By Noah Richler

If ever you’d expect a Canadian author to forego the book in its present form then surely it would be Douglas Coupland, who was WordFest’s 2009 Banff Distinguished Author. Don’t hold your breath. Memorably, I once interviewed Coupland after he had spent the morning chewing the pages of previous editions of his books so that he could turn them, quite literally, into papier-mâché wasps’ nests to be returned to the outdoors from which their paper pages had originated. But, in truth, the Vancouver novelist, sculptor and occasional screenwriter has even toyed with writing graphic novels for cellphones—far too much work, he once told me—remains utterly enamoured of the book as it is. Enough so that, in Banff, Coupland explained the origins of the thought process that had led to a passage of what Margaret Atwood would choose to call ‘speculative fiction’, that he chose to read from his new novel, Generation A, in which the evolution of human thought is tied to extraterrestrial meddling through the mechanism of the book. Prior to the new novel, Coupland had written a short treatise about that great but latterly troubled thinker Marshall McLuhan that was published earlier this year as part of the Penguin Canadian Lives series. Coupland would have identified, certainly, with the way in which McLuhan was forever tied to, and even shackled by the neat phrases that became the monikers of McLuhan’s forward thinking: ‘the global village’ and ‘the medium is the message’, in particular. (Substitute, for instance, ‘Generation X’ or ‘McJob’, just a couple of those that Coupland made famous in his debut novel, Generation X, some twenty-odd years ago.)

McLuhan, Coupland explained to an audience that was half made up of youths who were in diapers when he was on their way to becoming their literary icon, went on to conceive of even more revolutionary eventualities, more than ideas, the most outstanding of these being his anticipation of the Internet and its effects on human thinking. For this observation alone, tiring of the hollow corporate predictions of Don Tapscott and the like, I shall now read Coupland’s biography of McLuhan, something that I have not done yet. (Once I do, or should you do, note, the book’s ‘long life’ will have been extended by another human one.) Coupland was also particularly interested—and this was the substance of the playful passage that he read from his most recent novel—in the ways that novels have shaped human thinking, and specifically how they fostered the notion of individualism in our conception of ourselves. Thoughts that ancient societies often believed were put into our heads (or, if you were Greek, the heart) by gods and goddesses we now generally believe to be our own—unless, of course, you are a bona fide evangelist. The printing press allowed the dissemination of ideas in a fashion that encouraged dialogues that, in another session of the festival, Monique Proulx described as occurring in private and in silence. It was possible, then, if only for an interval of 500-odd years (William Caxton’s printing press was invented in 1476) to believe that one existed intelligently, and almost singularly, as it was no longer as necessary to head to the church or the town square or, if you were lucky, to the school for instruction.

Coupland believes that this period is being brought to an end by Facebook, Twitter and all the other publicly lived social networking sites of the Internet that depend on and propagate associations of like-minded people—that return us to behaving and living as members of tribes, effectively. Recently some scientists have identified genes that they argue make their hosts more likely to behave as members of tribes—a lot of the research done in less developed countries, inevitably—but this strikes me as the modern equivalent of 19^th century phrenology, in which the skulls of criminals were measured and all sorts of dubious conclusions drawn. I accept Coupland’s explanation more easily wondering, as many do, if the last half of the twentieth century as it was lived in Canada especially, was a golden moment for many things—for democracy, for non-conflictual thinking and, dare I say it, for Jews (one tribe that has always fared rather badly at the hands of others). Maybe we are headed into another period of tribalism, unrestrained by the positive effects of reading upon our character that we may have taken for granted and assumed would be gifts to everyone.

But I would be interested in this aspect of what Coupland is saying—and, I suspect, likely to explore further for his Massey Lectures next autumn—as I am one of many who is particularly interested in story and how the forms of story that we indulge in exist almost independently of us but also throw light on our habits of perception and how we interact with the world. At the moment, we are living in anxious times, enough so that fear and what I would describe as an atavistic pattern of ‘epic’ thinking thrives.

Note that I use the word ‘epic’ here, to mean not long, as in an ‘epic poem’, but to describe a form of story in which good and evil exist as absolutes and it is possible to condemn, often to death whole other groups because in such a story there is no reigning idea of our common humanity and the Other is perceived of as not human and therefore expendable. Think of the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, or of the language that is used in war—America as ‘the Mother of All Evil’, or Iraq as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ etc; these are terms in stories that are explicitly designed not to encourage our sympathy for the enemy but to want to destroy them. This is a far cry from the sort of thinking that the novel encourages—a form of storytelling that promotes our sense of being individual, such as Coupland was invoking, but never without forgetting the bond of our ‘common humanity’ and of the ‘universal experiences’ that we believe the best novels elucidate and comment on.

Web bonding, Coupland believes, will abnegate all this—and certainly there are many sociologists who point to the numerous ways in which the web creates constellations of the like-minded that support his view. I am less certain. I am meeting more and more people who spend hours on the ‘net that in prior times would have been spent reading, but I am also meeting more and more people who understand the reasons why they like, not prefer, books and keep buying them. Old people are now buying e-books and readers because the font can be enlarged without adding a couple of hundred pages to a physical book that then becomes an advertisement for the reader’s diminished sight—embarrassing to many in a society that venerates youth and seems to at least hope that a little more science can make the state permanent. Others, however, continue to buy paper books because they want them, or because as a gift it is much more idiosyncratic than e-mailing a file or leaving it at some website to be downloaded.

