Celebrating the stories that unite us
This year’s festival explores the ties that bind us to each other, to storytelling and to our environment
The Word On The Street festival is, of course, about books. But it’s also about broader ideas and concepts, which inform its programming. When considering the state of the world in 2021, festival organizers came up with a theme that highlights the importance of connection and interconnectivity in stories — and in the industry as a whole.
“In a year like 2021, we all have a greater awareness of our interdependence and interconnectivity,” says Rebecca Diem, digital strategy and communications manager of The Word On The Street Toronto. After a period of isolation during the COVID -19 pandemic, the festival is exploring how we want our relationships — as a city and a society — to evolve going forward.
Every spring, WOTS’s programming team visits all publishers in Canada to get a “secret sneak peek of what’s coming,” says Diem. “We pinpoint some exciting conversations that would be interesting for the community as a whole, and this year we wanted to make sure the festival continued to capture a diverse range of voices for Canada.”
So, festival organizers created a program advisory committee composed of authors and industry leaders from across Canada — including Nancy Cooper from Strong Nations Publishing, Syrian Canadian author Danny Ramadan, novelist Kerri Sakamoto, writer/editor Terese Mason Pierre and the Star’s Deborah Dundas — to provide insight into the state of publishing in 2021.
“One of the suggestions was highlighting the Anishinaabe idea of intentional relations between beings, places and ideas,” says Diem. Using that concept, the programming team looked at how to design the festival around the idea of connection and interconnectivity.
For example, a festival highlight will be a feature conversation with bestselling author Eden Robinson about Return of the Trickster, the final book of her acclaimed Trickster Trilogy — about the interconnectedness of a community, and “what it means to be part of a legacy that you don’t necessarily want,” says Diem. “[Robinson] explores that really, really well.”
Then there are panels such as Dreams of Home: Stories of Community & Connection, with authors Uzma Jalaluddin, Louisa Onomé and Sarah Suk, about the idea of home and how it shows up in their writing. Jalaluddin is an upand-coming Canadian author whose book, Hana Khan Carries On, is being turned into a miniseries by Mindy Kaling ’s production company, Kaling International, and Amazon Studios.
The festival theme is about more than the connections between people, it explores the ideas and concepts that govern our lives. One panel, So Funny It Hurts, is an intentional exploration of the use of humour as a way of working through grief and trauma.
“What we’re asking our audience to do this year … is to reflect on the relationship between the author and the story they’re telling, the story and the reader, and also between the community of readers,” says Diem.
That’s where the concept of intentional relationships comes back into it: “Now we have this greater awareness, so how do we move forward with intentional relationships and intentional connections?” says Diem. “So, it’s not just, ‘Go buy this book,’ but how does this story transform the world we live in just by existing? How is our city and our country transformed by the stories of the people who live here?”