Features

 

 

Vancouver Writers Fest Draws

Some of the World’s Best

International Writers & Readers Festival, October 16-21
By Regan Sarah Taylor

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~ es is an unfortunate stereotype about

writers long-held by the general public: they are a
moody, sullen, solitary, anti-social lot who prefer
books to human company and never have any fun.
Thank goodness for the people who organize the
Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival.
They are doing their utmost to dispel that myth. The
festival, which wrapped up its 20" year last Sunday,
is remarkable for how much fun it is. If the events

I managed to attend were any indication, artistic
director Hal Wake and company are doing their best
to make this five-day stretch of readings and panel
discussions on Granville Island as loose and lively

as possible. There are no dour, stuffy readings here;
no painfully awkward Q&A sessions; no egotistical
authors monopolizing the podium. The daytime events
are quick and breezy, generally led by seasoned hosts.
The evening events see the emcees encouraging
everyone to go have another drink. It’s a surprisingly
good time for something so literary. I could only see
a handful of this year’s 61 events, and these were the
best:

STS Cy co ty

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GAWK, Billeh Nickerson’s event at the festival,

is apparently famous for selling out every year.
Nickerson is a Vancouver poet who has worn many
other hats— including editor of literary magazines
Event and PRISM and editor of the anthology
Seminal: The Anthology Canada’s Gay Male Poets.
He’s also well known around town for his talents

as an inimitable emcee; I’ve seen at least one book
launch where, as host, he outshone the performance
of the author with the book to sell. He handpicks the
readers at this annual event, and it’s clear his taste
runs toward the saucy, the risqué, and the young and
up-and-coming. Almost all of the writers here were
well under forty, which is unusual in this business.

This was by far the best of the events I caught
this year, not least because of the scantily-clad
male go-go dancers who gyrated on pedestals to
the strains of Arthur Russell before the show and
during intermission. Although at least one of the three
dancers looked mortified to be there, the addition
of a little naked flesh onto the scene certainly set an
appropriate tone for the evening. Nickerson issued
a tongue-in-cheek warning in his preamble that
audience members who couldn’t stomach sex scenes
and swearing should go home. In some cases, the
writers present chose to read their most scandalous
work—as in the case of local author Jenn Farrell,
who offered “the dirtiest story in [her] book,” a tale of
a phone-sex wage-slave rapidly losing interest in her
job.

Others were exotic in less obvious ways: Victoria’s
Steven Price read poems about Harry Houdini —
although he did begin with a penis joke directed at
Nickerson—Calgarian Andrew Wedderburn read,
from his book The Milk Chicken Bomb, a series of
weird, childlike musings on things like giant ants,
lemonade recipes, and the proper way to acquire a
bank loan for the purchase of a submarine. Local
slam poet Brendan McLeod was manic and hilarious
reading from The Convictions of Leonard McKinley,
which won last year’s Three-Day Novel Contest

 

and is told from the point of view of a hyperactive
teenager who is obsessed with God.

Though his book is neither dirty nor funny,
the most riveting reader of the night was David
Chariandy. His Governor General’s Award-
nominated novel Soucouyant, about a man dealing
with his immigrant mother’s dementia, is well
deserving of the praise. Chariandy wasn’t even
originally on the program—he replaced an absent
Maureen Medved on the bill—but he was the
brightest of a remarkably bright bunch. The only low
note was the last reader, Montrealer Catherine Kidd,
who went on far too long with her grating, irritating
spoken-word piece “Human Fish” and, surprisingly
for someone “best known as a performance poet,”
didn’t seem to know how to use a microphone.

Gift of the Gab, Friday morning’s sold-out

event, was not a reading so much as a showcase

for 4 trio of writers luckily possessed of goofy,
charming personalities. Ontarian Ray Robertson,
Newfoundland’s Michael Winter, and Irish dynamo
Nuala O’Faolain sat and answered questions from a
jovial Vicki Gabereau in front of a very appreciative,
largely middle-aged audience.

Ostensibly these three authors were gathered
together because of their shared ability to tell an
amusing story. Winter and O’Faolain were noticeably
more adept at this than Robertson (aided in part,
perhaps, by their respective accents); they bantered
wittily in place of reading excerpts from the books
they were there to promote, while Robertson read a
fraction too long from his Jack Kerouac homage/
personal memoir What Happened Later. The book
seems like an entertaining—if a little too earnest—
appreciation of the “King of the Beats,” and the
sections focusing on Robertson’s own childhood
in small-town Ontario were both more original and
easier to listen to. While Jack Kerouac makes for
interesting enough subject matter, it seems to me
there has been far too much written on him already.
The parts we heard from What Happened Later were
decent enough, but Robertson was clearly the most
forgettable of the three participants.

Michael Winter told a story about falling into
a giant garbage incinerator while doing home
renovations in Newfoundland, and promised that
the incident would make its way into a future novel.
Winter’s known for his unabashed refusal to separate
fact from fiction. As he put it: “I make stuff up, and
then I live it.” I was mildly disappointed that Winter
did not in fact read anything from his newest book,
The Architects are Here, which recently appeared
on the long-list for this year’s Giller Prize. A second
anecdote, in which he recounted his adolescent
obsession with CBC radio host Augusta LaPaix,
more than made up for the lack of excerpt. Winter
is among Canada’s best young writers and I hope he
makes it back to the festival, and back onto the Giller
list, someday.

Gabereau, playing host with cheerful spontaneity,
wisely saved journalist Nuala O’Faolain for last.

I’d never heard of O’Faolain before sitting down in
the Granville Island Stage for this event, and I’m
unlikely to forget her now. She began with a long rant