Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
If I’ve been sadly absent here—and I have been—it’s partly because this summer I’ve been extremely busy putting together the content for Kingston WritersFest’s web site. More than sixty-three authors are coming to share their work with us this season, including novelists Steven Heighton, Lisa Moore, Joan Thomas, Kathleen Winter, and Michael Winter; memoirists Karen Connelly and Iain Reid, and poets Joanne Page and John Steffler. Find the complete list on our Authors Page.
One of the perks of my job was that in composing profiles for each of our authors I got to know quite a lot about them and their upcoming books, as well as their reading habits. Fascinating stuff.
I’ll be appearing at Kingston WritersFest as moderator of an event called In Search of Memory, a conversation with Judy Fong Bates about her beautiful memoir, The Year of Finding Memory. I loved Judy’s novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café, and I’m just about to dive into the memoir now. Tickets to this event, and all others, are available at the Grand Theatre Box Office. Prices are very reasonable, but tickets are selling fast, so get yours soon!
Those of you who love to write should check out the Writers Studio—ten master classes with some of Canada’s best writers. I plan to attend as many of these as I can get into!
If you’re in Kingston or anywhere near it in late September, join us!
Tags: Appearances, Kingston WritersFest
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Monday, September 28th, 2009
Thanks to Merilyn Simonds, Jan Walter, and all the many volunteers at the Kingston WritersFest last weekend. The Festival was an overwhelming success, with huge, enthusiastic audiences for every event and happy writers. The venue is already booked for next year.
With Merilyn Simonds at the helm you can be sure that writers of creative nonfiction were well represented at the Festival. In particular, I enjoyed a panel moderated by Charlotte Gray on Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series. Mark Kingwell, Daniel Poliquin, and Jane Urquhart spoke brilliantly on their subjects (Glenn Gould, René Lévesque, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, respectively) but also on the art of biography itself.
The Extraordinary Canadians series, edited by John Raulston Saul, imposes strict length restrictions on its authors. All three at the WritersFest mentioned that early in the process, they began to think of what they were writing as extended essays, and that ultimately, this idea that they were writing essays liberated them from doomed attempts to encapsulate an entire life in forty to fifty thousand words. Instead, the form itself required – but also inspired – non-linear and highly personal interpretations. Structure arose organically from the themes that dominated their subjects’ lives, together with their need to cut through the many myths and presuppositions about these famous people. Each book in the series is therefore a dialogue of sorts between author and subject.
I liked this idea of essay-as-inspiration and look forward to reading the results.
Tags: Biography, Creative Nonfiction, Essays, Kingston WritersFest
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