POWER OF THE PAGE
City lit up by lit fests
Fawnda Mithrush worked hard between shovelled bites of Thanksgiving stuffing, convincing non-reading family and friends about the wonders cram-packed into Edmonton’s annual non-fiction literary festival.
The executive director of LitFest can find something for anyone who’ll listen. Over the next 11 days, writers will be in Edmonton to discuss farming and saving food, pedestrian life and topics that have fallen off the radar in the election campaign. If you prefer to laugh, you could do worse than asking standup comedian Charles Demers to explain his beef with Kelsey Grammer.
“I was hawking the festival pass all weekend,” Mithrush says. “It’s a really good opportunity to grow a reading list, if you don’t have one already.”
It’s not the only opportunity to pad out that list, either. For the fifth year in a row, Edmonton’s LitFest coincides with STARFest, the St. Albert Public Library’s annual fall readers’ festival, which begins Friday with its eight-event, 13-day festival, mostly featuring fiction writers.
StarFest includes astronaut Chris Hadfield and two Canada Reads winners, Kim Thuy and Heather O’Neill, alongside Clair Cameron, Susan Juby, Sandra Gulland and Nick Cutter (a.k.a. Craig Davidson). For the first time, this year’s festival featured events outside of the usual rotation, including “appetizer” Lawrence Hill, who came in September, and “dessert” Lori Lansens, who speaks in November, says STARFest’s Heather Dolman.
“They’re all great authors,” Dolman said. “Quite frankly, any of the events, it’s just a pleasure to listen to them and have them share.”
The festival has grown, Dolman notes. In earlier years, STARFest liberally “borrowed” authors from LitFest, supplemented by other festivals in Calgary and Vancouver. This year, the only common link is Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors, the 2014 Giller Prize winner. Michaels will talk with local music writers next Friday at LitFest, then discuss fiction in St. Albert the next night.
Future years could see STARFest move further out from the library’s too-small Forsyth Hall and the too-big Arden Theatre, used this year for Hill and Hadfield. Future STARFests could alight at the Enjoy Centre, St. Albert Inn or some other venue, if a sweet spot matching size and budget can be found.
At LitFest, which features an array of venues, there’s other dishes in the literary feast. For those with more interest in cultural criticism, there’s Welsh satirist Jon Ronson, who headlines at the Winspear on Tuesday to talk about online shaming. Vancouver-based Ivan E. Coyote will talk about the gender binary and the use of the pronoun “they.” And for history buffs, Rosemary Sullivan will discuss Josef Stalin’s only daughter, who immigrated to North America and died in rural Wisconsin (and is the topic of Sullivan’s newest book, Stalin’s Daughter). We asked Mithrush about other highlights at this year’s LitFest.
Q What’s different this year?
A: I guess I’m different this year. It’s my first year that I’ve programmed the festival. I was hired last year a month before the festival, so the previous executive director had gone through all the programming. So last year, when I actually got to my desk in September, it was mostly a matter of “add water, run the festival.” This year, as I got to see how the events came together, I was able to focus on what we really wanted to be important at the events. Do we want the conversation to be important; do we want the authors reading from the books? I think the best events at LitFest that I have seen have actually just been about the good conversations that get started between an author and the audience.
We have quite a bit of First Nations and aboriginal programming this year. Frankly, it wasn’t even deliberate. There’s just really great books out there that deal with First Nations topics. We’re really happy to have Wab Kinew and Drew Hayden Taylor coming to town. Also, we have another event with a lot of women who are writing about the murdered and missing indigenous women and that issue, so there’s a whole panel on that topic.
Q You mention audience interaction. What does that mean?
A Maybe we can colourfully animate the content of the books. Will Ferguson, for example, is coming with a book called Road Trip to Rwanda. And we’ve actually booked a group of Rwandan dancers to perform at the event who are Edmonton based. It was just kind of a lucky thing that happened — we have this fantastic group, Izuba dancers.
We don’t want to just be a book festival and sit around and read books. We want to show people what the content of the books is about. Another book like that is Born to Walk by Dan Rubinstein, a former Edmontonian, who has written a book about the history of pedestrianism. And we’re doing a walking tour with him that’s going to end in a pub downtown.
Q You’ve got an election night event, Ballots, Beers, and a Bunch of Writers at the Garneau Theatre.
A When we kind of figured out through the programming that the election was going to happen right in the middle of the festival, I approached David Cheoros at Metro Cinema and said we want to do some kind of live-streaming event of the election results because God knows, nobody else wants to do anything that night besides focus on the election. It’s important to have diverse voices. And we want to be able to hear about things that affect everyone.