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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Jacob Berkowitz at KidsFest

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Saturday of the Festival is always a full day for me, but this year was as full as it could be! I began the day updating social media, and then received a message at 7:00 am that the person we had employed to coordinate KidsFest/FestiJeunesse was sick. I grabbed my daughter and our box of “swap” books and headed for the Moncton Public Library. The tables were set-up and the décor looked terrific, but we definitely needed one brain to oversee the activities, because it is quite the morning! The children (aged 2-12) and their families have been coming to KidsFest for years now (about 1,500 people participate in 2.5 hours) and expectations are high for a quality family event.

This year the children all received a free book (Let’s Go! The Story of Getting from There to Here) and a passport when they entered, so we decided to take the theme of transportation throughout the event.  They proceed to get stickers at all the stations around the library and the atrium. They start by swapping a book at our book swap (bring a book, take a book), proceed to the library’s table which this year focused on map making, played a bit of transportation bingo, learned some fascinating early transportation facts from interpreters from the Moncton Museum, watched four performances from students at the Capitol Theatre School of Performing Arts (four tragedies!), made their own boat at the craft table, participated in our read-a-thon, wrote their own poetry and of course, met authors during their readings and participated in writing workshops. It is a fun-filled morning. My absolute favourite part is the kids who have met the authors in their schools over the course of the week and have convinced their parents to bring them to KidsFest so that they can see the authors again. We were so privileged this year (as always!) to have fascinating children’s authors who do such a great job of making words fun for kids. Jacob Berkowitz, Cary Fagan, Christiane Duchesne and Nicole Daigle all stole the show!

As I was running back and forth between headquarters and the library I luckily bumped into Linden MacInyre, so I was able to thank him for coming and wish him well on his return and his next book.

At noon, I changed pace completely and ran over to Moncton City Hall for Noah Richler’s fascinating Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye lecture entitled: What We Talk About When We Talk About War. I was able to video this lecture, so we will be posting on our site soon. Of course, we will publish the lecture as we always do in a bilingual format, with Goose Lane Editions.

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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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Maurice Basque and Linden MacIntyre

Friday, April 23, 2010

Well, I survived my 11^th Soirée Frye and despite the public humiliation, I am relatively unscathed. My co-host Mario Thériault was up to his regular tricks of pointing out just what an uptight, snobby upper Canadian I am! It was just so nice to have all the students there, basking in the glory of winning the Frye Writing Contest, and for them to rub shoulders with all the invited authors. One student from Fredericton High School (Stéfanie Violette) who won second place in the short story category planned to stick around town, taking in some workshops and readings today. We try to match members of the community with the authors, finding just the right fit, and I know that some terrific friendships were formed last night between authors and their escorts.

This morning began in the best way possible: driving Linden MacIntyre to CBC’s Information Morning. What a wonderful man. He is very impressed with the Frye Festival and believes that we need to do a much better job of selling the rest of the country on our unique spin on a literary festival, so of course I’ve been thinking about that all day! Getting some substantial and meaningful national coverage will be a major goal for us for 2011. After driving Linden and then Nino Ricci (I got them some Tim Horton’s coffee on the way since the coffee machine with the Coffee Mate (yes, this still exists!) was just too terrible!) I ferried them back to the hotel for school visits and picked-up Noah Richler. What professionals. Each one of them was in the lobby at the precise time with a smile on his face. Local children’s author Jennifer McGrath-Kent joined me to discuss KidsFest, finishing up the day of “Frye-Day” programming for Information Morning.

When I was leaving CBC (for the last time!) I ran into Dominic Langlois, one of the featured authors from “Prelude: Emerging New Brunswick Authors” and he took the time to tell me how much he had enjoyed the experience and how thrilled he had been to participate.

I then returned home to download some video footage, and in the process destroyed my son’s video camera, so after a few hours of messing around with that, I bit the bullet and bought a new camera – I just couldn’t bear to lose the footage from the last couple of days and I really wanted to capture the events today, since I do believe that “showing” people what the Festival is all about will be much more effective than “telling”. (Our Youtube channel on our site should be filled with footage very soon.)

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It’s Frye-Day and CBC Radio’s local morning show is completely devoted to the Frye Fest, with information and interviews with authors.  I’m listening now to Linden MacIntyre being interviewed.  He’s talking about his own early life and relation with the Catholic Church, and about his life as a writer.  He’s picking up on the theme of yesterday’s roundtable, “Stories, and What They Do,” talking about what fiction can do that no other form of writing can do.  He’s talking about his own religious upbringing, and his understanding of the Bible, as stories and metaphors, perhaps without Frye’s great faith in the power of myth and metaphor.

