Festival Blog

Family Fugue...wait, what does that word even mean??!

That was the question on pretty much everybody's mind at the start of this event. The authors, and host Anne Giardini, couldn't do much to clear it up, finally deciding that whatever it is, the audience is about to witness a massive simultaneous one. In case you're still wondering, I urban-dictionaried it and got "A state which is entered after the mass consumption of a reality changing substance". Hmm...how does this relate to family-based literature? Who knows...

What a pleasure to sit in the presence of Brian Brett Sunday morning as he mixed short readings from Trauma Farm, his memoir of life on his Salt Spring Island farm, with additional stories and details of farm life and tough-minded criticism of agribusiness and factory farming. And Brett is a presence. A large, craggy-faced man, his powerful body wrapped in leather vest and unpretentious work clothes, he reminded me of a Yorkshire farmer, or following that genetic line farther back, a Viking. Brett's appearance is largely the result of testosterone treatment for Kallmann's Syndrome, as he tells us in his memoir Uproar's Your Only Music: "Over the years I have metamorphosed into a creature resembling my childhood biker pals." But Viking or biker, he is a gentle, voluble one, bubbling with mirth and enthusiasm as he shared vignettes of farmyard slapstick with the audience, before reading a final passage that was eloquent and moving in its affirmation of the connectedness of all living things.

Brian Brett 

As I sat eating dinner on 11th Avenue Sunday night I observed the lineup for the final event of this year's festival snake all the way from the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Broadway, down 10th, and down into the alley next to Vij's restaurant. I overhead the table next to me speculating what the attraction could be:

"Well," said the wife "they all look to be the same age group, all look well-educated, maybe it's a Simon and Garfunkel reunion, or perhaps there's some art movie retrospective at the Stanley."

The thing I hate about youth-targeted events is that the organizers and performers always try way too hard. They feel like to impress youth, they have to get into our mindset - they have to say words like 'cool' and 'hip' and while they're at it, why not throw in a few casual references to rap? The truth is, events like these are a total underestimation of us and our interests. We don't all speak like wangsters or quote Snoop Dogg on everything as adults seem to think.

Waiting for Peter to appear on stage Sunday night I couldn't help overhear a conversation between the ladies to my right.  One said to the other:  "I told my mother I was going to see Peter Mansbridge tonight.  She looked at me and said, ‘I wouldn't cross the street to see him!'"  Crotchety matters notwithstanding, a large number of people had crossed the street to see Peter Mansbridge and stood patiently in the cold rain for the Stanley Theatre's doors to open too.  Now we were all seated, waiting expectantly. A short intro by Hal Wake and another by Trudy Hofley from Scotia (Bank) Private Client Group, the sponsor of the event—and voilà!  The man himself.  My first thought of course was:  he looks and sounds exactly as he does on television.

In the passage Robert Arthur Alexie read from his novel, Porcupines and China Dolls, he puts us into a missionary ship in the far north. The ship is carrying away young Aboriginal children to residential school. Looking back to shore, a child sees the tiny black outlines of his parents, standing motionless, like statues. When the children arrive at the school, priests and nuns brusquely strip, wash, and shear them, as well as cover them with white delousing powder. The children's clothing and personal effects, the one comforting link with home, they burn. "Porcupines" are the spiky-headed boys after their hair has been shorn. "China dolls" are the girls, their hair left only slightly longer, faces dusted with the white powder. With these stark and evocative details, the haunting image of the parents on the shore, Alexie, in a short space, conveys more about the residential school experience than any number of more generic accounts in the mainstream media. As one member of the audience commented toward the end of the event, "White Canadians know with a small ‘k' about the residential school system, but they don't Know about it with a capital ‘K'." The key to Knowing is when we feel something in the guts. The specificity and intimacy of Alexie's written words, and the forthrightness and openness of his spoken ones, achieved that feeling for me, and probably for many in the audience.

7:50 p.m.  Ten minutes to show time.  I haven't spotted a single person I know.  Significance?  ( - ).  Spot Elizabeth Bachinsky.  Know her less than slightly from a brief period where we shared a common employer.  Notice she's in a dress, and has changed her hair.

Have never been to a Poetry Bash.  Haven't been to a poetry reading in what feels like a very long time, excepting two days ago.  I think that counts, bro.  Poetry=Poetry.  Bash=Party.  The bar is open and I do have a drink in hand.

Friday afternoon and back at the Granville Island Stage to catch up with four novelists — make that five including Merilyn Simonds, the show's moderator, to find out about the writing process, the creative spark that gets a writer writing, where it comes from and where it leads.  I'd heard a theatre staff member advise a couple of patrons entering the theatre to fill up "gaps" or empty seats rather than, supposedly, make new ones, as audiences tend to do, because the show was sold out.  Sold out!  I was impressed.  I couldn't help

Friday morning's Playing with Real People, featuring Thomas Trofimuk (Waiting for Columbus), Annabel Lyon (The Golden Mean) and Kate Braid (A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems) centered around a discussion of the process and challenges of writing historical fiction. Each of the books concerns real people - Christopher Columbus, Aristotle and Alexander the Great, and Glenn Gould. Though I'm currently in a can't-put-down rhythm with the other two books, I will admit that what drew me to this event was the opportunity to hear Kate Braid discuss how she came to write about Gould. I recently viewed the excellent Canadian documentary Genuis Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould at the Vancouver International Film Festival and discovering Braid's collection of poems a day later provided a necessary calm because, quite honestly, anything about Gould makes the author of this blog swoon, intensely.

I was thrown back to 1990 (also known as grade 5) yesterday. I sure didn't see it coming when I signed up to attend event #30 Science Fact and Science Fiction, with Jude Isabella (editor at Canada's only kid's science magazine YES mag) and Rochelle Strauss (science educator and author of One Well).