Not really, just always wanted an excuse to write that.

Also don't mean to be trite. Last night's Living with Death panel covered a range of possible emotions and experiences around death, dying and grief, and as one audience member put it later in the evening, we "didn't expect to hear so much laughter" at this event.

Audrey Niffenegger's books are literary in the true sense of the word—she counts Henry James and Virginia Woolf among her influences, and she structures her works according to very tight thematic constraints that resonate long after one has finished reading.

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.

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.

Gazebo: (noun)   \gə-ˈzē-(ˌ)bō

Etymology: perhaps from gaze + Latin -ebo (as in videbo I shall see)

I was late for Gazebo, though not so late as to miss the underwear dancers, (let me repeat that for emphasis: UNDERWEAR DANCERS) because I got stuck at the Rocksalt launch down at AGRO Cafe. I did get to see Maxine Gadd at the launch, a true living poetry legend, and meet actor Misha Collins, who plays Castiel on my favourite guilty pleasure, the CW's Supernatural. (Photos of both under the jump.)  Mr. Collins was very gracious and clever. He's also a published poet.

To my eternal disappointment, the promised nipple-piercing giveaway at Gazebo did not occur. I wanted to win. I really thought it was time to re-open that particular wound. Alas.


(left: Gazebo Go-Go dancer with host Billeh Nickerson)

It's 1994. Location: Calgary, Alberta (or Anytown, North America.) Pearl Jam is huge. So is grunge (before that whole Fred Perry thing). Kurt Cobain has killed himself, thus simultaneously sending thousands of teenagers into the depths of adolescent despair and ensuring his band's place in history will be forever tied to its lead singer's tragic early death. Rock and roll loves a good tragedy.

It is the nature of programmers and publishers to create order, sets, and means of categorization, and it is the nature of artists and writers to resist such rank ordering. So it was perhaps inevitable that a little controversy should erupt at Comings and Goings, an event that brought together four disparate writers under the rubric of "the immigrant experience." It occurred when moderator Anne Giardini asked Rawi Hage if he considered himself to be Canadian. Hage visibly bristled; "It's becoming an insulting question!" and a nervous frisson murmured through the crowd.

But it would be equally reductive to hold the entire evening up against that one moment. Because the experiences of coming and going are not just, as Giardini put it in her introduction, quintessentially Canadian, they are quintessentially human.

(left to right: Anne Giardini, Rawi Hage, Donna Morrissey, Gillian Slovo, Nam Le)

Family sagas. Oppressive environments. Bodies ill at ease or out of place or raging against their surroundings. These were but a few of the recurring themes at Grand Openings, the official opening event of the 21st Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival.