Lachlan Murray's blog

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 

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.

I like attending the Festival's Grand Openings event because in a relatively short space of time I can experience a range of authors, some of whom I might not have the time or inclination to seek out individually. And inclination is a funny thing. What piques our initial interest in one author and not another? A book's title, cover, typeface, or quality of paper and binding? A novel's setting? An author's background, his or her picture, even an author's name? Such seemingly arbitrary and idiosyncratic reasons can underlie that first and perhaps quickly abandoned dalliance. It must drive publishers, and agents, and writers batty.

Amit Chaudhuri 

Several years ago, I was at a literary evening hosted by a young Canadian short story writer. During her opening remarks the writer said, "We love our Alice," but said so in the context of introducing other young and newly published writers. The implication was that the ‘beloved' status of Alice Munro could also be a way to nudge her aside—an undertaking in which Munro herself has collaborated, considering her flirtation with retirement a few years ago, and her more recent withdrawal from this year's Giller Prize competition. You've had your success, now it's our turn, could possibly be a sentiment harboured by more than one generation of Canadian writers as Munro seems to have only grown stronger and more prolific with passing years. Veneration as a strategy for acknowledging a particular artist and body of work as dominant, while also relegating them to the safe confines of ‘national treasure'.

(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."

(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."

If there were any John McCain sympathizers in Wednesday night's Festival audience at Performance Works they were being very quiet.

Less than two weeks before the American election, and the in some ways astounding possibility that the United States will elect its first black president, A Great and Terrible Nation brought together four American writers to give their perspective on that country of extremes to the south of us. The event began with Peter Matthiessen, George Pelecanos, Jonathan Raban, and Meg Wolitzer each speaking individually about the question "what makes the United States great and terrible?" A panel discussion followed, moderated by UBC English professor and expatriate American Jerry Wasserman, and the writers also read short passages from their latest books.

Words I jotted down during "Grand Openings," the event that over the last few years has launched the Writers Festival by presenting half a dozen or more writers in rapid succession: cold, bleak, stark, dark, surreal, heresy, angry, blacked out, transgression, screaming, siege, bullied. So why did I have a great time and chastise myself once again for not knowing more about a writer—or in this case several—introduced to me by the Festival? Because I also wrote down these words: funny, visceral, detail, dream, appealing, voice, lyrical, elegiac, love.

The two groups of words do not exist in isolation. I loved how cold, bleak, stark, and dark—how alone—Rawi Hage makes a winter's night walk through downtown Montreal feel, both for the protagonist of Cockroach, a Lebanese immigrant struggling with alienation and exploitation, and for us. I've walked those walks, in Toronto and Chicago and elsewhere, and the defamiliarization that results from seeing the North American winter city through the lens of Hage's narrator heightens and intensifies—ironically, makes more pleasurable—my own experience.

Ha-RASS-ment or HAR-ass-ment? Do you loan somebody money, or lend him or her money? Temperchure or tem-per-a-ture? (I think I know the answer to that last one.) An interesting moment during the Writers Festival annual fundraising gala dinner on Monday night came when host Gloria Macarenko amused the guests with her account of the CBC's "Media Broadcast Advisor". Have you ever wondered how news readers nail the pronunciation of those multisyllabic, consonant-heavy names—linguistic porcupines—that often accompany news stories?