So the physical book, I believe, shall continue to have a ‘long life’ and furthermore, exist in many forms. This last detail is important, because it also denotes the junction at which I part ways with my pal Coupland (who is, however, at the mere beginning of a journey of thinking, as much was easy to recognize at the Banff talk and exciting for that reason: we lucked in to being at the beginning of the journey with him, rather than hearing an author just plug his last book). For I believe that creation stories and romances and epics and novels are forms of story that co-exist in us, and that a novel is more than something that is “written, in prose form and long”—a standard definition. I believe that novels can be oral, printed electronically, or conveyed in film—and that it is exactly their message of individuality and our common humanity that distinguishes them. This message is contained in the leap of the imagination that first an author, and then a reader makes; a leap that is made on the back of the assumption that a person’s experience in, say, Afghanistan under the Taliban (as in Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner trilogy), a New York magazine under an Anna Wintour (Lauren Wesiberger’s The Devil Wears Prada) or England’s Tudor court (Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker winner, Wolf Hall) can be understood exactly because we are fundamentally alike.

This is the distinguishing characteristic of the novel—not, as many argue, its investigation of the interior life or its attention to detail, etc. It is this extraordinary and progressive idea that makes it the highest expression not just of our literary but also our political selves. And as it exists on pages, but also on the radio and in film—movies that are just not very good or ambitious should not deter from the novelistic powers of better ones—and, yet, on the Internet. These are early cyber days; video games, Facebook, or the now no longer talked about ‘Second Life’ and other ways of storytelling shaped by that technology as the printed book was by Caxton’s 1476 invention, are but early forays into the storytelling that is possible over the web, and there is no scientific reason why the laws of story that have shaped the way we narrate our lives in other media would not apply to this one,

So, yes, we may, in these anxious, strife-ridden times, find ourselves relapsing into tribal thinking—and noticing it more. But the novel and all it has taught us cannot disappear. The book, and the individualistic thinking it has encouraged—in non-fiction texts and treatises, but also in novels—has a long life. Let’s pay attention to how it unravels.

*          *          *

Books have a long life and their authors and readers too—or at least it can seem that way at times. Coupland read, after Generation A, the concluding chapter of Generation X, the novel of another set of anxious times that made the fella famous. It was poignant, hearing him do so, and for this reader too, as—what, twenty-three years ago?—I had traveled to Universal City in Los Angeles to interview the author, then not yet widely known—who dressed at the time in fifties suits we now associate with the television series, Mad Men, and who would not get out of bed or draw the curtains of his hotel room because he was himself so anxious then. I interviewed him anyway, was struck by his gift and so took the peculiarity in stride. In Banff I thought, have we really known each other that long? And aren’t I the luckier for it.

I leave you now, until next year’s WordFest, I hope. It was a fun ride. Thanks to Anne Green, Anne-Nicole Pilkey, Jocelyn Hebert, and Amanda and Antony and Don and all the other great volunteers, and to photographer Kathie Stell. What a super festival.

Best,

Noah Richler

No he’s not been outside the CanLit wire.

It can be tough, this writer biz, especially when you’re starting out and doing the solo bookstore thing rather than attending a festival, such as WordFest, where the administration and the volunteers are wonderfully efficient and hospitable and the audience actually wants to meet you and to listen. That is a treat, really. But still it can be tough and these last couple of days I have occasionally found myself reassuring authors that short lines at the book signings are not really barometers of anything. In the Toronto Star, this week, I wrote about the task of building audiences and several publishers talked about how readers often buy books afterwards, or talk to them, and how a first meeting like any between people can be cautious and leave readers wanting, first of all, to think a little more about the literary encounters they have just had.

“A book has a long life,” my wife, a publisher, is fond of saying. She says this mostly when I give in to the despair that dogs writers who wonder if anybody at all is reading their work or, or at this time of year, how to continue buoyantly when their books are not on any of the prize lists that seem to be usurping all public discussion of their art. It can be indulgent, sure, to think this way, but it is also human (and most of the time, fleeting.)

A book has a long life.

Saturday, I had two wonderful glimpses of this axiom in action: a book resurrected (or at least proving that it had survived a near-death experience) and another I’ll wager is at the beginning of its own exciting journey.

In the morning, a little unprepared, I hosted a panel titled “Uncharted Territories” with Robert Arthur Alexie, Wayson Choy, Lorna Crozier and June Hutton. I was unprepared because I thought I was merely introducing these four authors and not leading a discussion, a task that took me aback for a moment but that was infinitely more interesting to me. Those of you who perhaps have been reading my blog will know that I went to bat for CanLit after one of the Giller judges wrote a column in the Financial Times that appeared to be quite dismissive and condescending towards our literature but here was proof, yet again, of our extraordinary literary riches.

(I say ‘appeared’ because that was how I first understood it as did all the cowering snipers who came out to shoot me down and claim that I needed a thicker skin, that the judge was only saying what Canadians are afraid to say publicly, etc—nonsense, of course, and somewhat undone by the judge’s later insistence that she loves our literature, and could not possibly be condescending towards such a “large, prosperous country.” Huh? Why not?)

