holdings do not frequently add themselves to the long list of anxieties that writers entertain. Authors are masters of worry and essentially optimistic in the work that they do (writing a novel is an optimistic act because it lays a stone on the pathway to human improvement, no matter how dire its mood, but also because, by virtue of writing and publishing, the author imagines someone else might actually bother to read it), but they tend to bigger, better worries—such as environmental apocalypse, for instance.

This has been Margaret Atwood’s subject for a while—in her last novel, Oryx and Crake, and in her present Massey Lectures, Payback, too. In the last of those lectures, Atwood lists a number of possible responses to worldly or stock market ruin, and one of these is just to get on and party—a very Canadian response, in fact. This is what Champlain did when he arranged hearty dinners as response to more cold February (and March and April and May and November and December and, in a bad year, even June and October) nights than poor Rachel Tennison would ever have known back in Holland Park, and it is the response of the hero of Victoria B.C. writer Bill Gaston’s latest novel, The Order of Good Cheer, that the Victoria B.C,. writer, shortlisted for the Giller a few years back, discussed with Paul Quarrington and Newfoundland poet Randall Maggs at Mount Royal College on Thursday.

By the way, if you want to hear a short bit of chat—at the habitation at Port Royal, where Bill Gaston’s novel—which has a historic and a contemporary component—you can, at http://anansi.ca/assets/GastonAnnapolis.mp4, and if you want to hear Elena Forbes in conversation with the BBC World Service books producer Jennifer Chevalier, log on to http://anansi.ca/assets/audio/elena_forbes.mp3.

Gaston’s a terrific writer, Maggs too, and it’s actually kind of remarkable that he himself is in any good cheer at all. Stock market players and corporate executives—those who did not already bale as they saw the storm their actions had put into play—may complain, metaphorically, of “burning houses” over a bottle of a slightly less expensive vintage, but Gaston’s house really did burn down after he’d returned to Victoria following the first stages of his book tour, back in early summer. Gaston got out, as did his whole family, and the pet dog that had alerted them and woken them up.  Gaston reads again in Banff as the Festival moves into the mountains over the weekend.

Maggs, once a fighter pilot and who originally came from these parts, lives in Corner Brook NL, where he is the author of their literary festival, the ‘March Hare.’ Like Gaston, who wrote about his great affection in Midnight Hockey, Maggs adores ‘the Game’ and made his own tribute to hockey in his collection of poetry, Night Work: The Terry Sawchuk Poems. He read from those last night, in a terrific evening in which young JonArno Lawson was undoubtedly the star, his playful word games challenging the tip of the tongue and typically ending with an emphatic punch. (Lawson is fond of aphorisms for exactly this reason.)

 

Now, on to the Alliance Française, for the Radio-Canada WordFest broadcast Vous m’en lirez tant, with Stephen Harper’s favorite Calgarian franchise, its culture-loving French-Canadian population—and then, with WordFest’s unbelievably hard-working photographer, Kathie Stell, to Banff …

Performance artists Miles Merrill and Kinne Starr at the Word of Mouth/ Word Play Showcase at the packed-out Vertigo Theatre Thursday night. Real talents. You’ve heard me talk about them a lot.

WordFest 2009 Blog

Check out Noah Richler’s inside look at WordFest 2009 at http://wordfest09.wordpress.com !

WordFest Blog 5 by Noah Richler

Because they’re both fun and they write brilliantly for young adults and adults alike, Sheree Fitch and Chris Humphreys, in an authorly squeeze.

You can talk about ‘CanLit’ and ‘AusLit’ but what can you say about ‘NZLit’, it doesn’t work,” said Elizabeth Knox, the New Zealand author of the bestselling The Vintner’s Luck—now being made into a movie by Niki Caro, director of The Whale Rider, with the Oscar-nominated child star of that film, Keisha Castle-Hughes. (Whose favorite moment of the Academy Awards, a few years back, was not gentleman Johnny Depp standing and greeting the pint-sized New Zealand star with such grace and courtesy?)

We’d been participating in the discussion, “Crossing the Equator,” at the Rozsa Centre at the University of Calgary again, only now the view through the building’s marvelous wall of windows was of spanking new cement trucks (all the old ones are in Ontario) and not trees but, no matter, the discourse was lively.

