Bishop-Gwyn: Franca wanted to be remembered

Just a few days until the finalists for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction meet at the Harbourfront Centre for a round table discussion. Today, Carol Bishop-Gwyn tells us the story behind the story of Celia Franca.

Carol Bishop-Gwyn, author of The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca:

(c) Gordon Fulton

We’ve reached an epoch in our history where we need to claim our cultural pioneers before it’s too late. Charles Taylor Prize winner Charles Foran did this with his biography of writer Mordecai Richler. As a dance historian, it only made sense to capture Celia Franca, founding artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada.

Celia Franca as a topic dropped into my lap—I felt it was meant to be. Journalist Frank Rasky was in the midst of writing her biography in the early 1990s but died before completing the project. His hundreds of hours of taped interviews, deposited in the dance archives Dance Collection Danse along with his often combative interviews with Franca herself proved invaluable to me. The fact that she donated a vast amount of material including some very revealing items in notebooks, diaries and letters to Canada’s national repository of history, Library and Archives Canada, also lead me to believe that she wanted to be remembered, albeit as she, herself, would have wished to be presented.

There were times during the writing of the book when I wondered if Celia was out there stirring things up. Sitting with friends one day, a bird I’d never seen before landed close by in a bush. I was told it was a cowbird, which lays its eggs in other bird’s nests.  Recently someone had compared Celia Franca to a cowbird. Was that bird watching me?

All five finalists for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction will participate in a panel discussion at Authors at Harbourfront Centre on Wednesday, February 27.

Let’s talk, Toronto

By Edward Keenan

The city of Toronto has been through a fascinating couple of years: having apparently turned its back on David Miller-style urbanism for the disgruntled populism of Rob Ford, we proceeded to see Ford’s proposals generate huge levels of outrage that turned city council against him. Facing an election campaign kicking off in about a year, we’re at a bit of a crossroads as a city.

Can we heal the divisions—between drivers and cyclists, downtown and suburbs, taxpayer and citizen—that have become such a regular part of our discourse? Is there any hope of addressing issues such as transit expansion, housing affordability and smart development that will make every neighbourhood in the city better? What do we even hope to be as a city? It seems like a conversation we need to have—and one too important to leave to politicians. So we’re asking smart people from across Toronto to start asking such questions, and to start proposing solutions, large and small, to challenges we face in redefining our growing global metropolis in the early years of the 21st century.

Join Edward Keenan, author of Some Great Idea, and Ivor Tossell, author of The Gift of Ford, for Toronto Talks: The Future of Our City on February 20.

The Super Bowl of book clubs

© Maayan Ziv

By Ayesha Chatterjee

Words and waterfalls. Already I’m mixing them up. Why code is poetry and poetry, code. I had my first IFOA reading in Markham on Tuesday evening and as we drove up from Toronto, Marjorie Celona and Bert Archer and I talked about a jigsaw puzzle of things that in my mind are now blended in with the memory of the colours of the trees along the Don Valley Parkway, vivid even in the grey of the autumn afternoon.

I felt like a star that night, like J-Lo, with my own personal assistant, a charming young high school student named Ivy who had thought of everything, even an extra pen for me to sign with.  I don’t think I will ever get used to reading in public, always surprised and humbled by the audience’s kindness, the small conversations afterwards, the exchanges of commonalities.

And then Niagara yesterday: the white force of water drenching us all with its indifferent power. The photographs I took of the Horseshoe Falls from the Maid of the Mist look strangely alien, as though I’d taken them on a distant planet with everyone dressed in blue spacesuits. In almost all of them, a seagull circles, smoothly curved, the opposite of the thing with feathers that Dickinson wrote of.

We were introduced by the Mayor of Markham on Tuesday night, who said that the IFOA  was the Super Bowl of book clubs. I rather like that. I’ve never thought of myself as a football player before.

Click here for more about Chatterjee’s IFOA events.

Winter reading rituals

By Anakana Schofield

I’m not long returned from the Brooklyn Book Festival where the weather was beautifully warm and I had to pace about wearing shorts. Last weekend I travelled to the Victoria Writers Festival and Wordstock, the Portland writers festival, and tonight have just arrived home from the launch of the Vancouver Writers Fest.

I remember all four recent festivals by the weather and conversations. In New York I had to turn on the air conditioner. In Portland I had to turn on the heater and yesterday night I could not sleep because it was so windy here in Vancouver.

