Pure Poetry at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

Olive Senior and John Glenday were the highlights among the six poets hosted by Billeh Nickerson at Friday’s Pure Poetry event. Saturday’s evening Poetry Bash has four of the same authors, but I preferred the Friday afternoon time slot mostly because of the venue, the Waterfront Theatre being so much more comfortable than Performance Works.

Olive Senior read from Shell, starting with a whimsical poem about ginep fruit. She also shared a sweet story about how the poem had inspired an 11-year-old girl to write a story. It was lovely to hear Senior’s Jamaican lilt and phrasing – “in two twos the tree grows.” Senior followed some lighter pieces with a layered poem covering 500 years of Caribbean history, starting with Columbus.

John Glenday said he “did lots of things wrong when I began writing poetry. All my poems were first drafts for two decades.” I don’t know if Apple Ghost is from that time, but I’m glad that he read the title poem, since it is one I am familiar with and like very much. Glenday’s approach to inspiration resonated with me, calling it the work of examining the world, not something that enters passively into an artist. “By examining the world, we breathe life into it.”

Glenday told little stories to introduce the origins of three poems from his newest collection, Grain. Did you know the can opener was invented 48 years after the invention of the tin can? “Tin” is a love poem that made the audience chuckle and then heave a collective sigh at the end. “St Orage” was inspired by a sign with too much space between the “t” and the “o.” The final poem was a result of repeated viewings of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast when Glenday’s son was ill – he retold the fairy tale backwards. I could have listened to this Scottish poet for another hour.

Gull wants my lunch.

Sachiko Murakami, originally from Vancouver, read poems from Rebuild about real estate entwined with the death of her father. She encouraged us to go to her projectrebuild.ca website to create for ourselves.

Sharon Thesen, another BC author, shared images from her childhood in Oyama Pink Shale – a time peopled by creatures like dogfish woman, and mummies who drove Ford F10 pick-up trucks.

American poet Fanny Howe read from Come and See, a collection about the catastrophes of the 20^th century from the perspective of a grandparent.

Martin Espada grew up in the projects in Brooklyn and his poems from The Trouble Ball draw on his Puerto Rican heritage. I especially liked the one about getting his tonsils out as a kid – the promised “you can have all the ice cream you want” was a huge disappointment, since the ice cream burned his raw throat afterwards. Espada’s delivery was powerful and he ended with a rousing poem of rebellion in honour of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Conversations with Bill at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

Some of the things I love about the writersfest have to do with the location, like taking the little ferry shuttle from English Bay over to Granville Island. We’ve been blessed with sunshine up until now, but it looks like there’ll be nothing but rain from here on.

False Creek Ferry

At the first event I attended today, Conversations with Bill, I was most excited to hear Kate Beaton but ended up being entranced (yet again) by Helen Oyeyemi. Three very different authors each had 30 minutes in the spotlight with the always charming Bill Richardson.

Helen Oyeyemi had a good rapport with Richardson, who recognized Mr. Fox and Mary Foxe in an English fairy tale collected by Joseph Jacobs – “Lady Mary was young and Lady Mary was fair” –  and Oyeyemi confirmed that these were stories she had grown up with. The Bluebeard stories bored her, however, because there wasn’t an explanation for why the husband killed his wives, plus she couldn’t relate to the moral that one should not be curious. I remembered my similar displeasure with Bluebeard as a child. Then I totally bonded with Oyeyemi’s dislike of Jane Eyre (creepy Mr. Rochester locking his wife in an attic). I hadn’t previously thought of it as a Bluebeard story. Anyway, Oyeyemi was gracious and well-spoken and I loved her.

Kate Beaton was not initially forthcoming with Richardson, but warmed up after a while. She had interesting things to say about publishing web comics as a full-time job – marketing t-shirts and prints as well as getting advertising revenue – since her comics are viewable free on the internet. Best was when she got talking about her passion for people in history; she got the audience laughing with her descriptions of Canadian historical figures. I admire her work but I didn't feel a need to join the long line-up to get her to sign the book I had bought. Check out Hark, a Vagrant online. (Beaton also gave a nice plug for Craig Thompson's Habibi. )

Barry Callaghan spoke about his stormy relationship with his famous father, Morley. He also read from his hilarious essay “Canadian Wry” written for Punch magazine to explain Canadians. (It is collected in Raise You Ten.) Callaghan’s anecdote about his disdain for Robertson Davies was candid and amusing, especially since he called him a windbag… the pot calling the kettle black?