Wayson Choy is, aside from being the sentinel of Chinese-Canadian experience exquisitely rendered in memoirs and in novels, one of the kindest authors on the Canadian circuit. This is not, I assure you, a quality to be underestimated and it was beautifully in evidence during the special session. After Alexie read, with a degree of shyness, removing his sunglasses and dropping his face so that the tender well of his acutely felt native experience was suddenly legible, a passage from his novel Porcupines and China Dolls about the missionaries coming in their boats to take away the aboriginal families’ children, the silence in the room was profound and thick with feeling. I followed up with a question—I think it was about the presence of at least the memory of ancestors, call them spirits, in both Choy’s memoir of nearly dying and Alexie’s novel of residential school prompted anguish—and Choy, such a sensitive man, turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t answer just now, I’m still recovering from [Robert’s] extraordinary reading.” Crozier put a hand on his, and it was not a false action. Say what you will about this country’s past, but there was nothing but love, admiration, and empathy in that room—and a desire for reconciliation and of all our peoples making the journey together that I believe has always existed in the majority of Canadians.

It was a profoundly moving moment and, but for the long life of a book, might never have happened. Alexie, as I have noted before, waited six years for his book to be published and then, in the week that it was, his publisher (Stoddart) went bust.  Penguin Canada went on to publish The Pale Indian but without interest. I found Alexie’s first book in a remainder pile and, yes, was so thrilled by it that I traveled to Inuvik to see him and put him in my book about Canada and the radio series I made. That was a few years ago. Since that time, the book went out of print but did not stop being talked about and, last year, a new west Coat aboriginal press, Theytus, reissued it. Subsequently Shelagh Rogers discovered it and interviewed Alexie for her CBC radio show and then—Calgarians should feel proud of this—Anne Green invited him to WordFest and “Kevin From Canada” (the excellent Calgary blogger I told you about yesterday) discussed the book on his site.

Alexie had never read publicly before WordFest. And I can say that rarely, if ever, have I seen, as I during the “Uncharted Territories” session, the quiet emotion that was displayed yesterday by an audience and set of authors clearly thinking (along with everything else), “our community has been enriched.” They were proud to be on that stage. I don’t want to have to explain this to critics, so I’ll just say it to you; it was a special, and very Canadian moment. Robert Arthur Alexie’s book will live on, I think, and kudos to Anne Green and company for doing their bit to elevate the possibility that this exceptional man will continue to write.

A book has a long life.

Then, at night—at the ‘Distinguished Author’ reading at the Banff Centre, WordFest’s second leg, there was another instance of a hitherto little known author completely winning over her audience during this, her first foray onto the festival circuit.

Emily St John Mandel was the second of the night’s three authors, apppearing between J.R. Carpenter, a Banff Centre alumna, and Douglas Coupland, the evening’s ‘Distinguished Author.’ (“I bought my first reading glasses nine months ago,” said Coupland, “I knew something like this was going to happen.”)

Carpenter read from the novel she had written subsequently and to complement her CD-Rom like forays into a trio of urban landscapes; a fusion that I did not think was altogether convincing but that was nevertheless interesting and that had the audience laughing in all the right places. And Coupland, of course, was his utterly charming, eccentric and meandering self. Coupland still has the vestiges of a kind of Valley dialect that he has used for years and that his legion of readers and admirers know acts as a sort of veil over the astonishing bits of wisdom and insight he provides. “Okay,” he will say, suddenly leaning forward, “Here’s the thing …” and anybody who knows best listens to this with such a knack for gems in ordinary phrases. Recently, he and I recorded a conversation for a CBC Radio documentary that I was making about the notion of trust and, inevitable with Coupland, our talk spilled over into today’s realm of North American anxiety, post 9-11. “Okay,” said Coupland. “Here’s the thing: every day’s September 12^th.”

The date I’d never explicitly articulated to myself—or heard anyone else do, either. But you and I know exactly what he’s talking about, don’t we?

Coupland, of course, was wonderfully thought-provoking (lots of Marshall McLuhan on his mind—in the novel, Generation A, and the short Penguin biography of the philosopher that he wrote before it), and entertaining, but we always knew he would be, reason why we attended the reading in the first place. But the unexpected treasure of the evening was Emily St John Mandel’s appearance in the middle. Mandel, who studied ballet in Toronto for a while (she lives in Brooklyn now), has talent—and a presence. She has a certain gamine air and, the dancer in her, occupies just a little space delicately. Her language is plain but, like deft footwork, conveys the intent of her story perfectly. The couple of chapters from Last Night in Montreal that she read concerned her young protagonist, and her capacity for leaving, for moving on—though, given the spectre of her mother, it is probably more accurate to describe her condition as an incapacity to stay and commit. It was a genuinely beautiful reading and exciting because of its simplicity—no talk, no effects, just the words of a well-written story.

Later, I visited Mandel at the book-signing table. Coupland had scores of eager readers in his queue and was gracious with every one of them. Mandel was sitting quietly, with no one before her. (There’d been a few, I’d arrived a little late.) Not my station, but I was impressed with her talent and took her aside to encourage her. “Don’t be discouraged,” I said, praising the qualities of her reading and explaining that the length of a lineup was a barometer of nothing. She was building an audience, I said. Coupland had been doing so for ages.