Next up on CBC will be Nino Ricci.  Nino, Linden, and Annabel Lyon will be featured this evening at an all-English event, with Noah Richler as host.  We call it “An Evening of Canadian Lit.”  Most events are bilingual, French authors and English authors alternating.  Tonight’s event is all English, making a special appeal to English speakers who find all they can do with French authors usually is look and not listen.  Block it out.  Tonight we make it easy for them.

At noon today I’m looking forward to the roundtable “Writing Lives and Afterlives” with Noah Richler, Daniel Poliquin, Nino Richler, and Maryse Rouy.  The discussion will be about the relation between historical figures (famous or not) and the narratives (fictional or biographical) that writers create.  Jean Fugère will be moderator.  Fugère, from Quebec, has been coming to the Frye Fest for many years now, serving as moderator, MC, and interviewer.  He’s always well prepared, well read, and has a great ability to ask the right question.  I missed his interview yesterday with Noah Richler, occupied as I was with the very pleasant task of keeping Annabel Lyon company at dinner, along with my wife and a friend.

Nino is talking now, mostly about his Trudeau biography.  The narrative arc is from conservative, reactionary early Trudeau to “independent” and “outspoken” later Trudeau.  Public persona was arrogant; privately, friends thought him too shy even to get into politics.  It’s a brief interview with Nino, now over.  No discussion of “Origin of Species” or anything except the Trudeau bio.  Somewhat disappointing in its narrow scope, but good publicity for today’s roundtable and tonight’s event.

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Thursday, April 22, 2010

My day began with minor crises…losing an author (but then finding him!), illnesses in an author’s family, resulting in her cancelation, and a sick volunteer/KidsFest coordinator, but all was solved by noon.

The authors are arriving and it is so much fun to meet them (and match them with their much younger author photos!). The Festival Bookshop is open for business and there are piles of books just waiting to be purchased.

The noon-time round table was insanely eclectic, but worked incredibly well – where else would you get a doctor/novelist (Martin Winkler), a philosopher/novelist (Annabel Lyon), a Quebecois radical rapper/novelist (Biz) and an investigative journalist/novelist (Linden MacIntyre) all together talking about Stories and What They Do? The crowd was very happy (even though we ran out of simultaneous translation devices, for the first time ever!) and seemed so delighted to have had the opportunity to feed their imaginations in this way.

The book club with Steven Galloway was absolutely terrific! What a great guy! Steven is completely down to earth, modest and quite funny. The two “interviewers” (Suzanne Pelham-Belliveau and Laura Nicholson) did a great job of setting up the discussion and then Noah Richler, an audience member, stirred the pot! What great fun. I could have listened to Steven all day. He made us all think about civilization and what it means; the small things that we do every day to maintain our part of the “civilized” bargain.

I’m preparing right now for Soirée Frye, our annual evening extravaganza. I’ve been selling it this year as the ideal event to which to bring the “reluctant” Frye fan. We will see. We sent out tons of invitations and the event is “pay what you can”, so I’m hopeful that people will pack into our beautiful Capitol Theatre. There are four authors on the schedule, including Nino Ricci and Christian Bök (who arrived on the red-eye at noon today, looking exhausted!). Also, in our ongoing Frye Festival tradition of bringing an Anglophone and a Francophone musician together for the first time ever, we have Juno-winning Julie Doiron and Guillaume Arsenault on stage. As well, we will award $3,500 in prize money to high school students who have won our annual Frye Writing Contest.  We also donate $1,000 to two winning schools for the purchase of new books. I’ll be on stage with my co-host Mario Thériault, which probably means public humiliation for me, but hey, all in the name of literature! The reception to follow will be fun since all the authors will be there (they are all accompanied by members of our community) and there is talk of a big party afterwards…but I’m taking authors to interviews at CBC’s Information Morning at 6:40 tomorrow morning, so I don’t know how late I’ll be out!

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Day three of the Festival was simply a blur for me, so I didn’t manage to get to my computer. However, it was one of the best days I’ve ever spent at the Festival!

The day started early with an author pick-up at 7:45 am. I took Nancy Wilcox Richards to Frank L. Bowser School where I had arranged for two students to interview Nancy (with a reporter from CBC’s Information Morning) on her new book on bullying. The kids were so excited! They were both convinced that they will be famous as a result of the interview. (The cult of celebrity starts early!) She then met with three Grade 3 classes and chatted with them about the writing process (she even made them edit a page!).

