Sam & Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen

When two creative rock stars join forces, great books happen. Author Mac Barnett and artist Jon Klassen previously collaborated on the delightful picture book Extra Yarn. Their latest creation is the playful and subversive Sam & Dave Dig a Hole. It's about two boys doing what kids like, accompanied by their dog who appears to know more than they do.

Readers know more too. Barnett plays the straight man here with the words.
   "When should we stop digging?" asked Sam.
   "We are on a mission," said Dave.
   "We won't stop digging until we find something spectacular."

Klassen's illustrations provide both the real story and the humorous contrast with the text. The earth shown in cross-section reveals that the boys decide to change directions every time they get close to treasure (increasingly massive gemstones, a bone).

Sharp readers will spot the differences when the boys return home empty-handed. The surreal ending makes Sam & Dave Dig a Hole satisfying for all ages.

Look for other wonderful picture books by these talented guys, including Chloe and the Lion (Mac Barnett & Adam Rex), House Held Up by Trees (Ted Kooser & Jon Klassen) and my all-time favourite, I Want My Hat Back (Jon Klassen).

Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

I'm not a big fan of straight psychological horror, but mix black humour with creepiness and I'm hooked. Author Grady Hendrix hits the perfect satirical note with Horrorstor. Bizarre acts of destruction have been noticed by the opening shift at an American box store that sells Ikea knockoffs. A handful of employees are conscripted to stay overnight to find out what's going on. It's a night from hell. And it's funny too.

The book is designed to look like an Ikea catalogue. Each chapter starts with some pseudo-Swedish type of furniture, getting more and more odd as the novel progresses. It's irresistible.

Readalikes: Then We Came to the End (Joshua Ferris); The Blondes (Emily Schultz); Worst. Person. Ever. (Douglas Coupland); Afterlife with Archie (Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa); Zombies Calling (Faith Erin Hicks).

"Unwind on the cushion-firm mattress as this elegantly designed wheeled stretcher transfers you to the destination of your choice. Whether it's a fast-paced trip to an urgent care center or a more leisurely cruise to the coroner's office, GURNE delivers you in style and comfort" 

Dublin Impac Longlist: So Much Good Stuff!

When the folks at the Dublin Impac Literary Award say "long" they mean it. Their longlist announced today contains 142 nominees from 39 countries. I'm always excited to see what's on this list because:

• Finding out about new books and authors, especially from other parts of the world
• Seeing which of my favourites are included
• Reminder of great books that I've already read
• Nominations are all from libraries
• Big money prize (100,000 euros) celebrates literary endeavour

Two books that caught my eye are by Australian Indigenous authors:
Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright. (I reviewed Wright's Carpentaria here.) I hope that these are available in Canada, because I want to read them now!

It was good to be reminded of a couple of other titles that I've been meaning to read for a long time: On Sal Mal Lane by the fabulous Ru Freeman and For Sure by Canadian France Daigle. (Note to self: less time on twitter = more time to read books.)

I noticed that two books have single letter titles: S by Doug Dorst and K by Bernardo Kucinski. Interesting. Surely it isn't often that a book gets that kind of title.

The book that intrigues me most based on title alone: Mr. Darwin's Gardener by Kristina Carlson (because Charles Darwin and horticulture).

The book covers that most attracted me: The Humans by Matt Haig (because font and dog looking at night sky) and Love Letters of the Angels of Death by Jennifer Quist (because magpies).

Here are some excellent titles on the list that I've previously reviewed:

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Life after Life by Kate Atkinson
Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood
The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Harvest by Jim Crace
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
Eyrie by Tim Winton
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanigahara

There are a bunch of other books on the list that I've read and haven't reviewed, so the Dublin Impac longlist is also a kick in the pants reminding me to write my thoughts on this blog before moving on to another book. Aside from Instructions for a Heatwave, these are all titles that I listened to in audiobook format. Every one of them is worthwhile:

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
The Son by Philipp Meyer
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If you're looking for something new to read, check out the Impac list. Pick your favourites and see if they make the shortlist that will be announced in April 2015.

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg

British artist Isabel Greenberg has made a fresh, witty and charming tale out of ancient mythology and her own imagination: The Encyclopedia of Early Earth.

"Readers! This book is not a real encyclopedia!" -from the back cover.

