“One of the things I always regretted was not grabbing Lorna Crozier’s ass,” says author Dave Bidini. It was WordFest 2010, at the party after the after-party, when someone turned out the lights. “The room was dark save for the glow of the moon coming through the windows,” Bidini remembers. Then somebody hooked up a laptop to the room’s stereo system and started playing music. “It became this f—ing insane dance party.” The room was filled with literary heavyweights like Crozier, Patrick Lane, Stephen Heighton and book industry titans Anne Collins and Louise Dennys. “They were all acting like five-year-olds at a pool,” Bidini says. “It was one of the blessed few times where Can-Lit really tore the tweed of its fabric.”
At one point, musician C. R. Avery—inspired, perhaps, by the sort of consumables common at such events—complimented Crozier on the fitness of her 62-year-old Governor General’s Award-winning bum. “Touch it!” she commanded both Avery and Bidini. Respectfully, but regrettably, they both demurred.
Literature reigns as the least ass-grabby of the arts. After all, both writing and reading are inherently anti-social activities. Authors spend years writing their books in solitary and usually impoverished silence. Their readers lift the books from shelves in bookshops and hushed libraries. They read alone in bedrooms, on beaches or on buses, their eyes drawn down and away from fellow travellers. A book is rarely performed. Instead, a book is imagined—first by the author, then by the reader—and almost always alone.
But for a few weeks each fall, the writers are let out. They emerge from their home offices, blink in the sunlight, and hit the fall festival circuit. With their newest books in hand and name tags leashed around their necks, they read aloud on stages for five or eight “but please not more than 10” minutes at a time. Afterwards, they sit in folding chairs at folding tables to smile at, and sign books for, a line of readers consisting mostly of, let us be frank, white women of a certain age. Then the writers gather in hotel hospitality rooms where they drink free wine, ignore the trays of sweaty cheese, and wonder if maybe, just maybe, a party will break out like the one at WordFest in 2010.
The literary world may not seem like the ass-grabbing bunch, but they definitely know how to party.
WordFest, Calgary’s international writers’ festival, has been a major stop on the book festival for the last 20 years. Don Stein of the Banff Centre first conceived of a writers’ festival presented in Calgary and Banff in early 1996. He contacted Darlene Quaife, then president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, who came up with the name WordFest, and reached out to Peter Oliva, the then owner of Pages on Kensington. “I was doing a lot of author events at my shop, so Darlene and I knew each other pretty well,” Oliva says. “She asked if I had any other people in mind who might be great on a committee to get the show rolling.” Oliva, Stein and Quaife assembled a team that reads like an honour roll of Calgary’s literary community at the time: booksellers Kerry Longpré and Eric Jensen, playwright John Murrell, authors Bob Stallworthy and Fred Stenson, Calgary Herald books editor Ken McGoogan, and representatives from Calgary Public Library, Mount Royal College and CBC Radio, among others. Longpré describes this bookish gathering as the “coming together of curious people.”
The organizers wanted to create an event showcasing the scope of Canadian literary talent. WordFest’s founders wanted the festival to feel more populist than stuffily literary—the sort of unpretentious event that engages with readers and broadens Calgary’s book audience. “A wider readership is the most important ticket I know to building empathy towards each other, and between cultures,” Oliva says. “That’s what books do.”
Once a committee was formed, Stein called his friend Anne Green and offered her the job of festival producer. Green was working for the Canada Council for the Arts in Ottawa at the time. “I was a little bit surprised,” she says, but felt her experience putting on theatrical events would serve her well at WordFest’s helm. “Building an event is building an event.” There was something about Calgary’s audacious spirit, too, that compelled Green to take on the task of helping create a festival from the ground up. “Had it been Toronto, it wouldn’t have been possible. But Calgary has a can-do attitude. We say, ‘Don’t tell us we can’t do it. We will show you.'”
Green admits she was “naive” about the literary community at the time, and her selection as producer raised a few eyebrows. “Most people were happy, but not everybody was happy,” she says. Green possessed little experience on Canada’s book scene, and some questioned a vetting system that would select a producer who lacked relationships with authors and publishers. Many local writers, reflexively Ontario-phobic, also wondered why someone from out east was being brought in to captain a Calgary festival. Green remembers someone saying, “We don’t need someone from Toronto telling us what to do,” even though Green had been an Albertan since the 1970s, went to theatre school here, and had never lived in Toronto.
Green, though, had little time to dwell on such grievances. “I had a steering committee, $25,000 and a festival to open in five months.” Green and the WordFest staff took over Stallworthy’s Writers’ Guild office in the old 10th Avenue YMCA. “Poor Bob had no idea what was coming his way,” Green says. She also converted the room in a friend’s house where she was living into a secondary festival headquarters complete with desk, phone line, and a fax machine she’d brought from Ottawa. Green and marketing director Helen Moore-Parkhouse spent hours sending out grant applications, press releases and author request letters.
WordFest did not start small. “We knew it had to come out really strong,” Green says. “If it didn’t, it would take a really long time to get going. Calgary is not forgiving in that way.” That first WordFest consisted of two dozen events over four days in Calgary and Banff, and featured 50 authors. The list included such Can-Lit luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Wayson Choy, Lorna Crozier, Tomson Highway, Patrick Lane, Paul Quarrington and Guy Vanderhaeghe.
The inaugural Wordfest had a two dozen events over four days in Calgary and Banff. Producing such an event takes its toll on the staff.
“I was so frickin’ tired that year,” Green says. “But people were extremely generous.” Perhaps no one more than Margaret Atwood who, after noticing Green’s fatigue, sat her down in the cafe next to the Uptown Stage and Screen. “She gave me a little lecture on survival and on dealing with writers,” Green says. “Bless her heart.” Green won’t repeat most of what Atwood told her that afternoon over coffee and muffins, only that the little lecture was “a total gift” and stood her in “totally great stead” during her 15-year tenure as festival producer.
Producing an event the size of WordFest requires a year-round effort by a committed staff, but according to Mary Kapusta, WordFest’s former marketing manager, festival mode begins ramping up in late spring. “By August, it is on,” Kapusta says, “and it is incredible.” The WordFest office begins to fill with books and volunteers. Programs are printed and press releases sent out. Logistical fires, small and large, get identified and extinguished. Once the festival itself begins, the staff goes on what Kapusta terms “the WordFest diet.” “You don’t have time to eat. You just go.” The hospitality-suite cheese the writers ignore becomes emergency rations for starving WordFest staff.
In spite of the craziness and malnutrition, Kapusta loved the energy of the festival. “It is impossible to run around with your head cut off and not feel some sense of importance,” she says. She especially enjoyed the afternoon debriefings during the “magic time” between the early-afternoon events and the evening program when “the real funny gossip came out.” Staff and volunteers would talk about, say, an author who suddenly disappeared, the cheques that hadn’t arrived, or who left with whom when the hospitality suite shut down.
The ever-ignored sweaty cheese tray.
As delicious as the backstage gossip can be, the most memorable WordFest moments—for audiences, staff and writers alike—happened onstage. There was the time at the first festival in 1996 when Greg Hollingshead shared an event with Margaret Atwood and absolutely dazzled an audience who he knew had come to see her rather than him. There was the event in 2001 when American novelist Richard Ford asked Robert Kroetsch whether or not he tries to “be Chekhov.” In other words, does he strive for greatness? Kroetsch replied “Why the f–k not?”, perhaps the only correct answer to Ford’s tricky question. There was the local news anchor who found herself woefully unprepared and overmatched as she interviewed a mischievous Dany LaFerrière. There was the ode Tomson Highway performed for his brother that left a theatre audience in tears, the time when a train whistle sounded outside while Todd Babiak read a passage from his novel that featured a train, and the time Chuck Palahniuk had mysterious boxes delivered to the WordFest office in advance of his event with strict instructions that they were not to be opened before his arrival. Kapusta helped Palahniuk unpack. The boxes were filled with inflatable toys Palahniuk used during his performance. “Writers can be a little kooky sometimes,” she says.
Shelley Youngblut, who took over the role of WordFest director last May, looks forward to another festival filled with memorable moments, both on- and offstage. She hopes to build upon WordFest’s venerable 20-year history while at the same time seeding for the next generation of festival-goers. She likens her role to a wedding planner. “In four days I am planning almost a hundred weddings,” she says. “Some of them have multiple brides, and every bride matters.” The readers, the wedding guests in her metaphor, are her first priority. “This is a readers’ festival,” she says. She and her team aim to create an environment where people can have fun and lose themselves in the experience of communing with authors—both those they already love and those they newly discover.
Youngblut’s first task as director was to address what she calls the festival’s “venue challenge.” Unlike the Vancouver Writers’ Festival, which takes place on Granville Island, and Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, which occupies Toronto’s Harbourfront, WordFest has always lacked a central meeting place for both writers and audiences. As a remedy, this year’s WordFest will borrow an idea from the High Performance Rodeo and will operate a pop-up bar, located in Motel, across from the Big Secret Theatre. With the OctoberFest Lab, WordFest will finally have a literary town square. “We are creating a hub where people can congregate before and after the events,” Youngblut says. The lab will host free readings from Calgary authors and feature the festival’s first adult spelling bee.