“A book,” I said, “has a long life.”

So far, among too many experiences to list, I’ve been thrilled by Verónica Murguía, David Huerta and Miguel Ángel Arenas, a few but not all of the WordFest’s guests from Mexico; captivated by a wonderful session in French with Dany Laferrière and Monique Proulx at the University of Calgary; I’ve watched Tim Wynne-Jones and Cary Fagan captivate and amuse several classes of children; I’ve listened to the marvelous Saskatchewan poet Karen Solie read with Lisa Moore, Zoe Whitall and Shani Mootoo in the ‘Anansi Girls’ event that took place in the actually very congenial surroundings of The Auburn, next to the Vertigo Theatre. I’ve listened to Robert Arthur Alexie break hearts as wounds long festering are opened again. I’ve listened to Mariatu Kamara, that most extraordinary survivor of unspeakable man’s wartime cruelty to, in this case, a child—except that this exceptional Sierra Leonian woman, now a UNICEF ‘Special Representative’ has written and has spoken about it, so I’ll have to find another word to accurately explain the tempest of feelings I have listening to this remarkable writer and reading her memoir, The Bite of the Mango (co-authored by Susan McClelland). And my wonder.

As I said, this is just a portion of the extraordinary polycultural Fest feast on offer—one that’s polygeneric too (if that’s a word, what I’d like it to refer to is the variety of literary genres that are also represented). It’s a remarkable achievement, and one that I hope is appreciated even by the Calgarians and the glut of well-to-do companies that are not yet patrons and sponsors of WordFest. Director Anne Green and her team, through relationships with the various partners that they have been developing over fourteen years, have spread their literary tentacles out into the various facets of Calgary’s vast city—and enriched them. The French. The First Nations. Albertans themselves.

Failing to yet write about this last bunch is what launched this morning’s frustration. I did manage to hear a bit of Diana Gabaldon this morning—and, on this Saturday of bestselling heavyweights—to Kathy Reichs being charmed by WordFest’s very funny and capable host, David Gray, borrowed from the CBC, and to that marvelous one-of-a-kind graphic illustrator and novelist, Seth. And though I am about to race off to Banff where, drinks at the Voyageur pub aside, I shall catch up with Douglas Coupland, Emily St. John Mandel and J.R. Carpenter what is upsetting me is that I did not get a bit of counseling from Hal Niedzviecki, Canada’s guru of our new internet-born ‘peep’ culture, or to catch the ‘Wild Rose’ writers of Alberta this last Thursday.

As I’m not about to give up this cherished position of WordFest blogger without a fight, next year I’ll just have to figure out how to attend two simultaneous events at the Vertigo Theatre and Studio and, somewhat more of a challenge, how to attend equally fascinating panels in disparate corners of this city.

However, if I may, let me share a WordFest tip—and to express thanks for something else that is Calgarian and very special as I do so (and don’t be appalled, there is no sponsorship scandal behind this little plug).

If, as I do, you feel occasionally shortchanged by the impossibility of attending two or three events spread out in a city where, I hate to break it to you, just about nothing is in walking distance, I can tell you that one spot that is close to the Palliser Hotel and where there is a lot of clandestine author action is the Avenue Diner on the Stephen Avenue Mall. This utterly charming retro-diner (with authentic red tractor seats at the counter) is, to my mind, one of the best breakfast joints not just in Calgary but in all of Canada. I apologize, Calgary, for being in the thrall of this restaurant and thinking of it with more excitement that I do dinosaur bones or the oilsands, or the rolling plains that I ventured across (in a manner of speaking), last night, to have a fine sirloin at Rylie’s Steak House in Okotoks, but there are few things more important to most writers than a well-made espresso in the morning and not just this one, but many, many writers from WordFest sensibly pop in to get a their caffeine fix and a most excellent breakfast here. So, let me congratulate you, Calgary, on your mountains and the even more staggeringly beautiful foothills and to this, your city, being the ‘birthscape’ (a Brian Brett phrase) of authors such as Karen Connelly, here at the festival, Nancy Huston (who has been), newcomer Deborah Willis, nominated for a Governor-General’s Award for Fiction this year (so a WordFest guest next year, perhaps?) and of a host of great non-fiction writers including Aritha Van Herk, a novelist, historian, one of the best and most generous critics in the country, as well as a supporter of the Festival.

No, what I am applauding this morning is the Avenue Diner, and how next year maybe I’ll make a point of trying to catch the authors I miss in camera there. Hell, this year, I’ve already seen Barry Callaghan, Emily St John Mandel, Lisa Moore, Zoe Whitall, Shani Mootoo, Matthew Skelton and others across the room.

Clearly there’s an opportunity, here. The Avenue Diner is as close as Calgary has to Left Bank. Let’s absorb it into the Festival—have an event there, maybe.

Oh, and while I’m appropriating Calgarian institutions to my own literary ends, let me draw your attention to one of the best bloggers about writing in the country—who is that because he’s intelligent, loves writing and reading, and is never sour or mean. His site is called “Kevin From Canada”—and he’s from Calgary.

More this afternoon. Have to get in the car now.

What glories languages offer! The fact of the two novelists speaking in French meant that their explications of their work, and of the writing life, were expressed both more ruminatively, more passionately and even more mischievously than we often hear when listening to authors speak in English. Of course the talk also depended upon these two authors’ distinct and convivial personalities.

Monique Proulx is thoughtful, pointed and generous. Her writing is sensuous and concerned with a world reaching far beyond Québec’s borders, as was evident in the short passage she read from her novel Champagne (translated into English as Wildlives). Dany Laferrière—no surprise to anyone who has read novels with provocative titles such as The Taste of Young Girls, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired and, most recently, I am a Japanese Writer (these translations of the original titles are mine, note) is bold, comic, challenging and even outrageous at times, and majestically dismissive of any reduction of his multi-faceted identity—this pugnacious attitude summarized in the cheeky title of his novel of writing a novel, I Am A Japanese Writer.

Dany Laferrière and Monique Proulx at the Centre Français of the University of Calgary

Technically speaking, of course, Laferrière is a Haitian-born Francophone Canadian living in Québec, but he will have none of that. “My identity is that of my reader,” he says—a point of view that is unquestionably shared by his compatriots across the Canadian linguistic divide, but that I have never heard put forward quite so succinctly and interestingly in English.

Laferrière spoke of the job of writing as being one of putting charm into words—of achieving style, really—though Proulx was this charm personified.

“I’m delighted to be in Calgary,” said Proulx (in French, all the proceedings were in French), “to discover a francophonie in Alberta, and a love of francophonie. There is a bridge that exists between the two cultures and we are walking upon it.”

Not a bad metaphor in the city of + 15 city walkways, don’t you think?

Proulx spoke of writing as being an enquiry into identity, but also liberty, made through the ‘mirrors’ of society; Laferrière spoke of the writer’s droit d’être quelqu’un d’autre—the right to be another. He applauded, with good cause, the leap of the imagination that readers make when, on the back of a novel, they imagine themselves into the place and identity of another.

Both spoke of the joys of reading, and of the frustrations of not being able to read enough. Proulx spoke reverently of the silence that she needs to be able to work—and admiringly of the dizzy vertigo of Laferrière’s works and the way each of his novels is a sort of mad, incautious leap. And then Laferrière gave another beautiful summary, this time of the marvel of the book itself—and that ecstatic quality of silence.

Of the book, he said, “We have invented a toy that imposes silence—an active silence, for hours. This is extraordinary—and something to be defended.”

Colin McAdam reads from his Giller-shortlisted novel Fall at the Vertigo Theatre on Wednesday night. Photo credit: mypixforu.com

That was proved to me again last night as I and the full house at the Vertigo Theatre listened to Don Gillmor read from Kanata, his ambitious novel of Canada; to Montrealer Colin McAdam read from his Giller-shortlisted novel, Fall; to Karen Connelly, originally from Calgary, read from Burmese Lessons, her second novel to be set in Burma, the country to which she feels such evident ties; to the Mexican author Veronica Murguia read from a short story of a 17^th century wet-nurse contemplating the mysterious possibility of the ‘original’ language that Adam might have spoken in the Garden of Eden, and to Barry Callaghan read from Beside Still Waters, and share its contemplations of love and death.

Barry Callaghan reads from his novel Beside Still Waters, an essay in love and death. Photo credit: mypixforu.com

In particular, it was exciting and a treat to listen to Barry Callaghan and his sensuous evocation of lovers swimming in a phosphorous bay off the coast of Puerto Rico, their every physical action throwing up sparkling trails of light. The glistening moment, so new, was easy to imagine, and the audience was transported. As they had been to very different circumstances by Veronica Murguia’s story and its historical, courtly surrounds. Murguia wrote the story, not yet published in English, in Banff—proof of the strong ties between WordFest and its activities in Calgary and Banff, and Mexico.

Afterwards, I asked her to what degree she thought language—that not only expresses but shapes our ideas—was influenced by climate. It was an obvious question, really, when the author is from Mexico and the streets of Calgary are already, outside, under a blanket of white.

“I love the snow!” she said excitedly. “It’s good for thinking!”

Veronica and David’s words video.

Mexican author Veronica Murguia charms the Vertigo Theatre audience with her short story reading Wednesday night. Photo credit: mypixforu.com

The idea on her story of an original language was thrilling to me—and showed up my ignorance, as apparently the contemplation of one is as old as Herodotus (and I read the Classics at university, dammit.) But it was also interesting to me as, from the opposite end of the spectrum of human experience, it suggests an idea that is prevalent in a lot of thinking today because so many languages and cultures are disappearing. Wade Davis, the anthropologist in the enviable position of being ‘Explorer-in-residence’ at the magazine, National Geographic, has taken his concerns about all the knowledge that is lost as this happens, and made it the subject of The Wayfinders, this year’s Massey Lectures (published by Anansi). I wondered to what extent there was grim symmetry there—that we may have started with one ‘original’ language, when in the beginning there was The Word, and now, through the loss of cultures, may be driving ourselves to the position of having one global language again.

This, of course, is the sort of discussion that Mexicans love, what with their dual legacy of European and indigenous heritages—a combination that we, in Canada, share, though we deal with it more dourly. It comes down to climate, I suppose—that snow that makes us think rather than gab at length and philosophically as Mexicans are able to do in the warmth of tropical nights …

Speaking of that combination of European and indigenous heritages, our own example of that duality is also very much in evidence in this year’s WordFest.