It's about a storyteller from the land of Nord and his series of adventures as he travels the globe in search of a missing part of himself. Meanwhile, BirdMan and his two children - the Ravens - look on from their perch in the heavens. It's told in graphic novel format with striking linocut-style images.

First panel in the book. How could I not immediately fall in love with a book that starts with mitten love?

The story of historical events depends on who is doing the storytelling. (Note the high five in background.)

The Master Bootlicker made me laugh...

Another panel that made me laugh. (God's reaction to prayer: "What the bloody hell is that noise?")

This panel is from Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Blood (Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang, Tony Akins). It was pure serendipity that I read this immediately following The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, and found this reference to Bird Man / Bird God. The thing that prompted me to re-read the New 52 Wonder Woman series is the news that a new creative team is taking over the writing: Meredith and David Finch. Looking forward to what they'll do!

To see more of Isabel Greenberg's delightful art, check out her website: http://isabelnecessary.com/

Readalikes: Mouse Bird Snake Wolf (David Almond & Dave McKean); The Odyssey (Gareth Hinds).

Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A.S. King

Every new book from A.S. King is reason for excitement. I know that I will find offbeat characters navigating this confounding world with wit and heart. Each one makes me feel that I'm encountering life in a new way. I am seduced every time.

Glory O'Brien's History of the Future begins with a quote from Walt Whitman: "The future is no more uncertain than the present."

"Prologue: The clan of the petrified bat

   So we drank it - the two of us. Ellie drank it first and acted like it tasted good. I followed. And it wasn't half bad.
   When we woke up the next morning, everything was different. We could see the future. We could see the past. We could see everything."

Yeah, so two teens on the cusp of adulthood mix a desiccated bat into beer and drink it. Then they start getting random visions of the future and the past whenever they look at people. That's the kind of crazy stuff that happens in A.S. King's novels. From then on, it's all really real.

Ellie grew up on the hippie commune across the road from Glory's house. All their lives, they have been best friends by default. Ellie has never talked to Glory about her mother.

When Glory was four, her mother committed suicide by sticking her head in an oven. Glory's father has never replaced that stove; they only eat microwaved meals at home.

Glory is now 17 and her aunt Amy still sends birthday cards with overly girly motifs.

  "Amy always had a way of going over the top because I told her I was a feminist when I was twelve, and she told Dad he'd brainwashed me into being some sort of half-boy.
   Which was bullshit. I was not a half-boy. I was still totally myself. I just wanted Aunt Amy to get paid as much as a man if ever she got off her lazy ass and got a job.
   Why did everyone mix up that word so much?"

Today on twitter I saw this:

In Glory O'Brien's History of the Future, A.S. King takes a dystopian crack at the ongoing equality debate. Glory foresees a federal Fair Pay Act being enacted 50 years in the future. It will require employers to pay women the same as men for performing the same jobs. (That's not the dystopian part!)

  "The loophole in the federal Fair pay Act will be simple. How can states make sure they won't have to pay women fairly? Make it illegal for women to work."

Whoa. Serious societal malfunction ahead. Meanwhile, Glory struggles to come up with a plan for her immediate future.

I loved this book to pieces. King is the ace of YA. You can't go wrong with any of her novels, including a couple that I've reviewed previously: Ask the Passengers and Please Forgive Vera Dietz.

The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier

The Night Gardener contains the most evil tree I've ever encountered in children's literature. J.K. Rowling's whomping willow, Tolkein's ents, Patrick Ness' yew in A Monster Calls, and Chris Grabenstein's oak in The Crossroads have nothing on the sourwood at the heart of Jonathan Auxier's cautionary tale. Even its dried leaves are scary!

Ever think it would be great to have your deepest desire fulfilled? Read this book and think twice!

Two Irish orphans are employed to serve a formerly-wealthy English family who live on a remote, creepy estate. The family is hiding a big secret. Mysterious things happen in the night. It's all dire warnings at the crossroads, disturbing dreams, black roots and ichor. Perfect for children in upper elementary school who love a scary story.

The Night Gardener comes in an attractive package and would make a good gift. The Canadian Puffin edition that I borrowed from the library has a metallic dust jacket, patterned endpapers (black leaves on grey), decorated chapter headings (more black leaves), and black edging on the outside edges of the pages. The three parts of the story (the classic gothic format) are separated by solid black pages. The book design does a great job of setting its ominous mood.

