Lalo Espejo's blog

For people who are aspiring to be writers, Karen Connelly is not the kind of person you'd want to emulate, unless your goal is to collapse in a fit of self doubt and feelings of inadequacy. In some ways she seems almost impossibly accomplished, winning The Pat Lowther Prize for poetry when she was 21 for her first collection of poetry The Small Words in My Body. Then, at 24, just to one-up herself, she wins the Governor General's award for non-fiction staight out of the gate with her first book Touch of the Dragon: A Thai Journal.

In a society where teenagers find a failed internet connection to be a major disaster, what would an audience of high school kids make of a 12 year old girl having her hands cut off by soldiers, and living to tell the tale?

This was a question on my mind at the the event titled The Bite of the Mango which featured Mariatu Kamara in conversation with CBC radio's Kathryn Gretsinger, about her memoir as told to journalist Susan McClelland.

Mariatu and Kathryn

It was definitely arts night in Vancouver on October 1st – the film festival opened and that's always a big draw - but nothing could keep the Margaret Atwood fans away from the big event at St. Andrew's  - Wesley United. Actually, “big event” barely does it justice. It was sold out to the tune of  1100 people to hear Margaret Atwood in the role of Narrator, not author.

With an audience that size, it takes awhile to get everybody settled, and with every second past the official 7:30 start time, the restless anticipation grew thicker, like children waiting for their big reward. That was quite charming, because this demographic was definitely very grown up.

(Tim Matheson photo)

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 Writers Festival isn't just about coming out to see your favourite authors, but about discovering new ones,
whether that means new-new or just new to you. As a big fan of South African writer J.M. Coetzee and movies like Cry Freedom (oops, age-and-politics-betraying alert), I wanted to check out Damon Galgut's An intimate evening with, although word on this author is getting out since, as Mr. Galgut pointed out, the evening wasn't all that intimate with a near-full house at PTC on Tuesday night. The event got off to a great start...Galgut is theatre trained, so he's one of those writers who is a real pleasure to listen to as well. We were all quite captivated with a passage he was reading when an older gentleman in one of the front rows had a seizure. He turned out to be alright, but there was quite a commotion with the paramedics and abulance attendants all making an appearance. After he was carted off, with a friendly wave, the reading resumed. The author offered to cut the reading short to accommodate for the lost time, but the audience would have none of it. The passages he read were beautifully written and delivered with the intonations of a fine radio drama. I look forward to reading his books. I think I'll start with The Good Doctor, his Man Booker Prize nominated novel set in post-apartheid South Africa, and then move on to The Impostor, his latest.

This year's Writers Festival is an embarrassment of riches and I kicked it off at "Travels with my Family," just to see what's in store for the kids this year. David Homel and Marie-Louise Gay have a series of books based on trips they did with their children when they were little (they're in their twenties now). I can tell you this much: if you want to kick off a festival with a surfeit of kinetic energy, then a theatre full of 7 to ten year olds happy to be out of school for an afternoon is a damn good way to do it. Waiting for the authors to come out was like sitting in a giant popcorn machine, the room cracking and popping with excited children.