Today, Thursday the 16^th, I went off to the Knuckle Room at Mount Royal University to listen to novelist Robert Arthur Alexie, a Canadian Gwich’in from Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. Alexie was welcomed by Clarence Wolfleg, a Blackfoot from the Siksika First Nation whose very existence as a soldier who has served for NATO all over the world (and then as a police officer on his reserve) would have been meaningful to novelist Joseph Boyden, author of Three day Road, and his many readers.

After Clarence Wolfleg’s welcome song Alexie explained and then read from his first novel, Porcupines and China Dolls, which is terrific—alternately thrilling, upsetting, and invigorating. The language is forceful, at times vernacular and coarse, sometimes sweeping up the reader in its percussive musical cadences, and at other times softly describing the surrounding landscape so dear to him. It is basically a novel of First Nations’ experience of the residential schools, and the loss of parental ability and misery that ensued for so many. Alexie, however, is a man capable of mischievous humour despite all this, and started his reading and talk by explaining how, as an officer of the tribal leadership council, he used to amuse himself by adding a little humour and sarcasm to the endless memos, e-mails, reports and bulletins he had to write. Then someone suggested he should actually write stories—and he started.

“I started the book in 1996,” said Alexie, “and I finished it in the fall. Stoddart agreed to publish it and I imagined that in two months my story would be printed and ready for the stores for Christmas.”

Well, he said, “it took six years—and then the publisher went bust.”

“A book,” my wife Sarah MacLachlan (a publisher) is fond of saying, “has a long life.” Well, most books’ journeys to publication are not quite as tough as that, though in truth Robert Alexie could have told personal stories much more trying of the spirit. Alexie, who grew up on the land and then in Fort McPherson—the Gwich’in community not far from Inuvik—was in rehab in Scarborough, Ontario, when he met the sympathetic counselor who put him in touch with the agent who ultimately arranged the deal for his book to be published. He knows that what he went through is one of the set of dire consequences, most extremely suicide, that affected so many in the communities of the North that were ripped asunder by the experience of the residential schools. In the Knuckle Room he spoke of it, his lip visibly quivering, and the discussion that ensued between him and the packed house a palpable sequel to the story he told in Porcupines and China Dolls—and a prelude to the sort of confession and healing that will take place when Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission gets underway. As Lisa Moore says, stories really do travel in all sorts of ways.

Robert Arthur Alexie talks to a reader at Mount Royal University on Thursday afternoon.

Man, the adult writer’s world is a cinch—on a list, off a list, et cetera. Nothing like talking to kids to whip you and your sentiments into shape. Kids put up with nothing that doesn’t interest them; haven’t learned to fake it yet. Today, at 12:30 at the Book Rapport session at the ConocoPhillips Theatre at the Glenbow Museum, Cary Fagan and Tim Wynne-Jones tested their mettle before a bunch of elementary school kids who, good for them, were very pleased and attentive in a big way. First, Cary Fagan talked about his Jacob Two-Two on the High Seas, a fourth book in the kids’ series that my father, ill, was unable to write. Fagan speaks clearly, doesn’t hesitate, looks kids in the eye as he explains himself in a way that frankly, I’d find difficult. (As an author, high schools were the venues that terrified me the most.) The kids asked questions, unhesitatingly.

“How did you feel before you started to write?”

“Why did you want to write a Jacob Two-Two book?”

“Why isn’t Mister Scrounger nice?”

Then Tim Wynne-Jones took to the stage with Pounce de Leon. He started by explaining that he’d not, initially—see my very unprofessional video— initially wanted to be a writer at all. It was incompetence that drove him to it.

Wynne-Jones, incidentally, won a GG nomination for his young adult book, The Uninvited, earlier in the day. He’ll be talking about that book later, during WordFest, at Event 23 at The Vertigo Theatre at 1230 tomorrow.

The Governor-General’s Awards hiked the amount of the cash that is awarded with their prizes a couple years ago, wanting some of the glamour the Scotiabank Giller Prize has attracted (without particularly understanding that its secret juries and its process of pre-selecting winners is much of what makes it less surprising and therefore interesting.) This augmenting of the booty, I think now, is possibly a mistake. To wit: I had an interesting e-mail from a literary agent friend of mine, someone short-listed authors in both categories in most years, who wrote, “now that the monetary value of winning has been increased 100-fold, and there is no literary reason for anything, the literary debates have dried up. Between one silliness and another, what is the point of discussion?”

My friend may be right. Here we are, a month into the season, and the lists are discussed as sports or celebrities are. These, of course, are the “follies” my father was referring to (a description of events that even Jack Rabinovitch, the founder of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is fond of using.) What do we know about this year’s books shortlisted by the Giller, the GG and the Writer’s Trust? Who has profiled Annabel Lyon, a modest though admired success because of her short stories, and now short-listed for all three? Who has attempted to glean trends—a fiction in itself, perhaps, but nevertheless an interesting exercise—from this new spate of Canadian authors?