Readalikes: A Series of Unfortunate Events (Lemony Snicket); A Tale Dark and Grimm (Adam Gidwitz; Coraline (Neil Gaiman); and Into the Woods (Lyn Gardner).

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

It's number 1 on Amazon's top 100 books of 2014: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. I listened to this on audio in July and didn't blog about it then, even though I really liked it. Let's see how much I remember without referring to anyone's summary or reviews.

Two main themes stick with me: the impossibility of knowing what is going on in another person's head, and the insidiousness of racism in Western society.

The middle teenage daughter has died in a family with a Caucasian mother and a second-generation Chinese American father. What happened to her? Her death has widened the fractures in her parents' marriage, which was already under stress from thwarted ambitions and the absence of outside support. Will their relationship survive?

It's a story of loneliness and isolation. It's about accepting hard truths. It's a story of modern life. I'm glad the editors at Amazon recognized the power of this book.

P.S. The audiobook [Blackstone: 10 hours] is narrated by Cassandra Campbell. (I had to look that up.)

Fictional Lives During World War II: A List

Poppies, France - pastel on Canson Mi-Teintes paper - by Lindy Pratch

In honour of Remembrance Day, I put together a list of 10 novels set during World War II. War is an extraordinary, heartbreaking, exciting and horrible circumstance that tests our humanity. I love books that focus on character and setting, so that's what you'll find here. (The links will take you to longer, earlier reviews on my blog.)

Freddy's War by Judy Schultz
War's effects on soldiers as well as those on the home front are examined in this layered novel about a young man from Edmonton who is sent with the Winnipeg Grenadiers to Hong Kong in 1941. Lots of food writing in this one!

Tamar by Mal Peet
After her grandfather's suicide, a British teenager uncovers his secret involvement in a romantic triangle in wartime Netherlands. A nuanced look at the way war affects subsequent generations.

The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit
Poetically narrated in the collective voice of hundreds of women, who arrive perplexed in 1943 at a site in New Mexico where their husbands are working on a top-secret project.

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
This powerful novel threads together the lives of two families through five decades of world events, starting in 1945 when the atomic flash in Nagasaki permanently marked the pattern of a woman's kimono onto her back.

Half-blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Cranky Sid Griffiths, 82 years old in 1992, relates the events surrounding his time in a jazz band in the 1930s in Berlin, and the disappearance of his youngest bandmate, who was picked up by Nazi soldiers in Paris.

Once by Morris Gleitzman
A heart-wrenching tale for all ages about a Jewish child, left in a Catholic orphanage, who decides to search through Nazi-occupied Poland for his parents. See also the companion book, Then.

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
A lyrical, layered novel that begins with a small Polish boy, his family's only survivor, who is rescued from the Nazis by a Greek geologist. The pair eventually make their home in Canada.

Coventry by Helen Humphreys
Through the dramatic events on the night of November 14, 1940, two fire wardens on the roof of Coventry's cathedral become unlikely friends as they share the horrors of an extended bombing raid that destroys much of the city.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Friendship inspires extreme heroism when a young British pilot is captured by Germans in 1943 and made to write down the details of her mission. Very suspenseful!

B for Buster by Iain Lawrence
16-year-old Kak's idealism gradually turns to horror when he lies about his age in 1943 to enlist in the Canadian Air Force and becomes a wireless operator on night bombing raids over Germany.

She of the Mountains by Vivek Shraya

Edmonton-born author Vivek Shraya's complex exploration of queer identity in She of the Mountains layers Hindu mythology with contemporary life. Episodes from the life of Parvati, mother of the universe, alternate with scenes from the life of a South Asian boy coming of age in Canada.

I'll start with the book's striking design. Raymond Biesinger's stylized green and black artwork illustrates the text and emphasizes its quality of universality. Green is a colour of growth and transformation, so the bright green pages that divide the novel into sections also contribute a layer of symbolism.

Parvati is a goddess, yet she suffers in ways that humans understand: grieving over the death of her children; feeling conflicted loyalties; emotionally wounded by her husband Shiva. Her sections are told in first person, making her story fresh and immediate.

