Festival Blog

Could there be a better setting for a literary festival than Granville Island in autumn? (Rhetorical question; don't answer.)

With the breathtaking vista of fall leaves and False Creek in the background, VIWF hosted 69 events and almost one hundred authors (cribbing Lachlan's math) in less than a week. Incredible! There were some wonderful literary moments, some tense moments, some moving moments, and plenty of funny moments, but for me the strongest moment occurred during the couple of hours I spent at and but also, a tribute to David Foster Wallace, already well-covered textually by Lalo Espejo and aurally by Anu Sahota.

(Authors Anne Simpson, Patrick Lane, Daphne Marlatt, and moderator Genni Gunn)

The 2008 Writers Festival is over and, well, I'm a bit wiped.

(Author Russell Wangersky in conversation with Mark Forsythe)

As the audience was standing to leave following Burning Down the House the woman in front of me said, "I've been to eight events. This was the most riveting."

On Friday night, writers and readers congregated at the Granville Island Hotel for and but also - an evening of readings and reminicises in honour of writer David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in September.

Following last night's David Foster Wallace tribute, I had hoped to go straight home to bed with a hot water bottle and my new mackinaw lap robe, but as fellow blogger Nikki pointed out, it was only 11 pm and contrary to my preferred lifestyle, I am not eighty years old. Enlivened by the reminder, Nikki and I made a plucky dash to the hospitality suite of the Granville Island Hotel in search of conversation and cut vegetables. How nice to have found both, and Austin Clarke, too.

There was a last-minute event thrown together as a tribute to David Foster Wallace (DFW), who committed suicide in early September. Many local writers were greatly affected by the sudden loss of a man who was such an inspiration to many of us. His risk-taking, his outlandish scenarios and his trademark footnotes, featured in his fiction and non-fiction alike, gave many a writer the gumption to push for more. My first experience with DFW was an article in Harper's Magazine in 1996 called Shipping Out (renamed A supposedly funny thing I'll never do again in the subsequent essay collection), and I thought it was one of the smartest, funniest things I'd ever read in my life.

The poet Sharon Olds completely blew my mind this afternoon. She was interviewed by Hal Wake, the Festival artistic director. Their conversation ranged across writing and life, but it was something about Olds' presence, her humility and courage, which made you feel she was really letting you in. The audience, as you can imagine, was poet-heavy, and come of the questions dealt with process and craft. As a non-poet, I tend to find it amazing that anyone can write a poem at all (I have the same feeling sometimes when I'm watching baseball. Who are these people who can run, run, run, then catch the ball, then stop and throw the ball in such a way that someone can catch it?). Olds revealed, amazingly, that only one in about ten poems she writes ever sees the light of day. This may explain what seems to be her all-home-run books: the less-divine stuff has been weeded out.

(Moderator Kirk LaPointe, authors Sheng Xue, Qiu Xiaolong, and Ting‑xing Ye)

About two-thirds of the way through Chinese Puzzle a poignant moment occurred when all three panelists spoke of China as still being "home."

Questions about identity and appearance, and about how we make ourselves visible in the world, served as the touchstones for Wasserman & Co, where Linda Grant, Amitav Ghosh and Andrew Davidson read and discussed their work. Grant’s latest novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, is concerned with the meaning of clothing as identity, as camoflage, as tribal symbol. Davidson’s much-anticipated first novel, The Gargoyle, concerns a man who is burned over much of his body and loses the external symbol of himself,

My body refused any attempts to rouse it from sleep this morning, and I completely missed Beyond Atonement, for which I feel terrible. My latent Catholic guilt complex is happy, however, as now I must find some way to atone for this grevious literary error.