I love the fall season in Vancouver and pay close attention to the wind and rain. It signals for me the start of my winter reading rituals. The weather closing in, the sky turning grey means it’s time to turn in to the page.

All year I turn to the page, but in winter I embrace the page amid additional attention to physical comfort.

To establish any ritual it’s necessary to repeat it. It’s not a ritual if you only ever do it once. My reading rituals are particularly employed and important when it’s raining. As it’s regularly raining in Vancouver, I am committed.

Comfort is vital. I adopted two couches from a generous couch shedder because I deemed we needed a couch-per-reading-person (in this case two). I have invested in four hot water bottles because I deemed we needed two per person. I bought my son the softest blanket in the world which I subsequently commandeered and he has yet to raise a loud protest since he has disappeared into the vortex of video gaming. Quilts are very important in our apartment, they are dragged up and down stairs and sometimes found under the kitchen table and are thus umbilically connected to winter reading rituals. Pillows and cushions are critical.

Liquids. Liquid comfort matters during a winter reading ritual. In this case: teapot, teacups, milk jug, glass of hot port have proved trojan company. For smaller participants I admit to providing endless bags of chips and token chopped apples.

Finally I have found fuzzy or warm socks a most important part of my winter reading ritual. If my feet are cold or itchy it’s very distracting to my reading.

Once comfort is established and the weather has been noted, this liberates my brain and reading begins.

A stack of books is always within arms reach of the couch because I practice inter-reading. I might wish to digest a paragraph by reading a different work after it, or I might just dig in for the long haul with the same text.

Walks are taken only to refill hot water bottles or the teapot. Generally the plan is not to get up. Naps are sometimes taken at the book, but this isn’t encouraged. The teapot is the weapon against slumber. The curtains are always open, darkness is welcome but the curtains stay open because the weather doing its thing outside is a pleasing visual carnival.

Titles vary, but I would not necessarily reread Madame Bovary in winter. She is usually reserved for the wooden chair on Grandma’s deck.

Schofield will share her debut novel, Malarky, at IFOA. For more about Schofield and her events, click here.

You have to keep moving

© Tobias Lundqvist

By Mons Kallentoft

I am currently editing two books, my next crime novel and an autobiographical book on gastronomy called Food Junkie.

My crime stories are translated to 26 languages.

But the gastronomy book is a much harder sell for my agent, which is a pity, since it is in my opinion the best and most important book I have ever written.

But that’s how the book business works. Better to focus on something we know will work than charter into unknown territory.

But as a writer that is pretty much the most dangerous thing you can do.

Artistically you have to keep moving, challenging yourself, inventing your art over and over again, otherwise you will be finished, sooner than later.

I am writing this in Stockholm, and if everything goes as planned I will be in Toronto this time next week.

Looking forward very much to meeting a lot of nice, interesting people, enjoying the city, and check out some restaurants.

One advice: two books in a year is one too many. At least for me.

Stressful.

Especially if you focus on quality as I try to do.

Click here for more about Kallentoft, author of Autumn Killing, at IFOA.

Shoreline

By Kristel Thornell

© Joi Ong

In the first Clarice Beckett landscape I saw, two trams were passing one another in a milky, bluish haze. The simple scene was somehow recognizably of the early twentieth century, and yet timeless. I had never heard of this Australian, who lived from 1887 to 1935, working for most of the interwar years with breathtaking stamina—despite much criticism for not conforming to the artistic fashions of the day—before she was largely forgotten for decades. Beckett’s paintings are often resolutely spare. They show straightforward stretches of city and suburban road, seaside views, country fields. What is involving and even transcendent about them? Her wondrous restraint and instinct for the moody merging of tones generate atmospheres that are resonant without being quite fathomable. A haunting airiness. The viewer’s imagination is teased beyond those crepuscular streets, or those plain telegraph poles against a rainy sky and sea, the landscapes seeming to only barely belong to the physical world.

Beckett’s quietly heady paintings strike me as images of reverie, exalted introspection, contained yearning. I fancied they also represented the shoreline mingling history and fantasy where the writing of Night Street occurred. I knew I couldn’t have written a novel that kept strict faith with biographical fact. It felt necessary to try to hold the stark facts of her life in a gaze as soft-focused as the one that produced some of the most dreamlike, open-ended meditations on landscape in Australian art.

For more about Thornell and her appearance at IFOA, click here.