The 2015 WordFest also marks the uncoupling of the festival from the Banff Centre. The Centre’s new administration decided to focus on nurturing its own author events rather than continuing the relationship with WordFest. So, for the first time in 20 years, WordFest authors won’t be piling into vans and heading west to spend their last festival weekend in Banff. Some see this as a net loss for the festival. No doubt, many regular authors to the festival will miss their time at the Centre, and Banff was a major draw for visiting writers, especially for big names like Mordecai Richler and Martin Amis. But Youngblut sees the loss of Banff as an opportunity to “Calgarify” the festival and to tap into the audacity that makes our city unique. Banff had the beauty, no doubt. But Calgary has the bravado.
This bravado keeps the writers coming back. By every metric, WordFest has been a success. The festival never lost money, and attendance numbers have remained stable for 20 years. For Longpré, though, the most important measure of success is the festival’s “intangible reputation.” Writers want to come to WordFest. Then they want to return. Eight authors who presented at the first WordFest will be back this year for the 20th edition.
Among them will be Dave Bidini—with his new book, Keon and Me—who will make his sixth WordFest appearance. “Calgary is really pretty bananas in a beautiful way,” Bidini says. He adores the city’s adventurous art scene, both as a musician and as an author. “It’s wilder in Calgary,” he says. “People talk about the wild west. I don’t think about it in those cliché frontier cowboy terms. I think of it in terms of expression. In terms of daring. In terms of informality. Passion and truth and all that.” WordFest has tapped into this local brand of boldness for 20 years. This is the attitude that coaxed Anne Green away from her staid Ottawa office back in 1996, and is the energy Youngblut plans to harness moving forward. And it is the same audacity that inspired 2010’s legendary after-after-party.
Coincidentally, Lorna Crozier will also return to WordFest this year. Will Bidini finally take her up on her offer? “The moment may have passed,” he says.
Now read this
If you have a platinum pass and six free days, then, blissfully, you can take in all four-dozen WordFest events. Otherwise, here are just a few not to miss, including one breakfast, two freebies, a workshop, a cabaret and a 20th-anniversary shindig that promises to inspire, if not a novel, at least a tawdry limerick.
Between them, this trifecta of male talent has a truckload of National Magazine Awards, three Governor General’s, a Giller, a Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize and an Order of Canada. See Don Gillmor, Nino Ricci and John Vaillant at the Tuesday Night Showcase. Tuesday, Oct. 13 at Arts Commons, Big Secret Theatre, 7 p.m. $20.
A late night for Lawrence Hill—Book of Negroes, The Illegal—at the Arts Commons (with Christian Bök) is followed by an early morning appearance: meet him at Sidewalk Citizen Bakery, where the cinnamon buns will more than make up for any lack of sleep. A Morning With Lawrence Hill, 8:30 a.m. At the Simmons Building. $20.
Don’t deepen your dorky-parent rep by admitting to your kids that you’ve never heard of Kenneth Oppel. The beloved YA author of the Silverwing series and The Boundless is at Owl’s Nest Books. Wednesday, Oct. 14. 7 p.m. Free.
What would Scaredy Squirrel do? Well, he’d definitely brush his teeth before a book reading. Melanie Watt (of Scaredy Squirrel and Chester fame; her new book features a grieving fly) joins Good Times Travel Agency and Toads on Toast writer Linda Bailey, Thursday, Oct. 15. At John Dutton Theatre, Calgary Public Library, 10 a.m. $10.
Poets throw the best parties. Seriously. The Poetry Cabaret, with special guests Derek Beaulieu, Lorna Crozier, Ulrikka S. Gernes, Monica Kidd, Patrick Lane, Peter Midgley, Damian Rogers and Nick Thran. Thursday, Oct. 15. At Glenbow Museum Theatre, 7 p.m. $20.
How any reader could resist a book titled Better Living Through Plastic Explosives we know not. Join Zsuzsi Gartner (she of that title), Greg Hollingshead, Irina Kovalyova and Tom Wayman at Pages on Kensington, Friday, Oct. 16 at 5 p.m. Free.
Could you be the next Art Spiegelman? There’s only one way to find out: attend Richard Van Camp’s graphic-novel-writing workshop, at which he will share the secrets of his trade. Saturday, Oct. 17. At Westin Hotel, Eau Claire Room, 10 a.m. $20.
Calgary’s own Giller Prize-winning Will Ferguson takes the stage, along with his friend Jean-Claude Munyezamu, to discuss his new travel monologue, Roadtrip Rwanda. Saturday, Oct. 17, 4 p.m. At Arts Commons, Big Secret Theatre. $20.
The 20th Anniversary Celebration includes Authors Tell All plus an event featuring 2015 Anne Green Award-winner Dave Bidini and special musical literary guests. Saturday, Oct. 17, 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. At Glenbow Museum Theatre. $45 each ($80 for both), which includes an 8:30 p.m. party.—Jacquie Moore