Dynamo

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.

The tension implied by divergent terms was evident in the work of all the evening's authors, a dynamo at the core of writing that does not allow itself, or its readers, to follow familiar and comfortable paths. Jonathan Raban spins some very funny and acerbic variations on Tad Zachary's anger in Surveillance, but we get the sense of a darkly unattractive character infected by the darkly unattractive society surrounding him. Lorna Goodison's vision in From Harvey River, a memoir of her mother's life in rural Jamaica, is much gentler, but it is not easy or soft, the image of white chiggers burrowing into the inhabitants' feet, or the question "Where had good manners got any black man?", undercutting the romantic and sentimental stereotypes that northern, industrial nations often propagate regarding "the tropics."

Similarly, the dreamlike Afghanistan that Nadeem Aslam conjures in The Wasted Vigil he also periodically shatters with the chopping blades of Comanche helicopters and rumbling B-52s. Tension pervades the passage George Pelecanos read from The Turnaround, in which three white teenagers, two of them intent on trouble, drive into a poor black neighbourhood, but as the three roll slowly toward the incident that will change a number of lives, the third character drifts into a reverie of the young woman he loves, the contrast between impending violence and emotional vulnerability significantly magnifying the dimensions of the writing.

Donna Morrissey's spectacular, visceral evocation of the sights, smells, vibrations and screaming machinery of an Alberta oil field running full bore was given added power by the equally effective language describing the female narrator's emotional response to this male world of violent conquest, the elegiac and the lyrical making the brutal more brutal. And Shane Koyczan understands how tension and the release of tension—fundamental to the making of music—works in poetry and prose as well, the searing pain of a bully's attack more extreme than even the bully intended spiraling upward into an out-of-body experience and the momentary freedom it provides.