Knox, of course, is from New Zealand, a couple of islands to which Newfoundlanders, in particular, can relate. They can, because the great cartographer Christopher Cook rushed off to map New Zealand’s North and South islands having already practiced many of the names he used there on Newfoundland. He two-timed Newfoundland, basically, for warmer climes but was subsequently eaten for supper and de mortuis nil nisi bonum, which is what people say when they really mean ‘serves him right.

En tout cas. (That’s French for, “I digress.”)

Knox was on a panel representing the Antipodes—that is antipodean, I should point out, to us and not to anybody who actually lives ‘down there’. Canadians, and mostly our Inuit are used to this sort of prejudicial geographical description—that we live ‘nowhere’ (“a place is only nowhere to the people who don’t live there,” said Margaret Atwood to me once), or that Inuit live “up” North. Even North is relative, of course; “you can put North anywhere you want,” said a Baffin Island bush pilot to me years ago, fiddling with his first-generation GPS as an ice-encrusted snowmobile shifted from its moorings in the back of the small plane—

En tout cas.

(That’s French for) as I was saying: Knox was on a panel representing the Antipodes with the wonderful Australian novelist Gail Jones, who was nominated in 2006 for the Orange Prize and is on her way to a week’s residency at the University of Manitoba in Brandon, where students are studying her novel of aboriginal colonial abuse, Sorry, and Myles Merrill, the American performance artist who moved to Australia from Chicago when he was twenty-five.

This was another compelling congregation—“session” always sounds so formal—in which some light was shed upon illuminating similarities and differences between these three countries at opposite ends of what was once Empire.

Australia, Canada and New Zealand are places that have a great deal in common, and other aspects of national experience that are not. All of our countries are defined by aboriginal contribution and relations between natives and settlers that are largely unsettled. The idea of aboriginals as the original custodians of the land, of the problems of colonial territorial acquisition and also of the necessity of some sort of apology—made, in a qualified manner, in Canada this last June to those who had suffered through the residential schools a few months after Australia apologized to the country’s “stolen generations” (not just political speeches do the Conservatives appropriate from down under)—exist in Gail Jones’ work, as they do in that of novelists and poets of this country. No surprise there, as novelists, poets, storytellers and artists by the very nature of what they do tend to be at the forefront of issues dogging a populace and so lead efforts to recognize, if not resolve, outstanding social problems.

Issues concerning aboriginal relations and the colonial legacy are at the root of Miles Merrill’s work, too, though he deals with these ideas in fierce and trenchant monologues—one of which, “Monotype,” took the caustic imagined dialogue of an aboriginal and a couple of racists in an Australian bar to say something quite distressing about human relations.

Not Gail Jones, Elizabeth Knox or even Miles Merrill (sorry, don’t know how to interview and shoot a camera at the same time), but Alberta’s Marina Endicott, because I’m crazy about her writing, tip her to win the Giller, and hear Western and West Coast writers complain that the Giller pays no attention to the West—huh? She’s a brilliant reader too.

Merrill is an easy, natural performer and an interesting figure. The words that come out of his mouth can be rough but the comportment, and the sentiments are gentle. “Do you write out of bitterness?” one young woman in the audience asked. “No” was Merrill’s answer, and then he went on to relate a story about troubled kids he’d asked to write a story about what they’d done on a Friday night, and who’d parroted received hip-hop ghetto American experience. “Now tell me what you really did,” he’d said, the soliciting amazing and only-Australian tales of traditional aboriginal experience. We talked a little about the Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill, who holds a lot in common with Merrill: both are the children of American civil rights activists—Merrill of Black Panther parents and Hill of a couple that chose to travel the overground railroad to Don Mills. There young Lawrence experienced the frustration of his mixed-race skin not being interesting, or recognized for what it was, and in his novel Any Known Blood, his protagonist is mistaken for a native, an Algerian, etc, and makes a play of it—which was exactly Merrill’s experience in Australia. Fascinating. Merill’s works are on CD, and he has a website—www.wordtravels.net—and both are well worth checking out.