It all added up to 90 minutes of eclectic entertainment.

The Forest and the Trees at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival

Fall colours on Granville Island

Charlotte Gill stopped counting after she had planted one million trees. She worked 17 seasons as a tree planter and describes the job as one that gives a person full contact with the natural world. I’m really looking forward to reading her memoir, Eating Dirt. At the writersfest yesterday, Gill said she has learned that people can’t put back a forest; only time can do that. About a thousand years. Canada still has 1.5 million square miles of tree cover remaining and Gill would like us to view this as a planetary treasure.

West Coast art on Granville Island

Andrew Nikiforuk talked about a different kind of logging company, one that’s been around for 300 million years: bark beetles. These small creatures – "tree managers without PhDs" – are part of the renewal process. Like all beetles, they are the world’s garbage men. I like the way Nikiforuk compared a tree to a well-defended fortress and bark beetles to medieval knights and peasants, swarming the castle. Humans have aided bark beetles in their work through logging practices that remove biodiversity in forest make-up and through decades of fire suppression in parks. Nikoforuk explained why the government response to the bark beetles has probably been more destructive than the beetles themselves.

Book table at writersfest event

Nikiforuk’s Empire of the Beetle is sure to be a fascinating read. He talked about scientists working with sound to “stress the hell out of the beetle.” They tried Rush Limbaugh and Guns & Roses, but found that it was low frequency amplified insect sounds that completely changed bark beetle behaviour, such as cannibalizing each other and not laying eggs. Another solution Nikiforuk offers is community-based ownership of forests, rather than ownership or lease by multinationals. Trees are the lungs of our planet and as their numbers go down, so does the oxygen in the air we breathe.

Word! at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival

This morning as I waited in line to get into The Forest and the Trees, I chatted with a woman who said the Wednesday Word! event was the best out of three festival events she had seen so far. The spoken word event is so popular that it is offered twice and still sells out early; the advance ticket sales are the main reason that I'm a member of the festival. Anyway, we had tix for the Thursday time slot and I felt totally energized after the event.

Brendan McLeod hosted Tanya Davis, Zaccheus Jackson and Sheri-D Wilson. Brendan asked each poet which they would rather have, a talking teddy bear or the ability to shoot staples from their fingers. That should give you an idea of the general wackiness and fun.

Sheri-D had pushed the envelope too far for some people at the event on Wednesday, so she was forbidden to do her panty poem today. She advised us to watch it on YouTube. Instead, Sheri-D performed a powerful piece about the murder of Reena Virk. Zaccheus told heartwrenching stories about homelessness and substance abuse. Tanya's autobiographical stories were disarmingly funny. Check out her How to Be Alone video online.

Grand Openings at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival

I am in Vancouver for a week at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival, staying at the lovely Sylvia Hotel on English Bay. The weather on Tuesday was gloriously sunny, so my companions and I spent the day walking in Stanley Park before attending the Grand Openings event on Granville Island last night. The lineup of seven authors was stellar, as is usual at this festival, but Cate Kennedy and Helen Oyeyemi were the authors I was most excited to hear.

Kennedy read from two new books, including a heartbreaking excerpt from the novel The World Beneath, about a woman with Alzheimer's, in which her husband and son collude in denying her alcoholism to a doctor. Kennedy chose a poem (from A Taste of River Water) that was a story in itself, and she mentioned that her poems are always like that. I’d love to hear more, but I think that book will be hard to find in Canada. I looked at The World Beneath at the festival bookstore and was horrified to read one of the quotes on the back (from Library Journal) comparing her writing to Jodi Picoult! If you dislike Picoult’s style as much as I do, believe me that Kennedy is nothing like that. She makes keen observations about human interactions and chooses her words carefully. (See my review of Dark Roots.) It was too bad that the festival bookstore didn't have many copies of Kennedy's books available, because the supply had already run out by the intermission.

I’m halfway through Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox at the moment – enjoying it very much – and can attest that it is even more delightful to hear it read aloud. The narrative is a sly twist on Bluebeard in which an author meets his match in a character come to life. (See also my review of The Icarus Girl.)

Dermot Healy told us he would speak slowly on account of his Irish accent. He read a very funny part from Long Time, No See about an infestation of ghost chickens.

David Bezmozgis also made me chuckle. He read about a Russian Jewish refugee worker in Italy who had a special talent – that of finding suitable places to copulate – in The Free World.