Five Questions with… Ayesha Chatterjee

Poet Ayesha Chatterjee will appear at IFOA on Sunday, October 28. You can also catch her at IFOA Markham on October 23.

© Maayan Ziv

IFOA: You were born in India and have lived in Germany, the USA and now Canada. How does place function in your poetry?

Chatterjee: My poetry tends to be visual, so I use place as a prop a lot. The colours and fabric tend to vary, depending on where the poem is set. I’m also a different person in different countries and I think that comes through in my poetry as well.

IFOA: Did you write as a child, and if so what did you write?

Chatterjee: I’ve been “writing” since I was about 6 years old. I’d dictate to my mother; silly little stories about Bobby the Battery and my little kitten and things like that. I started writing poetry when I was about nine. I found poetry easier than prose, it came to me more naturally (which is why I always wanted to be a novelist). I was very shy about having other people read my poems, though. My parents would ask me to show my latest “work” to their friends and I’d leave the room while they were reading it, because I couldn’t bear to hear them talking about it.

IFOA: Tell us about one poet whose work has influenced your own.

Chatterjee: Emily Dickinson. Which is odd, because I had never even heard of her until I was at university in America. There isn’t a single extraneous word in Dickinson’s poetry. It’s like haiku. She can write a universe in a sentence.

IFOA: What are your favourite and least favourite words – today, at least?

Chatterjee: Obfuscate and viral in that order.

IFOA: Finish this sentence: If I had only known that…

Chatterjee: I’d have a ginger cat who was a thief, perhaps I wouldn’t have named him MaCavity. Would that have changed him?

IFOA: Bonus question: International Festival of Authors in one word:

Chatterjee: Cornucopia.

For more about Chatterjee, visit ayeshachatterjee.com or readings. org.

On Virtual Proximity and Self-Promotion

“The distance between writers and readers has vanished.”

By Aga Maksimowska

When I was a kid growing up in communist Poland, my mother used to read Astrid Lindgren’s The Bullerbyn Children books to me. I was obsessed with the brothers Lasse and Bosse from the time I could say little more than their names to the time I invented my own stories set in the tiny Swedish village.

Imagine if I had had a computer, and if the Internet existed. And if my literary hero had a Facebook account, or her own web site. Imagine also that the eight-year-old me, in my Gdańsk apartment, sent a personal message outlining my love and appreciation of Lindgren’s work, and that very e-mail was opened moments later by the 78-year-old in her Stockholm apartment: well, that would be unreal.

Writers used to be a mystery to readers. They were revered, as many are nowadays, but revered from afar. Today, the distance between writers and readers has vanished. Writers are available to their devotees for closer inspection on social media pages, open for e-mail exchanges or book club discussions via Skype.

Is this virtual closeness better, or worse? Would Astrid Lindgren hold the same firm place in my imagination if I were able to follow her on Twitter?

I don’t know whether I’ve arrived at an answer. I’m not sure I want to.

In my experience, both as a reader and a writer, this virtual closeness has thrilled me, but it has also disappointed me. Literary idols have replied to e-mails and made my day; others have ignored compliments and declined requests to visit my classroom. I’ve cringed over comments about my own writing, and cherished feedback from readers who were moved by my work.

When my debut novel, Giant, came out, I reluctantly started a blog. Shouldn’t I be writing flash fiction, I lamented to my husband, instead of flash journalism? I was apprehensive of using social media to promote the book. It feels icky, I told him. Shouldn’t someone else be doing this? Isn’t this a publicist’s job?

As it turns out, my ever-encouraging husband said, it’s this writer’s job.

He was right. In this ever-changing publishing landscape, with the modest resources of an independent publisher behind me, promoting my book on the Internet and social media is my job. If I don’t believe in Giant, why should others?

I can’t lie: the icky feeling hasn’t completely gone away. Sometimes I long to trade the time I spend doing publicity work with writing my next book.

I look forward to discussing our new reality with my fellow debut novelists at the IFOA roundtable entitled Novelists for a New Age. When that job is done, I will listen to some of my literary idols read from their works. I will gush as they autograph my copies of their novels before returning home to place the books on the shelf beside Astrid Lindgren’s stories.

Maksimowska will appear at IFOA on October 21 at 4pm, alongside fellow debut novelists Matt Lennox, Stacey Madden, Grace O’Connell and Tanis Rideout. For more about Giant, visit maksimowska.com.

The Rookie

By Arno Kopecky

Rookie! Rookie! Rookie!