In Australia, as in Canada—more so than in New Zealand (“we have no interior,” Knox complained)— Northrop Frye’s idea of cities as “garrisons in the wilderness” applies. It is outdated in both countries, of course, though it probably still resonates, as in each country a constellation of cities clings to the shore—there with the Pacific, and with the United States, here. Each country has vast and less populated places at their back door: here the North; in Australia, that interior. Gail Jones was receptive to the question of these national similarities and differences, and spoke eloquently about the writer’s advantage of being at the margins.

It was interesting to me, too, that the phenomenon of the photograph was at the heart of one of the novels she read from, Sixty Lights. Our own Katherine Govier, Michael Ondaatje and notable others have used the idea of the photograph to make their writers’ enquiries into the nature of human experience.

Speaking of photographs, here’s Bookshorts’ Judith Keenan with Canada Reads and Giller-longlisted novelist Paul Quarrington, the other night. His film, “Pavane,” was one of the soirées best. He’s looking good, eh? (“What’s the matter with him,” one writer asked me worriedly, “has he given up drinking?”)

Canada has more than its fair share of actual photographers, too, such as Jeff Wall and Edward Burtynsky, who illustrate the popular idea that being at the margins—observing the rest of the world from a distance—makes us comfortable contemplating the world through a lens. Of course it’s not just the experience of the Canadian to write that way—it was W.G. Sebald who was most adept at the abstract inclusion of photographs in his brilliant work (the photograph’s incomplete nature, the fact that it has edges and a world implied beyond its frame is an invitation to writers to make it up, to start to imagine everything that surrounds the photograph)—but it does strike me that there may be particular reasons that we understand the separation of experience and our representation of it that the actual physical object of a photograph, or a camera, makes explicit. In Canada, as possibly in Australia, some part of the colonial legacy—of having been at the very edge of Empire and political experience—persists in this sense we have that we live at the margins. Only now it’s been turned into a virtue. We are observers and good at it.

So “Crossing the Equator” turned into a conversation of discovery, as much as the revelation of lives differently lived. It would have been great fun to continue on—is, for instance, the fantasy that Gail Knox also writes, and read from, derived from the experience of being at the margins of the self-proclaimed centres of the world (the UK, the United States) and therefore more free to re-imagine place? How is it that both Australia and Canada revere a criminal renegade—Louis Riel, here, Ned Kelley in Australia—and so on.

En tout cas

This, of course, is why we attend festivals—to sit and listen, as I also did to Patrick Lane the other night—and either be stimulated by the sheer force of language, or simply to want to know more. I’d listened to a couple of minutes of Patrick Lane reading from Red Dog, Red Dog, and thought, “I know this story”—of a drinking, carousing young cowboy, but soon after that he’d drawn me in and won me over with his poetic, evocative prose.

Novels can be “novel”—i.e. new—by virtue of style, as Patrick Lane’s was, or through their information, leaving us wanting to learn more about some time or place of which we’d previously had no idea and that is made accessible to us through the bridge of our common humanity, upon which novelists, poets, storytellers and their readers rely. Today I bought Gail Jones’ novel, Sorry, and I ran into Miles Merrill intent on buying the book I wrote. “I haven’t paid enough attention to Canada,” he said, perhaps not knowing yet, how much his own experience of being the outsider in America and Australia is a quasi-Canadian one. He’ll find out, or disagree 9and we’ll talk about it later.) Either way, ours were just two journeys of discovery that started after “Crossing the Equator.”

WordFest Blog 4 by Noah Richler

A full moon on 9th Avenue lights the way to the Vertigo theatre and its WordFest marquee, Wednesday night.

 

In the lobby of the Palliser, the venerable CP hotel where the WordFest is based, there was Neve Fischmann, the film producer, on his cell phone pacing the lobby—and still there after returning from the Avenue Diner on the Stephen Avenue Mall, one of my favorite Calgary haunts as it offers possibly the best breakfasts in the west. Even by oil country standards, Calgary being the city where Blackberry pouches have replaced gun holsters on upstanding citizens’ belts (where, I wonder, do the women put them—will garter belts, adjusted for this new communications age, make a comeback?), Fischman’s call was a long one. An hour, maybe?