In her incarnation as the mortal Sati, Parvati yearns for blue-skinned Shiva:

"As the prayers continued, I gazed at the fire ahead, comforted by the only presence in the room that understood my burning sense of betrayal and disappointment.
[...]
Contemplating my misfortune, I became mesmerized by the streaks of blue in the flames until all I could see was blue.
Shiva! There you are! I knew you would come, I said. I stood up and walked into the fire, arms open. This was the end of my human life."

The contemporary sections are in third person, following an unnamed boy who grew up in a Hindu family in Edmonton. Gay is an invective used against him when he was too young to even understand the word. The way that bullying squashes human potential is made poignantly clear.

"[He] stopped seeking pleasure altogether. His world was reduced to bare necessity. Home was where he slept and ate, and school was where he learned.
He graduated from high school amorphous, his teenage body and its vast possibilities left on the unpaved field where it was first attacked."

At university, he comes out and and finds community at The Only Gay Bar in Edmonton. Then his life is once again in turmoil, because he falls in love with a woman. Bisexuality is not sanctioned. He is told: "Honey, we all liked girls at one point. But the Bi Highway always leads to Gaytown."

Shraya signs books at the University of Alberta,  Sept 2014

She has skin like his own and their shared browness is a revelation: "Falling in love with her brown had unexpectedly given his own skin new value, a new sheen."

"White was almost every interaction he had, and through this relentless exposure, he learned to value it, serve it, aspire to it, his white bedroom walls plastered with white famous faces. This was where the true power of white resided."

The new couple do not fit into the gay community, yet he cannot disavow the gay aspect of himself either.

"Who could they be outside their parents' homes? Who could they be outside of university? Maybe they would move to Vancouver; she loved the ocean, and he loved every city that wasn't Edmonton."

(I've heard that last sentiment more than a few times.)

Being human is a complicated and lonely affair. This short, sensitive novel is a fine example of the way we can reconcile contradictions and establish a sense of self-worth.

Companion reads (with links to my reviews): God Loves Hair is Vivek Shraya's first book; Ramayana: Divine Loophole by Sanjay Patel, for another brief and informal retelling from Indic mythology, combined with stylized art; The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruna, to get immersed in a longer retelling from Indic mythology; Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez, for another exploration of bisexuality.

Thank you to Arsenal Pulp Press for providing me with a review copy of She of the Mountains.

How to be both by Ali Smith

How to be both a girl and a boy.
How to be both sad and happy.
How to be both the surface image and the underpainting.
How to be both dead and alive.

Ali Smith's fresh and beautiful novel, How to be both, embraces contradictions.

It's one year after her mother's death and 16-year-old George is still grieving. She skips school to haunt London's National Gallery, to stand in front of one particular painting. It's by Francesco del Cossa, a 15th-century Italian artist whose fresco work captivated George's mother. The disembodied spirit of Francesco begins following George.

"Also, this girl is good at dance : I am enjoying some of the ways of this purgatorium now : one of its strangest is how its people dance by themselves in empty and music-less rooms and they do it by filling their ears with little blocks and swaying about to a silence, or to a noise smaller than the squee of a mosquito that comes through the little confessional grille in each of the blocks : the girl was doing a curving and jerking thing both, with the middle of her body, she went up then down then up again, sometimes so low down that it was a marvel to see her come back up again so quick, sometimes pivoting on one foot and sometimes on the other and sometimes on both with her knees bent then straightening into a sinuous undulate like a caterpillar getting the wings out of the caul, the new imago emerging from the random circumbendibus."

It was from her mother that George learned how to dance the twist. It is through her own inner resources and creative drive, with support from family and friends, that George learns to emerge from grief.

Smith is a master wordsmith. She knows "how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it / up-rising through the skin of it."

How to be both is divided into two parts, both called "one." They are intended to be read interchangeably: some editions start with George, some with Francesco. That aspect alone would make for a good book discussion. There are so many other, deeper things to ponder, like art, perception, and the intangible gifts we get from people we love. This book is a masterpiece.

Readalike: Fabrizio's Return (Mark Frutkin)

100 Crushes by Elisha Lim

Butches, sissies, and other gender-fluid folk: Canadian artist Elisha Lim showers love on them all in 100 Crushes. Queer people of colour are individually celebrated and given voice in Lim's single-panel illustrated essays. Simple outline sketch portraits, with added rich colours, are accompanied by hand-lettered text and surrounded with hand-drawn decorative frames.

100 Crushes contains selections from old and new serialized works. Gender expression, sexual orientation and pop culture are explored with dignity and appreciation for the beauty in diversity.

I had never before given much thought to the way the performance of masculinity shifts in relation to ethnicity and cultural backdrop. "100 Butches Number 12" moved to the West and was disconcerted to find that she didn't draw lesbian attention in the way she had in Singapore. Layers of emasculating Chinese stereotypes meant she had to seek out a new style: "I sport fur coats, sunglasses indoors, and bleached tips. Maybe the girls don't get it, but in time they will. Chinese men are sexy!"

Pee-wee Herman is the subject in one of the panels from "Sweetest Taboo: Memoirs of a Queer Child in the Eighties." As a child, Lim thought his show was terrifying and "wished that he would stop drawing so much attention to difference." Eventually, she recognized his courage and learned to love him for it.

Lim's interview with Rae Spoon (First Spring Grass Fire) is included in the section "They." Spoon says, "A nice life is when people get my pronoun right."

By sharing personal stories, 100 Crushes helps us to get things right.

Readalike: On Loving Women (Diane Obomsawin). BTW, Lim also did the cover art for Ivan Coyote's One in Every Crowd.

Check out Lim's website, where there's good stuff like God Loves Queers and bumblebees. I also like her brief (51 seconds) claymation film on YouTube: 100 Butches #9 Ruby. 

Vancouver Writers Fest Highlights 2014

The weather in Vancouver was
sunnier than the forecast predicted.

There were 100 authors included in the Vancouver Writers Fest and I was in heaven, surrounded by avid readers. For me, this year was all about the queer authors, even though I didn't get to a couple of my favourites: Shani Mootoo and Dionne Brand. Dare I complain of overabundance? Highlights include:

Ann-Marie MacDonald! She is razor sharp, smart and funny. Some (paraphrased) quotes:
"Everything I write is about truth coming out."
"I'm not going to be guilty of pretending that everything is roses and light."
"Comedy lights up the underworld, so you can see what you are scared of."
"Everyone has a personal abyss that opens at the darndest time. Mine is the produce aisle."
"Mrs. Dalloway haunts [Adult Onset], especially when she goes out to buy tulips."
My sweetie currently has dibs on MacDonald's latest novel, and I'm eager for my turn.

Lively conversation between Emma Donoghue and Sarah Waters (photo above) about writing historical fiction, and especially about the inclusion of real people or events. Waters disguised the sensational 1920s true crime that inspired Paying Guests by turning the heterosexual couple into lesbians. Donoghue stayed as close as possible to the facts in Frog Music, while inventing her own plausible solution to an unsolved true crime. When you've got a real woman who kept getting arrested for crossdressing, and who was murdered, there's no need to create someone more interesting. Asked if she isn't disturbing skeletons, Donoghue replied, "Yes, but in a dancing-skeleton-Day-of-the-Dead kind of way."

Michael Cho was the best surprise of the festival. I had expected to hear Cory Doctorow on a panel with Mariko Tamaki, but Cho was there instead. I had just finished reading Cho's fantastic graphic novel Shoplifter, and have been recommending it right and left. He talked about Toronto being a character in the book, which is one of the reasons I loved it. When asked about the challenge of writing a female protagonist, Cho explained that if he focussed on gender, the character would be a stereotype. Instead, he worked hard to make Corrina Park an individual. Another reason that Shoplifter hit me in the heart.

And while I'm on the subject of characters with heart, Mariko Tamaki talked about This One Summer, as well as Skim, one of my all-time favourite graphic novels. She showed a slide of Skim's original cover art (by Jillian Tamaki), which included the words: "This is the diary of Skim Dakota so fuck off." The publisher didn't go for that one.

Vancouver has the sea as well as the Writers Fest.

Characters are really important to me, so I paid close attention to authors who talked about this aspect of their creative process. Cristina Henriquez said, "There's no one immigration story" and "Latino is not a monolith culture." She began The Book of Unknown Americans when one sentence popped into her head -"We heard they were from Mexico"- and expanded her idea from there. Maylis de Kerangal talked about disguising herself by spreading out different small bits of herself into each of her many characters in Birth of a Bridge. Damon Galgut spoke about the contemplative pacing of his novel Arctic Summer, and the way he wanted to use that to mirror E.M. Forster's inner life. Nadia Bozak has placed a coyote/dog cross at the moral centre of her novel El Nino. Tom Rachman: "What is vital about literature is experiencing the world through lives different from one's own. (Yes!)