Probably no one’s going to say it out loud but no doubt they’ll be running it over their tongues, this cutthroat confederacy of Litfest vets whose shark tank I’m about to enter.

Was on a sailboat when word came. Day 43, everything going fine. Blue skies over the coast of British Columbia, humpback whales bubble-netting some kind of finger-sized fish all around us. Using their breath as a net. You’re invited to Toronto. Come read out loud. Juno, Jian, M.G. (what do the initials stand for anyway—right, I should know. Rookie.), Alice, Adrienne, Louise—all kinds of grand dukes and duchesses. All gonna be there. Big network. I’ll fit right in, was my first thought. Well not actually. When in doubt of your capacity to measure up, vilify. Yes they seem wise, compassionate, clever and fun as hell to be around, on paper. It’s called Voice. In person they maintain a permanent mental crouch, are constantly prepared to pounce on an upstart Rookie at his very first um with a devastating loquacity that can only be meant to expose its lack in others. How did it come to this?

Started writing poems when I was eight. Bad poems! Parents called them wonderful, kept writing. Got tired of poems and starting writing stories. Bad stories! Teachers called them wonderful, kept writing. Got tired of stories, tried to write a novel. Bad novel! Kept it to myself, kept writing. Got tired of making things up and tried journalism. Mediocre journalism. Better than previous genres. Kept writing. Tried traveling, too. Editors became parents and teachers. Went to South America, wrote a— travelogue, mostly. Just hit the shelves. Who knows what they’ll say. Probably something like, keep writing.

For more about Kopecky at IFOA, click here.

Choose Your Poison

By Michael Robotham

© Stefan Erhard – Literaturtest

To paraphrase a famous man from Alabama, writers’ festivals are a lot like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. This is true for audiences as well as writers. I’ve seen fist-fights, feuds, flirtations and assignations, but we writers have a code: what happens at the festival, stays at the festival.

In Australia there seems to be a new festival every weekend. There have always been the big ones like Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, but now there are new ones in Mudgee, Noosa, Bellingen, Albury and beyond. The same is happening in the UK, which has over 300 writers’ and readers’ festivals.

In the past whenever a village wanted to attract tourists it would set up a railway museum (even if the railway had never run within twenty-miles of the village). Nowadays, they organize a music or arts festival. I’m reminded of an episode of The Vicar of Dibley (BBC) where Dibley decides to hold a music festival and invites Reg Dwight, thinking they’re going to get Elton John, but instead get a guy called Reg Dwight.

The weirdest festival I’ve ever attended was Semana Negra in Gijon, Spain — an event that began almost 25 years ago as a crime-writing festival and has since grown into one of the largest cultural events in northern Spain. More than a million people attend over the 10-day festival of music, theatre, dance, funfair rides, rock concerts and the occasional literary talk thrown in. Most of the writers’ sessions don’t begin until 9 p.m. and run until after midnight, when everyone has dinner and crawls back to the hotel at about 3 a.m. I remember waking up at midday thinking I’d missed breakfast and having to wait two hours before anyone else surfaced.

The foreign language sessions are translated using interpreters and headphones. The set-up looked like something from the Nuremburg trials and attempts at humour were difficult because the punch-lines took an age to be relayed and didn’t arrive with the same panache. Norman Mailer had attended the festival several years earlier and was introduced and interviewed by two fanatical fans and students of his work. According to the story, they spoke for 45 minutes in introduction, trying to show the audience the breadth of their knowledge and appreciation of the great man’s work.

My experience was a little better. My Spanish translator introduced me and spoke for 25 minutes, giving away the complete plots of my first two crime novels.

“And then this happens…and then this…and you wouldn’t believe what happens next…”

Come question time, a member of audience demanded to know why I didn’t write about the plight of Australian aborigines. I pointed out that I wrote psychological thrillers set in the UK, but this answer didn’t satisfy her. She harangued me for so long that the rest of the audience began booing and hissing (her, not me).

I’m not expecting any similar problems in Toronto. The IFOA has proved itself to be one of the finest festivals in the world and I jumped at the chance at the chance to return. I’m already marking the schedule, working out what authors I want to see and hear. Now if I can just get out of doing my readings, I’ll have even more time for the others.

Cheers,
Michael

Robotham’s latest book, Say You’re Sorry, was published by Little, Brown UK, on October 2, 2012. Come see him at IFOA on October 20 and 23. For more about Robotham, visit his website michaelrobotham.com.