The festival is officially launched, and the cold, rainy weather seems to be letting up, promising some sun and warmth.  We had an impressive roster of sponsors and politicians at the launch, including the Premier of the province, a Liberal, and Conservative Senator Rose-May Poirier, speaking for the federal government.  All praised our efforts, our success, and promised continued support.  “You are certainly doing all the right things,” Poirier said, in French.  Sweet words, in whatever language.  Several speakers made a point of quoting Frye’s words on the importance of imagination, and on the importance of basic literacy.

The big news, in the eyes of the media, is that we did actually lose 2 authors to the volcano, contrary to what I said yesterday.  “Volcanic ash cloud casts shadow on Metro” is the headline on the front page of the local newspaper.  We’re always glad for any publicity we can get.  The two authors are somewhat peripheral to the festival, so we’re not really hurting.  The big worry was Craig Stephenson, but he’s here.  I look forward to meeting Craig this afternoon and driving him to a local high school, where he will meet a psychology class.

At 6pm this evening, Guy Gavriel Kay, acclaimed writer of historical fantasy, will talk about his new novel, “Under Heaven.”  He’s on a countrywide book tour, with a two-day stop in Moncton.  Tomorrow, Wednesday, he’s the invited speaker at the YMCA Literacy Luncheon, which celebrates the many high-school age volunteers who give their time to help others come, in Glenna Sloan’s words, to “a love of reading.”

At 7pm this evening we have gathered 6 storytellers, English and French, who will entertain us and give us examples of the magic of telling a story, of the sort that comes out of the oral tradition.  Ronald Labelle, good friend and Professor at University of Moncton, specialist in folklore and the oral tradition, has organized the evening for us, and will host the event.  The best-known of the storytellers are André Lemelin from Quebec, and Kay Stone from Winnipeg.  Gilbert Sewell, from Papineau First Nation in New Brunswick, will also be here.  Gilbert was at our first festival in 2000.

Local French-language publisher, Éditions Perce-Neige, will host an event at 10pm, featuring 4 of their newly published authors.  Though my wife, Elaine, is francophone, from Quebec originally, my own French is bit shaky, and I may skip this all-French event.  It’s going to be a busy-enough day, and we’ll be tired.

The Festival has set up Headquarters in a room at the Delta Beausejour Hotel, where all the authors stay.  People are there almost around the clock, working to make sure everything goes smoothly.  Our two paid staff are Rachelle Dugas, executive director, and Roxanne Richard, assistant.  Everyone else is a volunteer, including Dawn Arnold, President of the Frye Board, who works tirelessly at every level, fundraising, mixing with politicians, and details of programming.  We have hundreds of volunteers, helping with such things as driving authors to schools, selling tickets at the door, introducing authors, etc.  It is, as Nella Cotrupi noted with such warm words when she was here in 2002, an extraordinary community effort.

Congratulations to our friends and colleagues in Moncton!  We wish you the very best, and look forward to hearing from you.

We wish we were there!!

Update: Here’s a report from Ed Lemond on day 1:

The Official Launch of the Festival is this morning at 11am, with bells and whistles, musicians, sponsors and politicians, and our own Poet Flyé, Jesse Robichaud, whose task is to follow the festival for a week, make notes and come up a long poem to present at the closing next Sunday.  Since Jesse is also a reporter at the local newspaper, we’re assured of some good coverage. There’s snow on the ground, so it must be Frye Festival time.  We always get at least one snowstorm during the festival, or at least a dusting.  In 2001 the plane carrying Robert Bly and Marie-Claire Blais had to be diverted to Halifax because of a major snowstorm.  They finally got here in the early morning hours, in time for their events. We’re lucky that we haven’t lost any authors to the volcano.  Craig Stepenson, scheduled to give a talk Wed. evening (“Reading Frye Reading Jung”), fortunately decided to visit friends in Toronto before coming to Moncton.  He left Paris last Wed. or Thur., before flights were grounded.  I’ll meet him tomorrow and drive him to a local school, for a ‘school visit.’  It will be interesting to see how a Jungian Analyst based in Paris, France, addresses a class of high school students in Riverview, New Brunswick. The main event today, after the Official Launch, is called Prelude: Emerging Writers of New Brunswick, featuring 6 young writers, 3 French, 3 English, each with one or two books to their credit, just beginning their careers.  8pm, we’ll be there.  Tomorrow things start to heat up.

The Frye Festival gets under way in Moncton on the 19th.

The full schedule of events can be seen here.