 

And there since the early morning: bystanders watch the file of authors at WordFest hoping for rush tickets.

 

Of course he could have been pretending, posturing for a little importance as Nigerians used to do when I was in that country years ago, every businessman-wannabe toting a cell phone (and they were big in those days) even though the country had no networks yet. Amusingly, Fischmann, along with actor Paul Gross, who is to the Canadian film industry biz as Patrick Lane boasts of being to the world of Canadian novels—undoubtedly talented, if unusually old for the part—was in town for Passchendaele, the First World War movie that only afterwards became a book. And that’s amusing because the truth of the matter is that yesterday, Wednesday October 15^th, the most interesting movie showing, by a long shot, was the quite astonishing showcase, “Moving Stories,” of about fifteen short films inspired by novels and short stories.

 

Take, for instance, Calgarian Corey Lee’s short film, “Perfection of the Moment,” based on the short story from John Gould’s 2003 Giller-nominated collection of short stories, Kilter: 55 Fictions.

 

Chapters and Indigo are making a fortune these days, and someone should nudge book queen Heather Reisman and have her badger hubby Gerry Schwartz into putting book movie shorts like this into his Cineplex chain of cinemas as a nod to the money book sales have brought Canada’s wealthy couple. They’d stand their own, certainly, and prove just what an amazing array of talent the country produces in all spheres.

Judith Keenan

 

Or Newfoundlander Justin Simm’s film, Night Work, based on the poem from Randall Maggs’s collection of poetry, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems. What is it about Newfoundland, that whether the book or the film or the poem or the painting is lyrical or wistful or painful and brutal (Kenneth J. Harvey’s coming to town), you so emphatically know exactly where you are? I was wary of this event because I dread literal transformations of literature into radio, or television, where the narrated writer’s mention of, say, a baby washed up on to shore or a ginger-haired kid shooting a fawn is visually represented by, say, a baby washed up on to shore or a kid shooting a fawn. But even the short films that approached this sort of film-making, didn’t. Pavane, Paul Quarrington’s kernel encapsulation of the injury at the heart of his novel The Ravine, was great too. Well performed and punctuated by graphic illustration (i.e. drawn—in that other sense, the film and the novel deliberately avoid being “graphic”) of traumatic childhood memory.

Amazing night. Congratulations, WordFest and Judith Keenan, the producer of BookShorts who organized the program.

 

It’s not always easy, this WordFest thing. Plenty of events, often competing (a way of getting you back in future years), and a logical street plan of numbered streets and avenues that tends to confuse out-of-towners like myself who rely on their highly developed urban jungle sense to get themselves around plainer grids like Montreal’s, or Toronto’s, where streets have names and bend and criss-cross and climb up hills and down them, dammit. “Calgary has an illogical grid but it’s really well organized,” my driver said to me. You think so? That go two blocks east on 9^th Avenue down under the bridge and to Second Street really got the better of me. I had no idea where I was, and so I did not find the Alliance Française and missed Kinne Starr’s performance, which I’d really wanted to see.

 

But odd things happen when you hand yourself over to circumstance without getting spooked, and so last night I stumbled upon one of the most mind-boggling Canadian multicultural experiences that I have possibly come across, leaving even this practiced defender of this great national idea wide-eyed and fascinated. You can’t make this country up, I tell you—though it might have been an early Lee Henderson scene I was looking at. (Have to take him there, come to think of it, he arrives today.)

 

Under the bridge behind the Palliser, at the corner of 10^th Avenue and 1^st Street, is Brava Sheesha. The corner restaurant looks like it might have started life as a soda bar and coffee shop, then been a bistro maybe. Now it’s a falafel joint, but with a difference, the light red and at the top of one wall, the flat screen TV that had drawn me in. I stepped into a room that was lit red as a bordello, and as if the habit was Western and learned early on, all the patrons were sitting at the tables along the walls and me, the newcomer, well I had to sit in the centre. But they weren’t cowboys, this lot. They were teenagers, some of them still carrying those big ridiculous paddles for feet. They were white and Filipino and Somalian and Nepali and Chinese, and not just boys but tables of young women, too. And what were they doing? Smoking hookahs and watching the hockey game. Montreal against Boston, and with a minute and a half to go Carey Price gives up one of the stupidest goals I have ever seen, having chased a puck behind the net that took a bounce off an uneven seam in the boards right to the front of the net and the Boston player there, and the score is 3-3 and there’s a tremendous trilly whoop of screams of disappointment from the table of Filipino girls, thought the white and the Chinese lads in front of me are too busy drawing smoke off the apple wood and filling their glasses with it.

