Harvey Pekar autographing copies of American Splendor in Moncton in 2007

Here are some photos I’ve been able to find of a book signing with the late Harvey Pekar at a local comic book store in Monction.  This event was part of our festival in 2007.  Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have photos or any press clippings covering Harvey’s main event at the festival, a 90 minute appearance alone on stage where he took questions and comments from about 200 people, a very candid exchange during which he revealed a lot about himself and his creative process.  Sadly, I don’t believe we videotaped this event.  However, I retain the unforgettable image of him sitting alone on stage under a bright light, holding his head in his hands, patiently welcoming and answering all questions.  Like a character out of Beckett.  He said things like: I can’t believe this is happening.  Why do you care what I have to say?  I don’t deserve this.  You’re actually paying me for this?  He talked a lot about the movie American Splendor and the burst of fame it brought, along with the headaches.  The audience was made up of a lot of people we don’t usually see, and everyone was thrilled.

Our earlier post here.

New York Times obituary here.

More pictures of Harvey in Moncton after the break, along with a recent extended  interview with him at Penn State.

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I hope you can link up to this wonderful photograph of author Beth Powning with the class of students she met on Thursday. It’s at www.powning.com/beth

Sunday’s the last day.  It’s winding down fast now, beginning with a ‘Brunch and Books’ event with 2 authors, Beth Powning and Maryse Rouy.  The focus is on literacy and on the winners of the Adult New Writers Contest.  It’s always a moving moment when these adults, who have worked hard to improve their reading and writing skills, come foward to stand on a stage named in honour of the great writer and thinker Northrop Frye.  It’s probably happening just about now, as I write.  I lost an earlier version of this blog entry, or I might have got myself together in time to sit in on the event.

At 1pm, in about an hour, we meet at the Moncton airport to close down the festival.  Jesse Robichaud, the festival Poet flyé, will read the poem he’s created over the last several days.  We’ll hand out the first “Frye Academy Award” – the Frye Academy being a select group of English and French high school students who’ve read 6 books, half English and half French, and chosen one that they like best – a sort of Canada Reads format, but spread out over several months.  Finally we’ll have a draw to see who wins a free trip “anywhere West Jet flies.”

Yesterday was jam-packed, ending with an event called Frye Jam where we ask authors to work with musicians to create a unique blend of words and music.  The music is provided by a group called Les Païens, who have hosted this event the last several years.  We had a good audience of over a hundred.  Anglophones Fred Stenson, Annabel Lyon, and Steven Galloway read beautifully and seemed to enjoy the experience.  Steven’s reading from Cellist of Sarajevo, with Kenan having a vision of the city reconstituted and then suddenly hearing the music stop, brought tears to the eyes.  The francophone authors, France Cayouette, Biz, Ron Leger, and Guy Marchamps, were equally effective, though in a very different way, as they were poets and performers.  It was half past twelve when we emerged from the venue, to a spectacle we (my wife and I) had never seen – the streets of Moncton flooded with hundreds and hundreds of young people bar hopping.  Very scantily dressed, some of them, for the cold.  Mini-skirts, apparently, are back in fashion.

The dialogue at 6pm (yesterday), with Fred Stenson and Christian Bök, was wide-ranging, relaxed, and somewhat wild, thanks to Christian’s anything but straight laced approach to life.  Sparks flew at the end when audience member Steven Galloway took Christian to task for disparaging remarks about Yann Martel’s new novel.  Have you even read the book, Steven asked.  Christian said no, he hasn’t, but that doesn’t change his criticism: why such a huge publisher’s advance when the result, nine years in the making, is a small book, not immediately recognizable as great and worthy.  All that money could have gone to help young, talented, struggling writers.  It was good to see Christian and Steven at the bar after the public dialogue, in private conversation, healing their rift, one hopes.

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The last full day of the festival, and it feels like we’re winding down.  We need to wind down, because the exhaustion factor is taking hold.  I had a great moment last night talking with Christian Bök, after his smashing performance of about 10 pieces of sound poetry.  This is poetry that is all sound, noises, bits of words stripped of all meaning.  Sometimes soft, musical sounds, sometimes harsh and violent.  Everything held together with the rhythm and the music.  It’s a tradition that goes back thousands of years, in Christian’s mind.  I could have talked longer with Christian, but it was midnight, and my wife was waiting below, past the point of no return.  Ronald Leger, a poet of Acadia, had presented something similar a bit earlier, though not so extreme.  The event is called Night Howl, and this year it lived up to its billing.

Yesterday was very busy with writing workshops, school visits, dialogues, readings, and a roundtable, which was called “Writing Lives and Afterlives,” with Nino Ricci, Daniel Poliquin, Maryse Rouy, and Noah Richler.  The noontime roundtable was lively, with a somewhat shifting focus – from the demands of historical fiction, to the ethics of using real people as models for fictional characters, to the way narrative techniques are brought to the table when writing biography and memoir.  The shifting focus probably did, as Dawn has suggested in her blog, leave our class of high school students feeling adrift.  We’ll work on that for next year.

The highlight of the afternoon was a conversation / interview with Maurice Basque, an Acadian researcher and scholar at the University of Moncton, talking with Linden MacIntyre about The Bishop’s Man. Because Maurice knows the book so well, backwards and forwards, and because he knows the Acadian situation equivalent to the Cape Breton of MacIntyre’s book, the conversation was informative, serious, and deep, and also filled with so many funny moments that they had the audience in stitches.  Linden told about asking his 93-year-old mother what she thought of his book.  Was she upset with it because it undermined the faith that is so important in her life?  She replied: “My faith has never depended on what any man does or doesn’t do.”

At 5pm Marie Cadieux, Acadian writer and filmmaker, hosted a reading that we called “Beer and Books.”  There was plenty of beer available, though just as many chose wine or plain water.  The readers were Fred Stenson, Gracia Couturier, Biz (rapper and author from Quebec), and Steven Galloway, filling in for absent Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer.  What was nice was the way Marie engaged each author in a brief conversation after his or her reading.

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