VIWF

Last night I attended my first intimate evening – there is one each night of the festival. If you have a chance, do go. In fact, if you see this on Saturday, stop reading and get in the car. You can still get to Granville Island in time for An Intimate Evening with Aminatta Forna. The audience will be full of other authors, because the buzz amongst writers at the festival this week is that Aminatta is a writer to watch. 

In any case, last night I attended An Intimate Evening with David Adams Richards. I have long admired Richards' work. I have to say I read very little literary fiction – you may have noticed from my posts this week that crime fiction is more my thing. But I have read most of Richards’ books. He is a master at writing about the motivation behind people’s actions, and that is something every crime fiction writer needs to understand. His stories of everyday people and the choices they make, or are forced to make because of the circumstances in their lives, are utterly compelling, and completely heart-wrenching.

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When asked to choose a few events to blog about at VIWF, I looked at the list and felt quite at sea. I didn’t know most of the authors and there seemed to be so many choices I didn’t know where to start. But then I noticed Rich With History. “Some novels can be set anywhere,” said the blurb, and suddenly I remembered a little girl. A little girl, on her knees with the scratchy carpet digging in, head cocked sideways to more easily read the titles of the books, scouring the library shelves for pages that told of faraway places, stories that told of lives lived long ago. I remembered how her favourite thing to do was to slip into the fabric of a tale set in a place so foreign and fascinating to her, the feeling she got when she finished a historical novel, like she’d just awoken from a dream, how she loved anything that took her far away from the place and the time she knew so well. I remembered that little girl well.

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It is nothing short of intimidating when every single one of your fellow bloggers is either a good twenty years older than you, has a university degree, is a published author, or all three. (Or has 100 dresses. Kudos to Dina Del Bucchia!)

I went to my first Writers Festival event last night and was the youngest in the audience by about twenty years, save for a kid who looked to be about nine. (We bonded.) There seems to be a large age gap between the audience and me. So, I’ve decided that I am not going to try to sound intellectual or more intelligent than I am, to try to keep up with the people who have more experience and probably better things to say than I do, or to give an especially insightful analysis of the events that I go to. I’m just going to give my view as a young adult. I am a writer and a teenager in a culture which can’t seem to reconcile these two images – but I think that combined they can give quite an interesting perspective on the events I go to at the Writers Festival.

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I arrived in Vancouver this afternoon one hour before the rain. Walking over the Granville Street Bridge I could see the VIWF venues nestled amongst the markets and art galleries and the nautical supply stores, ready to welcome readers and book lovers and some of today’s finest writers from around the globe.

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