Cross-posted in the journal’s Frye Festival Archive here

Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson

Speech on the Occasion of the Opening of the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival

Moncton, Thursday, April 24, 2003

It’s a pleasure for me to be here tonight to inaugurate the Northrop Frye Literary Festival. As many of you know, John Ralston Saul was instrumental in encouraging the Aberdeen Cultural Centre to have this festival and it is our joy to see that it has come to fruition in such an ample and fecund state.

As Governor General of Canada, it is a privilege to honour one of our greatest thinkers, teachers and literary critics. Northrop Frye came from Moncton. He was educated in this school that has now become the Aberdeen Cultural Centre. So in my official function, I am delighted to welcome you all and to participate with you in this truly literary endeavour.

But before I was Governor General, I was a student at the University of Toronto. After graduating with my B.A. from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, I worked on my M.A. and took a course at Victoria College from none other than Northrop Frye, who had just written his seminal book, Anatomy of Criticism, about six years before. The course I took – and I notice there are several people here, including Dennis Lee, who took that course – was one which helped to shape my mind and my approach to literature.

It’s hard for us to imagine today that Northrop Frye was in the avant-garde of literary criticism, carving out a place for himself and for the way in which he looked at literature and encouraged his students to look at literature. With hindsight we can say: “Of course, we knew that’s what he was getting at all along.”

But at the time, it was not nearly so self-evident. In the academy, there was much grumbling about his approach to the word and to language and to literature. Those of us – and there were thirty of us, I think, in that graduate year – who took his course had no doubt that he was opening our minds to another way of looking at things and that he was also bringing a uniquely Canadian approach to our understanding of world literature.

So this personal knowledge of Northrop Frye as a teacher is one that I treasure deeply. And it continued for the following year, because I was appointed as a lecturer in the undergraduate English department at Victoria College while pursuing further courses towards a Ph.D. At that time, he was Principal of Victoria and took a very personal and affectionate interest in all of his staff and I think particularly in his young staff.

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The child sex abuse scandal that’s rocking the Roman Catholic Church guarantees that Linden MacIntrye’s The Bishop’s Man will continue to chart the bestseller list for a while longer.  Winner of the Giller Prize last fall, it’s well worth the read, topical or not.  In an interview last fall, in connection with his winning the Giller, MacIntyre talked about what draws him to the novel.  As a journalist with CBC’s ‘The Fifth Estate’ he has covered the story of the church’s attempts to cover up incidents of sexual abuse.  The novel allows him to do something that he cannot do as a journalist.  It allows him to go inside the minds of his characters.  It allows him to inhabit his characters and bring them to life as full human beings, with all their virtues and vices.

In his book This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, Noah Richler takes up this same question as to what makes the novel special and seemingly immune to constant threats to kill it off.  “What sets the novel apart is the ‘imaginative leap’ that its author makes in order to create and then inhabit a character, and that its readers make in turn.  This simple dynamic is what gives the novel its identity. … And in this assumption that readers make – that we are all, at some base level, alike – lies the magnanimity, but also the aggressive and even colonizing impulse of the novel.   For the novel is a hegemonic thing, righteous on behalf of a certain conception of humankind’s place in the world.”

The novel does what other forms of storytelling (such as the epic and the mythic stories that we associate with “oral” societies’) cannot do.  Again quoting Richler: “The novel says, ‘For me to know you and portray you in good faith, I must remember that you and I are fundamentally alike.  Perhaps only circumstance is what has made us different’.”  Novelists do their work by “putting themselves in their protagonists’ shoes and making that imaginative leap, no matter their creations’ extremities of character.”  There is no absolute evil in the novel, as there is in the epic and in creation myths.  The worst characters in a novel are still human beings, like all the rest of us.  “This quality puts the novel close to be an ‘end of narrative,’ if you like – a form of story that is as versatile and enduring as the belief in human rights that it reflects.”

Others have less faith, or no faith at all, in the novel’s versatility and endurance.  Books heralding the death of the novel are nothing new, and the latest is David Shields’ Reality Hunger.  The novel as we know it, with its linear plot and defined character, is, Shields believes, dead – or worse, irrelevant.  “Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in a neatly wrapped-up revelation.  Life, though – standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the Web – flies at us in bright splinters.”  Our reality is fragmented, chaotic, asymmetrical, elusive and noisy, and since reality is what we hunger for, the conventional novel is obviously inadequate for the task.  It’s a throwback to a bygone era.  We need something new.  Shields’ prescription is what he calls the ‘lyric essay’ – based on the collage technique, the structural equivalent of our splintered reality.

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