Perhaps the French have it right, and the way to don accolades to authors and books—whether through the Academie française, by awarding the coveted title of “literary lion” (as the American Academy of Arts and Letters does) or through the penniless Prix Goncourt and Prix Femina—is the way to go. With no fantasy of sudden wealth for the media and the public to discuss, all that remains—and that benefit?—are the books. (We do, in fact, have at least one prize in Canada, one of them the ReLit Award started by the Newfoundland writer Kenneth Harvey, but its criteria of small and independent houses are so arbitrary, and his own agenda so muddying, that it does not have anything near the impact of any of the French prizes.)

There is much good news in these lists (and as much in who perhaps could have been on them), for Calgarians especially.

Newcomer Deborah Willis, previously a clerk at Munro’s Books in Victoria (see this good piece in the National Post about her and how it was owner Jim Munro who apparently brought Penguin Group Canada and his ex-wife Alice Munro’s attention to her writing), was born and raised in this city. She is just twenty-seven and shall undoubtedly be a future guest of WordFest. And, as Anne Green pointed out at the ‘WordFeast’ fundraiser last night, four authors longlisted for the Giller Prize—and now the Governor-General’s Literary Awards are among the festival’s visitors this year. Michael Crummey’s new novel Galore, most deservedly, was shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction (in English) today, and Monique Proulx for her novel, Champagne, (translated into English as Wildlives). Tim Wynne-Jones, that literary lion of Canadian children’s literature, for The Uninvited. Shani Mootoo was longlisted for the Giller for her novel, Valmiki’s Daughter, which was particularly pleasing even if she make the shortlist cut and it’s her novel, Valmiki’s Daughter, that I have on my mind today.

Mootoo has been longlisted for prizes before, including the (then) Booker Prize, and is a proven talent. She writes considerately, which is to say that she is not one of those authors who write in such a way that you don’t now who’s speaking, and you don’t have to turn back six pages to find out. Her characters are rounded and fully formed; her plots, too, are developed and intriguing—a tool, in the novelist’s arsenal, that is sometimes forsaken for style, but not here. Valmiki’s Daughter, set in Mootoo’s native Trinidad, is a fascinating and memorable exploration of personal relationships—between parents and children, between lovers and friends—and the frequently onerous burden of recent family history. Mootoo paints this picture against the political backdrop of a recently colonized and tropical state, successfully. I remember Austin Clarke once talking to me about how, in the novel—of, for instance, the Caribbean immigrant struggling in Toronto—even weather is political. This is something Mootoo understands. Her landscape portrait of Trinidad is not whimsical or sentimental, but of the essence.

Mootoo is speaking late Friday afternoon at The Auburn, in Calgary (event 36, if you have the program) and on Sunday in Banff (event 60).

Some WordFeast Notes

White Knight donor Michael Lang is standing in the middle, author Hal Niedzviecki on his right. Author Karen Connelly, native to Calgary but who has made Burma her territory, is seated second from right. Photo credit: mypixforu.com

Emcee Kris Demeanour, musician and performance artist, hosts Tuesday night's WordFeast Fundraiser. Photo credit: mypixforu.com

Kris Demeanour was a treat as emcee at the WordFeast fundraiser, last night, held in the Penthouse of the Palliser Hotel. He joked, boldly I’d say, about the fact of a week committed to the arts in a province where “on ‘Alberta Arts Day’ we get all that out of the way, like we do the family on Family Day, in Alberta there’s a lot to do and we get on with it.” But Marilyn Milavsky, involved with a drive for the Calgary Opera and arts centre, was there, as so were Linda Shea of Altalink, benefactor Michael Lang (who won the evening’s auction of two WestJet tickets to anywhere and a night for two at the Palliser); various members of Gillian Lawrence’s family and, amid other donors and luminaries, Anne Green’s own parents, taking their distant seating in humour and good stride. “This is the parents’ table,” said Judge Patrick Lawrence, laughing heartily.

The Mayor of Calgary, Dave Bronconnier, has dubbed October 13^th – 18^th as “WordFest 2009 Week,” though Director Anne Green said she thought the whole month could have been be described that way, what with appearances by Margaret Atwood and John Irving ‘bookending’ the month, you could say. Mariatu Kamara, whose experience of having her hands chopped off by Sierra Leone’s rebels when she was a child is related in her extraordinary book, The Bite of the Mango, was the speaker; her appearance and shared thoughts were both dumbfounding and too ghastly for most Canadians to easily think about—but also inspiring. She is here. She is studying. She is alive.

Mariatu, a UNICEF Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, speaks today at 1230 at the Vertigo Theatre (event 12) and Thursday (event 22) at the Rosza Centre at the University of Calgary.

This year’s nominees are Kim Echlin for The Disappeared, Annabel Lyon for The Golden Mean, Linden McIntyre for The Bishop’s Man, Colin McAdam’s The Fall and Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault. It’s an interesting list, certainly, with novels set in different epochs and places—Ancient Greece and modern-day Cambodia; A bit of ancient Egypt as seen through the lens of the modern day, from the flooded lands behind the Aswan Dam. Boarding school where emancipated kids get up to what they want; bad Cape Breton, where kids get an education they never expected.

Credit: Suzanne Hancock. Colin McAdam brings his Giller Prize nominated book, "Fall", to WordFest.