From there I was fortunate to spend some time speaking with Guy Gavriel Kay, who is a new discovery for me. What a brilliant mind! Guy was to be the keynote speaker at a YMCA Literacy Luncheon so when I picked him up, I reminded him that he would be speaking (he didn’t have anything with him). He said, “Oh, I don’t believe in making notes before I speak, I like to wing it, it keeps me sharp”. Well, was he ever sharp! He had a brilliant talk for the high school students (who have committed to tutoring younger students two days a week after school for the entire school year). He spoke about the one room schoolhouse tradition of the older students teaching the younger ones and how something has been lost in our current system. The students loved him. (The reports back from his high school visit at Moncton High have been stellar: once again he walked into the room, asked the teacher what she was teaching (Victorian poetry) and proceeded to incorporate that into his chat with the students. One of the students in the class had read everything he had written and almost fainted when she heard that he was coming to her class!).

From there I briefly attended Beth Powning and Robert Moore’s great chat and then raced to Dieppe where we had a beautiful event at the restaurant L’Idyll, a gorgeous old house (the oldest standing building in Dieppe) where French novelist Martin Winkler spoke to a full house (we had to turn away many people…always a heartbreak for me!).

And then, I raced back to Moncton for my absolute favourite event: Café Underground. Every year this event just gets better and better. French and English high school students come together at The Empress Theatre to present their own poetry, prose and songs. This year, for the first time ever, one of the students presented a reading of a play she wrote. It was excellent! The calibre of the students’ writing is fabulous. In the afternoon, the students all met with a journalist (Jesse Robichaud, our Poet flyé), a musician, a music industry insider and a theatre professional for workshops. On occasion I do wonder why I do what I do, since this is my 11^th year of volunteering full time, but hearing the comments from the students last night about how important this event is to them, how much they look forward to the Frye Festival and how much it inspires them, I think I have enough fuel to go on for another 11 years! One of the students came up to me afterwards and asked me to sign her program. She had tears in her eyes as she told me it was her last year at the Festival – she had presented work for the last five years, but is in Grade 12 and going off to University next year. She told me that presenting every year at the Frye Festival was the highlight of her high school life. Wow. I told her that I couldn’t wait to invite her back as a published author!

I’m not sure why, but this year I’m kind of overwhelmed with the realization of the profound impact that this Festival is having on so many lives. I’m still not entirely certain how to articulate it (but I hope I can by Soirée Frye tonight!).

Better go find a replacement author to give a workshop on Saturday morning at KidsFest and pick-up Fred Stenson at the bus station!

Yesterday at 4pm I introduced Beth Powning, novelist, and Robert Moore, poet, and then, with about 40 others, enjoyed a lively and intimate conversation.  What sticks with me is their discussion of the false starts that each of them took in their writing career.  Beth, when she first moved to Canada from the U.S., tried writing short stories and, as she said, almost killed herself in the process.  Slowly she found her way, with a book of photographs accompanied by text, and several other kinds of writing, including a memoir Shadow Child, until she came into her own as a novelist.  Robert spent ten years writing plays until he realized he didn’t have the talent to create plots and his plays were all intended to set his characters up to speak poetically.  After the conversation 8 of us, including Beth and Robert and their spouses, went out to dinner.  Most pleasant.

At noon yesterday Guy Gavriel Kay was guest speaker at the YMCA literacy luncheon; I wasn’t there, but I heard he was brilliant.  He gave an extemporaneous speech that connected directly to the many literacy volunteers present.  I had heard him Tuesday evening, in conversation, and found him to be brilliant and witty, especially on the subject of science fiction and fantasy being genres separate and stigmatized.  There are two generations now, he said, of readers and writers for whom the stigma and the separation no longer apply.  He was heard to say that he would’ve liked to stay longer at the festival.

At noon I was at the ‘Frye Symposium’ roundtable on “Voyaging into the Unknown in Folk Tales and in Dreams.”  The four panelist (3 storytellers and folklorists, and 1 Jungian scholar and analyst) all focused on the forest as the image of the unknown where magical, unusual, transformative things happen.  Craig Stephenson talked about this in terms of Frye’s idea that “the fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”  This vision, this transformation, this reaching for the golden dawn, only comes through the experience of loss, descent, ashes.  For all four panelists the key moment is the moment when the individual finds herself lost in the forest.  The storytellers all love this moment, because it gives them freedom to take the story off the beaten path.  In this context, then, it was instructive for a member of the audience to rise and quote Frye, to the effect that the one great story, enclosing all others, is the story of loss of identity and recovery of identity, in the form of resurrection, golden age, etc.