 

“What kind of a restaurant is this?” I ask the Chinese waitress and her Arab-looking colleague at the cash.

“Middle Eastern,” she says.

“And what part of the Middle East are you from?” I ask the Arab other.

“I’m not,” she says, “I’m Albanian,” thrilled that I know something about the place because I’d actually been there.

 

Tanguay scores on the shootout. Now the Somalis are joining in the cheers.

 

So, let me recap: a Middle Eastern Shwarma joint in oil-rich Calgary, where the girl working the floor is Albanian and Somali and Chinese and Filipino kids with their baseball caps turned sideways are sharing the snaking mouthpieces of smoking hookahs with white kids rooting (to their inestimable credit) for les glorieux.

 

Which brings me back to Kinnie Starr, who’d performed before her afternoon session’s crowd the day before a piece that she said she’d written the previous night in her hotel room. So you’ll excuse me if, before missing her show at the Alliance Française, I’d taken the liberty of giving her a call and visiting Kinnie in her hotel-room cum studio where she read her new piece for me as she was in her routine of warming up. Her Canada is your Canada is mine—a place where you ask yourself where else but in this brilliant here could you possibly be.

Kinnie Starr actually performed this piece standing up.

There is good will in this country, and plenty of it.

October 15th 2008
By Noah Richler

There is good will in this country, and plenty of it. Last night Ronald Wright warned of neglecting aboriginal relations and today, at The Rozsa Centre at the University of Calgary—a splendid building where, appropriately, the airy lobby is like the interior of a sort of squat longhouse, with a glass wall of windows looking out onto the beauty of the campus in the fall—the case for such abuse was disproved. There is, in Canadian circles, an incredible and affecting appetite to hear native stories so, inevitably, this became the subject of debate.

Ronald Wright speaking at the Vertigo Theatre.

Kinnie Starr performed some of her very physical pieces of poetry, Drew Hayden Taylor delivered some of his trademark wry humour—his most recent work is a gothic novel, The Night Wanderer, about a vampire returning to his tribal home after centuries spent in Europe (vampires and Dracula figure large at this year’s festival, in the work of Chris Humphreys too)—and then Louise Halfe read in Cree and then in English.

Chris Humphreys, on the left, with beer and not blood.

(Apologies for being in the pic again, Ed.)

These three were remarkable, not just in their readings, but in their array of responses to issues of native representation and writing. Drew Hayden Taylor, with cocky insouciance, said that he writes for the money and never thinks, deliberately, about being funny. The humour, he said quite sensibly, must be organic and stem from the character. Later he paraphrased Thomas King, the novelist and author of The Truth About Stories—a wonderful treatise of the purpose of stories in native and North American life—who’d said that the person knocking at the front door and screaming an a polemic is unlikely to be let in; the person who arrives at the back door with the same issues and a joke, is likely to be let in for tea and stay all evening. Humour heals, said Drew Hayden Taylor. He writes because he wants to be a doctor.

Louise Halfe was the more lyrical, evidently concerned about many questions but typically forgiving and reaching out in her responses. When we say a writer is full of love for her characters, and her audience, we are describing this quality that Halfe (whose most recent volume of poetry, The Crooked Good, has been nominated for a couple of Saskatchewan Book Awards) has. Here is a woman who is able to say that “writing is like vomiting into a pail and throwing some seeds into the muck and seeing what beautiful things come out of it.”

 

The Saskatchewan Cree poet Louise Halfe.

“That’s some visual imagery,” said Taylor. Can’t compete with that.

