LITERAL DIVERSITY
As festival grows, so do efforts to include everyone
Toronto book festival shines light on under-represented communities’ contributions to literature,
Up in the northwest end of Toronto next weekend — May 3 to 6 — you’ll find one of the most exciting literary events in town. Now heading into its third annual event, the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), a festival that focuses on literary diversity, has been making waves. Thirty authors — from Omar El Akkad to Kim Thuy to Sharon Bala — will appear, and the festival has just announced a multi-year partnership with Audible. Going into this year’s FOLD, the Star sat down with founder Jael Richardson:
Are you where you wanted to be at this point?
I’m surprised at how well it’s been received on some levels. We get a lot of support, a lot of excitement and enthusiasm; There have been book people who said they thought it was for diverse people (only). For change to really happen, we have to get everybody seeing this as a festival that they can attend and want to attend.
What new communities are you connecting with this year?
Literary events have not typically paid attention to the deaf community in particular, and so this year we’re going to have captions. And we’re talking with the deaf community about having almost like a track specifically for the deaf community.
There’s been a lot of talk about accessibility, something important to a festival dedicated to diversity. What challenges have you faced in ensuring the FOLD is accessible?
We were in the really beautiful museum space and it fits probably just the right amount of people who come to our events. But if we go over that, it’s more difficult to move around. In city hall, there’s just more lane space and more room to remove chairs for wheelchair access and more room to have screens for captioning. So you have to prioritize accessibility instead of thinking about things such as esthetics and if the room is interesting and if it has historic meaning. All of those things have to be a distant second.
There’s also financial accessibility ...
We want to keep our all-access passes at $110 or under and our day passes at about $50. This year, we have something called “patron passes” so people could buy a pass and it would be gifted to somebody else.
Tell me about the innovations you’re most thrilled with introducing this year.
The genre fiction stuff for sure: having a panel on suspense is a new thing for us. Pitch Perfect is a new thing, an extension of one of our most popular sessions, which is the Writer’s Hub, (where) writers can go around and talk to editors or agents. This year, we added another layer in that people submitted writing and then (meet) with editors them one on one. We’re allowing people to do it even if they can’t come to the festival, so eight of those sessions will be through Skype.
If an attendee had to choose only one or two things, what would you suggest? What’s the must-see?
Without a question, Tanya Talaga’s book Seven Fallen Feath
ers is a really critical conversation, and also Robin Maynard’s piece on policing Black lives ... they represent two conversations we don’t pay nearly enough attention to. Everything else is a close second (laughs). This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For more information on the FOLD or to get tickets, check them out at www.thefoldcanada.org or on Twitter at @TheFold_.