I saw Rabih Alameddine at a couple of events and I was smitten. I hadn't imagined that he would be impish and campy in person. He's the author of a book that thoroughly delighted me: An Unnecessary Woman. In the '80s, Alameddine was motivated to enter the conversation about AIDS because he didn't see his anger reflected in the gay novels being published then. (Note to self: read Alameddine's earlier works.) The book that made the greatest impression on him and gave him the idea that he could be a writer at all was Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, because it reflected a family much like his own. I believe this book was an influence for Shani Mootoo, also.

Tim Winton mentioned a similar experience. Coming from a working class background, he owes his greatest debt in becoming a writer to Huckleberry Finn and the way Samuel Clemens turned common folk's vernacular into poetry. Winton likes people who write about their own patch, like Michael Crummey. (Me too!) Winton said landscape is a character - a determinant - in his stories. "The ecological reality of a place determines what can come out of it." (There it is again. A reminder that the fiction I love has a strong sense of place.)

When asked how much of Eyrie is autobiographical, Winton said, "People are quick to conflate me with Keely, which is unfair. I've had the occasional hangover, but not a 30-pager." Another question from the audience was about the ambiguous ending of Eyrie. Winton: "I'm not much interested in closure... Life is not that neat." He said he doesn't believe in housekeeping for the reader. He also said, "I don't buy magical realism. I don't buy realism either. Life is confounding and strange."

Some of my ticket stubs...

I was surprised by how much of Heather O'Neill's fiction is autobiographical, according to her. When she was 7, her mother sent her to live with her father in Montreal... since he was no longer in jail. They lived in rubby apartments in the red light district."My dad was always giving me useless advice. Like, you can't keep a diary; that'll be used against you in court."

Michael Crummy talked about how place is connected with identity in Sweetland. He also said, "Everything I've ever written is elegy. I'm interested in cultural loss."

Three First Nations authors were together at one powerful event: Thomas King, Lee Maracle and Richard Wagamese. King said "I see a lot of empathy for Aboriginal people in Canada, but not a lot of knowledge about Aboriginal people." That's why he wrote The Inconvenient Indian. Wagamese: "The story of Canada is the story of her relationship with her native people."

Maracle said she lied to her grandpa when she was very small. He looked at her for a long time and then told her, "That's a good story. Now I'll tell you one." Over the course of one summer, she learned a lot from him about storytelling. He told her, "White people pay good money for beautiful lies." Mink is a trickster in Maracle's new novel, Celia's Song. (Maracle asked the audience to repeat after her: "Raven is NOT a trickster.") She said "Salish women are strong because our mothers raise us to look after families of 400 people, even though we don't live in longhouses anymore."

At the start of almost every event I attended, the host acknowledged that the Vancouver Writers Fest takes place on unceded Coast Salish territory. Thomas King said, "All art is political. Good writing is a blueprint for the imagination." Maracle joked: "I finally got old enough to justify being idle and then these kids started up Idle No More."

Entrance to Granville Island, under the bridge.

View from the top of the Granville Bridge, including the mural
on the cement plant, created by a pair of Brazilian artists.

The final event on Sunday evening was fittingly inspirational and entertaining. Jane Smiley and Colm Toibin were interviewed by the incomparable Bill Richardson. Hal Wake warned them before they came onstage that it had a metal mesh floor: "I hope no one is wearing high heels." Richardson, waving his hand through the curtain from offstage: "I am!"

Talking about the dark places stories can come from, Smiley said, "If you turn something into a story, any experience is worth it." When he was a small boy, Toibin liked a particular visitor because she brought sweets, but even more because "she never had anything good to say about anyone." He quickly learned that what mattered was the thing that people couldn't bring themselves to talk about. "It is our job, while alive, to notice as much as possible."

Both Smiley and Toibin derive artistic nourishment from visual art and music. They closed the evening with an a cappella rendition of Whisky in the Jar. Big hit! I enjoyed hearing Toibin so much that I plan to attend his speaking engagement in Edmonton later this month. [Of his many acclaimed books, I've reviewed Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary.]

I'm always sad when the festival ends and it's time to return home. But on the plus side, I have a wonderful stack of new books to read!