But Kinnie Starr, the neophyte in the bunch, was in many ways the most febrile and urgently communicating of this accomplished trio—complaining, with cause, of the way that the native moniker brought a wave of good, but complacent attention that saw her, often, “shunted to some side stage. You would never see that with blacks.”

“It’s one stop-shopping,” said Drew.

Someone from the audience—well, okay, me—objected, saying that it was wrong to reprimand Canadians for being interested because they were native, when this was a sign of that tremendous desire for improvement of aboriginal status and relations in this country, one of a bunch of questions in a very lively discussion period.

And, of course, the Rosza was no side stage: the room was packed with as many people who had attended Ronald Wright and Deborah Ellis’s “main” event at the Vertigo Theatre last night. The literary world is a rich smorgasbord of offerings before a community with varied and vigorous appetites.

Onto the world of film, now.

WordFest Blog 2

On 9^th Avenue, the construction starts early and goes late and stops for no one. Calgary’s boom is uninterrupted by the crazy ride of oil prices or the mystery of sub-prime mortgages and the rescue of a trillion dollars conjured into the air like a magician’s trick. There is an election on, and it is a Tuesday, and so the streets are mostly quiet and the knock of hammers on wood echoes through the night.

But inside the Palliser, at the Glenbow and in a library at the University of Calgary, the WordFest has started, and they are quiet only with concentration. Richard Wagamese, the Ojibway novelist and author of the memoir For Joshua, is someone I regret not having interviewed for my own portrait of Canada, This is My Country, What’s Yours? He is here to present no one, but two books and his reading is the talk of the day. Oh, and it was Richard’s birthday, how about that?

Ojibway writer Richard Wagamese charmed his audience utterly

Wagamese was one of about twenty authors who attended “WordFeast,” the annual opening and fund-raising dinner—a gala, in effect, where writers, very much “ordinary working people,” mix with interested patrons in a convivial and excited atmosphere. There is booze, there is grub, though I did not hear one complaint about subsidy. At my own table, where I had the special good fortune of being seated next to the vivacious Newfoundland novelist Donna Morrissey, the talk was about Fort McMurray and the crazy lives being lived there, and whether or not the archetypal Canadian experience of the company town is still in people’s communal memory. Keith McCandlish, the affable geologist said not. I said it was. Morrissey, who’d doffed her shoes and curled her legs on the seat beneath her like a dancer, could have put an end to the debate as her own new novel, What They Wanted, reaches from Newfoundland to the oil rigs of Alberta, and is proof not just that our way of working, traveling the country and bringing stories back, is unchanged across generations—writers put these experiences in the communal vault of memory and storytelling—but also that writers are vital to ordinary working people, are ordinary working people, and not, as the second-time Prime Minister preparing his speech across the street had alleged, in Saskatoon, somehow the enemy.

Of course maybe she said nothing because, far too anally retentive, when I pointed out that Keith and his neighbour, the chef Walter, were spoiling the boy-girl arrangement, they got up and switched seats and the gender arrangement was unchanged. “Who has the ovaries?” Morrissey asked. “It’s a Calgary joke,” I told her. Later, Keith assured me that his geologist’s pick pin on his lapel was not the mark of a secret society, and we discussed the challenges that the influx of workers posed to Fort McMurray’s infrastructure and whether or not these hard-working folk voted.

Which is when everybody at the table realized they’d forgotten to vote and rushed out for ten minutes.

Just kidding, folks.

Literary festivals take a lot of planning and the prescience of Anne Green and her team was such that this year’s program includes nine of the fifteen novelists long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction and three of the five who made it to the shortlist.

Festival Director Anne Green.

The most glamorous and charming of the short-listed three was, without a doubt, Alberta’s own Marina Endicott, whose second novel Good to a Fault is causing waves and is published by Calgary’s new Freehand Press. Endicott has a wonderfully firm but placid manner in person, and that assurance is also in her prose. She speaks with Lane, Joseph Boyden and Nino Ricci Wednesday night at the Showcase event at the Vertigo Theatre, sure to be an event.