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The editorial cartoon in this morning’s paper shows Frye in profile, very short legs,mostly all head, with a big double chin and the top half of the head covered in dark volcanic ash, and in the thought bubble the words “The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book … not the passenger jet.”  Frye’s just walking past a newspaper vending machine, and the headline on the newspaper is “Authors Cancel Because of Volcanic Ash.”  The volcano’s still working for us, even as it’s causing tremendous hardship to so many.  It’s definitely not a trade-off that we desire.

We lost two authors to the volcano, as I mentioned yesterday, and last evening we lost a storyteller to the snow crab fishery.  Apparently the crab fishery is in disarray this year, and Gilbert Sewell, Mi’kmag storyteller from the north of the province, who is also deeply involved in the fishery, was called to an emergency meeting at the exact moment he was to arrive in Moncton.  Host Ronald Labelle, an experienced storyteller himself, filled in, and made some other adjustments, and the evening was great – everything we’d hoped.  People are telling us we should have a storytelling event every year.

One thing I noticed is that the English storytellers (Kay Stone and Ronald) stood front and centre on the stage and relied on their words and facial expressions to tell their stories, whereas the French storytellers preferred to sit on the stool that was provided and made great use of hand and arm gestures, and bodily movements, to tell their stories.  They shaped their words and made us see what was happening.  I wonder if this might be true more generally of English and French professional storytellers.  But whether English or French, they kept us enthralled, for 3 hours!

Today at noon the focus on storytelling will continue, at a roundtable on “Voyaging into the Unknown in Folk Tales and in Dreams.”  The panelists include 3 experienced, professional storytellers, and one Jungian analyst, Craig Stephenson.  Key Frye concepts, such as katabasis, descent, and labyrinth, will be shadowing the discussion, and perhaps there will be a way to bring them out more explicitly.

At 4pm this afternoon two New Brunswick authors, Beth Powning and Robert Moore, will engage each other in conversation.  Beth recently published the novel “The Sea Captain’s Wife,” to wide acclaim.  Robert is one of the finest poets in this part of the world.  They will begin the discussion by talking about the ‘place’ they go to when they are creating a work of art, whether a poem or a novel or a memoir.  And how that (interior) place they go to is related to the place where they live.

There’s lots more going on today – the YMCA Literacy Luncheon featuring guest speaker Guy Gavriel Kay, Dialogue in French with Gracia Couturier and Christiane Duchesne, Book Club in French with Martin Winckler, Café Underground featuring performances by high school students of their own written works, and many school visits.  The authors almost always enjoy these school visits, even when things get a little confused sometimes.  Apparently Guy Gavriel Kay’s school thought he was coming on Thursday instead of Tuesday, but some quick thinking made it all come out all right.  With 30 authors, and probably close to 100 total classroom visits, it all goes amazingly smoothly, thanks to organizers Nancy Pipes (English) and Roxanne Richard (French).

Today’s highlight, for me, will be 8pm this evening when Craig Stephenson presents a talk entitled “Reading Frye Reading Jung.”  It looks like we may have a very good turn-out for this talk.  In the audience will be Alberto Manguel, who has accompanied Craig on his trip.  We – and they! – are hoping the ash cloud won’t prevent them from returning to France, sometime later this week.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Despite Eyjafjallajoekull’s spewing ash, we went ahead with an event today without its star, Peter Lanyon, who couldn’t fly out of Italy. The Festival’s relationship with Peter goes back to April 2005 when this world-renowned Creative Director attended the Frye Festival. He attended workshops, dialogues, round tables and lectures and was completely changed by his experience. He agreed to re-brand the Festival, helping us to get to the essence of the Festival. We went from “The Northrop Frye International Literary Festival” to “Frye Festival” – promising to feed the imagination, or “plein la tête” of everyone who participates.

But the Frye Festival also acted as a catalyst for Peter in his own creative work. He put the finishing touches on a book of poetry he had been working on, commissioned Acadian visual artist Raymond Martin to paint images for each line of poetry and the book Life in the Lawn: A PoemGarden was born.

The poems were adapted into French by local businessman and philanthropist Mario Thériault and novelist France Daigle (La vie est inscrite dans la pelouse: un jardin en poèmes), and all 21 pieces of art and poems were on display at the Moncton Public Library today (and all month).

About 30 people attended the opening, including artists, poets, business people, and library regulars. The paintings are simply breathtaking, but the poems and their carefully crafted French adaptations garnered much praise.

All of this got me thinking about the many wonderful synchronicities that happen continuously during the Festival…authors meeting authors, authors meeting booklovers, booklovers meeting artists, academics meeting booklovers…the authenticity of our community and the proximity that our community allows, just permits the magic to happen.

I’m looking forward to all of tonight’s events, but particularly the book launches at Navigator’s Pub, the conversation with Guy Gavriel Kay and of course the Evening of Storytellers.