Prefaces & Afterwords

Poet Don McKay told the audience at Raw Material that when he was a young man he would “blast through the bush . . . inattentive to anything smaller than a moose.” Now he’s more likely to “pick up a pebble” and say, “tell me about yourself.” The other three writers on the panel, Jack Hodgins, Terence Young, and Charlotte Gray, suggested a similar smallness to some of what constitutes the raw material for their writing. The germinal seed for Hodgins’ latest novel, The Master of Happy Endings, was “a tiny item in an international paper,” in which a retired professor was looking to be adopted as someone’s tutor. The “little detail” that provided a spark for Young’s short story “Dream Vacation” was hearing about a student who’d had “a fortunate accident,” something not serious enough to incapacitate, but serious enough to warrant a substantial insurance settlement. Although popular historian Gray “works from the historical record,” and is thus forced to deal with a much larger pot of raw material than might be typical for the poet, novelist, or short story writer, “history is vast,” necessitating some careful selection on her part. In Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike, she plucks six individuals from the “long line of black ants,” the stampeders and others who made and remade the brutal journey through the Chilkoot Pass on their way to the supposed promised land where gold lay in river banks like “cheese in a sandwich.” In Gray’s view, a new and resonant telling of the story of the Klondike gold rush could emerge by imaginatively inhabiting a tiny fraction of the participants, rather than by employing the traditional sweeping or panoramic approach.

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I was almost late to An Intimate Evening with Andrea Levy because I’d just chaperoned two authors to the Cats Social House for a bite and a bevy. Earlier, at the opening reception, both women had been given purple orchids to pin to their dresses to signify their author status. We’d decided I was the chaperone only because I was corsage-less and they felt a bit like we were coming from a prom. When we left the Cat House (I like the shorthand) we tore off to our different events. I arrived at the PTC Studio to a buzzing packed house.

The woman in the seat next to me in the theatre introduced herself as Linda. I chatted with the pretty, older woman about the festival and what each of us was seeing. She was clearly excited to be there and, even though she didn’t look like the type to play hooky, she confessed that she planned to skip work on Friday morning to attend an event. She was a good reminder why the word “Readers” is now included in the festival’s name.

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