Patrick Lane

The sexiest stockings, however, were worn by the wonderful and extremely beautiful Cree poet, Louise Halfe. (In literary circles, writers tend to be sheepish about such comment, as if detracts from their fine critical faculties—until, of course, they let loose on the page). Halfe told the audience, by way of Anne Green, that “I’m a Cree, I’m a Canadian, and I live in a straw-bale house in Saskatchewan, and that’s all you need to know about me,” though you should also know she buys her stockings in Ottawa. Go figure.

Neatly skipping the night’s big spending part (listen, I’m a writer, I don’t have a thousand dollars to pony up to so that you can listen to my mates), I slipped out from the auction part of the evening, one that certainly appeared to start very healthily, and down the street to the Vertigo Theatre where Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress and now What is America? and Deborah Ellis, the extraordinary writer of children—and I mean “of,” is there any other writer in North America who has so touchingly and effectively adopted their political cause?—were speaking. Wright was careful to point out that his book was not an anti-American diatribe but a piece of interpretive history with lessons for Canada vis-à-vis aboriginal relations, especially. He even spoke, guardedly, of improvement in the United States, explaining Americans had dealt with the memory of the Civil War, “the only piece of history they take seriously”) and, through Barack Obama, with race, though this was not yet the case with the situation of natives (if only because their virtual genocide means “there are far fewer of them.”)

Ronald Wright, author of What is America?

Ellis, in her understated way, was utterly magnetic, and her new book, Off to War, Voices of Soldier’s Children, shows that the offspring of our military are another forgotten constituency. She has that most important writer’s facet, an ear, and she has it in abundance—for the children of American and Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq (yes, we too, are fighting in Iraq) whom she sought out and whose stories, anxieties and aspirations she has so articulately expressed. And she had it for a keen audience, too, in the quiet of concentration in the Vertigo Theatre, and thrilled in the long lineups for books, afterwards.

Deborah Ellis

And across the street, at the Telus Convention Centre, the Conservatives were celebrating a war of another kind. And the hammers would start again in the morning.

These are Interesting Times

These are interesting times. Next Tuesday, with what must now seem like bravura, Director Anne Green and the WordFest team will gather patrons and the first bunch of writers flying in from disparate parts for the 13th version of the Calgary literary festival and the ‘WordFeast’ that, each year, begins it. I’ve been. The fella from Encana at whose table I was sitting had his mom with him and was a gentleman and a sport-bought copies of my book, This is My Country What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, for everyone at the table. You see? Big doesn’t have to be bad.

At least Anne didn’t call the party a ‘gala’, invoking all the opprobrium heaped on the arts by our Prime Minister in remarks he may well be regretting that very election night evening. I can remember the days, not so long ago, when there was sufficiently little difference between Liberal and Conservative supporters that they’d gather and watch the election results in the same room. Elections were like a dull hockey match. Not so this one, rife with issues and the volatility of the elections coincidence with market drama worldwide.

In Canada, for the moment, we largely stand by and watch-the unfolding in the United States, especially, our partner in trade … and debate. Events here and around the globe, from our present government’s dismissive attitude towards arts and culture to the ongoing war in Afghanistan, mean that this is likely to be one of the most politically-enlivened WordFests of recent years-and the opening night event (at 8.30 pm at the Vertigo Theatre Centre Studio) should prove a terrific way in. Ronald Wright is the novelist and essayist whose Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress (House of Anansi), were such a success. In his new book, What is America? A Short History of the New World Order (Knopf Canada), Wright has picked up on many of the themes that made his Massey Lectures bestselling, and crafted an impassioned polemic about the destructive foundations of the New World and the darker side of our neighbour and the nation that is the free world’s troubled leader. He’ll be sharing the stage with the extraordinary Deborah Ellis, author of The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and now Off to War: Voices of Soldier’s Children (all Groundwood), another of the occasional books she does chronicling the experiences and anxieties of affected children with the sensitivity that comes from having been a social worker for so long. Ellis is remarkably selfless. She has given all the royalties from her Parvana Trilogy to the NGO Rights and Democracy totaling, to date, over half a million dollars. This will be a debate to attend, before heading home or to the bars to find out which of our political parties will be at the helm for these troubled times’ denouement. Get a ticket, but make sure you exercise your privileged democratic right-we’ll be reminded, on the night, of just what privileges we know, I’m sure-and vote.