“Mind-changing,” said Glendinning of the shortlist—and Banks, more specifically, that the evidence of the year’s survey of 95 novels was that our fiction shows both “an engagement with history and engagement with the natural world. And unfortunately those are not characteristics of American fiction that this time.”

Wow. No more talk of toques or eavestroughs, of grannies in the Ukraine or of the muddy homogeneity of the middle range of novels and a far cry from the tenor of the spat I got into with one of the judges, Victoria Glendinning, earlier in the month.

(You can follow our debate, if you want, by reading (1) Glendinning in the Financial Times, then (2) my own response in the Globe and Mail, then (3) our debate on the BBC World Service show Newshour—our item is 36.25 in.) and—and then, if you’re still interested, see the Times weigh in online and then enjoy our redemption in Vit Wagner’s column in the Toronto Star today.)

Indeed, I have to congratulate the BBC for their having had us on last week. Radio is in Britons’ blood and is a part of the national discourse in a way that it is not here. There is a sense of public argument, in all realms, as something ongoing. It’s also true that more English (and European) novelists feel comfortable speaking in the public domain about all sorts of political matters. Here, just a few artists do so with any regularity.

Possibly, we are a less comfortably discursive lot and with that idea in mind it is interesting to me that the BBC, and not the CBC, so instinctively arranged the Newshour faceoff between Victoria Glendinning and I, despite the issue being in its essence, Canadian.

Anyway, it’s a good list and one that should put to rest—at least for a few months—charges that Canadian fiction is somehow not concerned with the rest of the world, or that a Canadian novel is somehow unusual when it does step out in its concerns at all. Certainly all this hullabaloo is good news for Jack Rabinovitch and Scotiabank’s generous institution. (The award, now worth $50 000, was founded in honour of Rabinovitch’s late partner, Doris Giller, literary editor of the Toronto Star for a while.) Last week’s may have been one of the more puzzling long lists of recent years but it has been one of the most talked about in a long time—and that’s good news for the Giller, for Canadian publishing and the authors who are on and off the list. The Giller is now, apparently, the “top prize” for Canadian fiction—this, according to Newshour’s Lyse Doucet (an Acadian)—who also took pains to say that she thinks Lisa Moore’s most recent novel is “terrific.”

“Calgary was stellar! Thank you Cowfolk!” twittered Margaret Atwood after her appearnce Tuesday night at the Knox United Church.

Truly, Calgary this last week was the centre of the universe, known and imagined—the Dalai Lama as part of the University of Calgary’s NOW Conference at the Saddledome, and Atwood and God’s Gardeners presenting their own post-apocalyptic eco-spiritual alternative. Other cities are hard put to compare with such a pair.

Atwood, by the way, was this last week given 25/1 odds by the English betting firm Ladbrokes to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a coronation I have already suggested is overdue. To my mind hr literary and social contribution should have put her well ahead of Philip Roth (5/1), Joyce Carol Oates (5/1) and Philip Roth (7/1) though the real contender may not even be our other Canadian superstar, Alice Munro—but, sharing the same 25/1 peg—Bob Dylan. Stranger things have happened.

credit Barbara Stone

There is amusing irony to be found in the fact of Margaret Atwood having embarked on the extraordinary tour that makes its stop in Calgary tonight.

Atwood is without question one of the world’s most renowned literary novelists, a nominee for this year’s Giller Prize and surely a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, too. This conversation has been going not for a few years but in fact a couple of decades. I used to think it brazen; now such a coronation strikes me as imminent and justified. Among living novelists, whose contribution has been greater? (If I have to explain to you why I am pushing for Atwood and not Dan Brown then you might as well skip this column.)

Atwood’s output is prodigious, and extraordinary because she always meets her own high and exacting standards. She is a poet, an essayist and a novelist of myriad genres—one, of “speculative” (rather than “science”) fiction, of which her new novel The Year of the Flood is the most recent example—that she has pretty well appropriated, if not invented, for herself. She is a terrifically hard worker who treats her audience and the work of meeting them with respect. And she is gaining, these days, a fairly unassailable reputation as a seer—consider the prescience of her Massey Lectures, last year (Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth) and now her continued focus on the environment and humans’ perilous disregard of it.

What is amusing is that this Margaret Atwood is the same one who, a few years ago, introduced the Longpen™ as a way to end, now “extend,” authors’ book tours. There was sense in this. Calgary is a fortunate city in that, year after year, Wordfest brings international authors of the highest calibre to readers in the city—something that is less easy to achieve in, say, Medicine Hat. Atwood’s video machine with its virtual and immediate calligraphic arm promised readers in the most remote places the chance to have a book signed by a favorite author, though there is no denying that some publishers will have seen the Longpen™ as a way to forego the expensive business of touring authors and allowing them to meet and build their followings and to partake in the community activity of literary festivals.

Now, however, the incomparable Margaret Atwood has proved not only that touring is still a good idea, but that there is nobody who does so with more originality than her: if you are one of the fortunates who has a ticket to tonight’s Calgary stop of her The Year of the Flood roadshow, then you will be treated to a choir, to readings and to the hymns of a post-apocalyptic world that the author wrote for the novel, put to original music. And, of course, to Ms Atwood.

Even if the Nobel Prize committee does not do the right thing and get around to honouring Atwood, you will remember this evening always. Be glad.