Hearing Things

You can only stand in a Festival queue for so long before you get a keen sense of why it's called the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival. The majority of people around me last night were readers. They had come to see Comings and Goings, featuring Rawi Hage, Nam Le, Donna Morrissey and Gillian Slovo. But I did not stir when Rawi Hage hurried into the Waterfront Theatre, nor when I caught sight of Donna Morrissey's poppy red lipstick. No, it wasn't the writers I was interested in, it was the readers.

I set upon them.

As fellow Festival blogger Nikki Reimer has already noted, the evening's conversation - which aimed to explore the theme of "the immigrant experience" in relation to statelessness and exile - was not without its tense moments. Afterwards, I asked one audience member what she thought of the discussion.

When I turned to look for another interviewee, I saw that the crowd had lost its bloom, there was no one in sight. It was 10 p.m. on Granville Island, afterall.