Guy Vanderhaeghe seemed nervous and spent a lot of time setting the scene for A Good Man. His excerpt, about Sitting Bull arriving one evening into a Sioux camp after defeating Custer, could have stood on its own. It reminded me of Fools Crow by James Welch. Based on my enjoyment of The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing (as well as Welch’s book), I’ll add Vanderhaeghe’s new book to my TBR pile.

Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter is about genocide in Cambodia, so it was considerate of her to read from a side story in that novel. She said her account of an artist who was losing language because of a neurological disorder was based on a woman from North Vancouver.

Lloyd Jones told us about a blind German man who lives with a companion from New Zealand and a nurse from Tunisia. I’ve really enjoyed a couple of his earlier novels (Mister Pip and The Book of Fame) and will give this new one (Hand Me Down World) a chance too, but either the part he chose wasn't particularly compelling or I was just too tired to take in the last reading of the evening.

I plan to keep blogging through the rest of the festival. The next events I'll attend are on Thursday (The Forest and the Trees and Word!) so today is another day to enjoy the beautiful city of Vancouver.

The Reinvention of Love by Helen Humphreys

"He is my neighbour. We live two doors apart on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He is also my dear friend. I am also in love with his wife."

In Paris in the 1820s, when he was 22, Charles Sainte-Beuve favourably reviewed one of Victor Hugo's early books, a collection of poetry. As a result, Hugo invited Sainte-Beuve to his home and they became good friends.

(Another poet, who did not fare so well under Sainte-Beuve's criticism, came into the newspaper office to challenge the reviewer to a duel, shouting "Choose your weapon." Sainte-Beuve leaned across his desk, staring him down: "I choose spelling. You're dead.")

Sainte-Beuve was a remarkable individual, an intersex person who made public his love for Hugo's wife, Adele, when he published a book of poems about their affair - without changing any names. Canadian author Helen Humphreys writes in her author's note that "with few exceptions, the events in my novel mirror actual events. Where possible, I have used the words of Sainte-Beuve, Adele, and George Sand." The words may come from historical sources, but Humphreys is the one who has gathered them together and shaped the telling, using the distinctive first person voices of Charles, Adele and Adele's youngest daughter.

I really loved this book and think the best way to convey the magic of the prose is through quotes, as in this moment when the friendship between Charles and Adele shifts to romance:

"She was standing in front of the big mirror in the drawing room and her back was to me. The combs weren't staying in place. She was impatiently trying to stab her hair into submission when a comb fell out and her black hair cascaded down her back. It was that movement - that soft tumble, softer than water falling from a fountain - that released something in me. I cried out, just a small noise, as a child might make in her sleep. Adele turned and saw me watching her, and it was as though we had just discovered each other for the first time. I cannot fully explain it. All I know is that I could not roll my feelings back up, twist them into position and secure them into a place of propriety. I was undone. Nothing could be the same."

Charles' use of the pronoun "her" to refer to himself (as a sleeping child) is interesting here. He otherwise seems to consider himself male, although he switches to dresses and a female persona, Charlotte, in order to draw less attention when meeting up with Adele.

Why would the mother of four children and wife of such a publicly-known writer risk having an affair? Humphreys explores this question with a sensitive portrayal of Adele. "Victor loves me. I know this to be true. But Victor loves me for himself, and Charles loves me for myself, and the difference between those two is so astonishing that I don't know how to reconcile them."

The Reinvention of Love is a fascinating and intimate slice of people's lives during several turbulent decades. Highly recommended to fans of literary historical fiction.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

This big, juicy cross between Harry Potter, the Narnia books and Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry has adult themes and is aimed at grown-up readers. Quentin Coldlake is the central protagonist, but as with Harry Potter, he is surrounded by a cohort of friends attending the same college of magic.

I listened to the Penguin audiobook [17 hours] narrated by Mark Bramhall. There's a lot of dialogue, which moves things right along. I liked that Bramhall had different voices for each character, since this helped to keep straight who was who.

Grossman's word choices irked me at times, as when he called Quentin's parents their usual glassine selves (when "glassy" would have made more sense in the context) or saying that studying spells was "backbreaking" work. Another minor annoyance was mention of two Inuit students who came from the same reservation in Saskatchewan - either they were Cree or from some other First Nation (not Inuit), or else they were from a territory, not a reservation, and definitely not Saskatchewan.

Quibbles aside, The Magicians is an engrossing fantasy quest adventure that evokes books I loved when I was younger. I've just received an email notice that it's my turn for the digital audiobook of the sequel, The Magician King.