STARFest is an amazing time of year when local booklovers can get up close and personal with several of their favourite authors, and even a few that they didn't know they loved yet.
We're right in the middle of the 2016 festival with five events down including such spectacular literary stars as Ian Brown, Gail Anderson-Dargatz (fresh off a new book release), and Olympian Clara Hughes. Hughes is probably best known for being fast on the speed skating and velodrome tracks but athletic success took a second place in her memoir Open Heart, Open Mind. Her book about her struggles with depression helped to bring attention to how mental health issues can affect those people even at the peak of their physical health. Her event at the Arden Theatre also functioned as a fundraiser for local mental health initiatives.
STARFest ends with its last event Oct. 25. There are six more great authors set to take the stage before the curtains come down on another year.
Camilla Gibb
Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. with host Diana Davidson at Forsyth Hall. SOLD OUT.
It's hard to believe that it's been 10 years since Camilla Gibb last came to the St. Albert Public Library but not as hard to believe that she even came here at all. Gibb, the internationally acclaimed author of four novels including Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life, and The Beauty of Humanity Movement, stopped by on a late November Sunday afternoon to read from her third work, the exquisite Sweetness in the Belly. She was the writer in residence at the University of Alberta at the time, so she didn't have to travel as far then as she is doing now.
She now brings a non-fiction title to her CV. This is Happy is a profound look into the author's personal life and relationships, motherhood, a redefined family unit, and the struggle to stay connected in spite of the myriad forces that work to pull us all apart.
"There are central preoccupations that run through all my work, regardless of characters, plot or setting," she began. "I seem to be consistently exploring issues of identity and belonging, particularly where lives have been fractured in some way."
Never has this hit so close to home for her as in the last few years. She separated from her long-term partner and then gave birth to the fractured couple's baby. The simultaneous tearing away and building up of the family unit was too much for Gibb to bear while still managing her writing work.
"I lost the ability to write fiction for a time. My life fell apart and I, to use a cliché, rather lost the plot. I created a new plot through writing a memoir," she continued, noting in a way that only a writer can, "Narrative is essential to us making sense of our lives."
This intense self-examination will certainly make for some heady discussion during tomorrow's event. Gibb is no stranger to deep, philosophical studies of people in strife. She trained in social anthropology, after all. Much of her fiction work looks at cross-cultural relationships.
In Sweetness in the Belly, the protagonist Lilly is a white woman raised by a Muslim leader in Ethiopia after her parents were killed in a car crash. It's a country that Gibb was already intimate with after doing some academic fieldwork there. She said that she decided to write that book to cover some humanistic ground that she missed in her university papers.
"While cultural specificity is important to recognize, I do think as a species we all struggle with similar issues of looking for meaning, purpose and belonging in our lives and a desire to live lives of dignity," she continued.
"I didn't feel what I had written about Harar academically really did the place and its people justice. I started the book before 9/11. After 9/11, I realized that this book would be read in a very different political climate. Although this didn't change what I was writing about, it gave more political importance to some of the ideas about Islam in the book – particularly the variety in its expression, such as Sufism, mystical practices, the veneration of saints, and the notion of jihad as an internal struggle."
Peter Robinson
Friday, Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. with host Wayne Arthurson at the Arden Theatre. Tickets are $10.
Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks has had a stellar career of solving mysteries and murders over three decades. Thank author Peter Robinson for the fictional modern-day master sleuth who offers as much in terms of wit as wile as he gets to the bottom of every misdeed that crosses his desk.
One might consider Banks to be a type of contemporary Sherlock Holmes character and, with the author's British heritage, you might not be that far off base. The career of Robinson's protagonist is almost as prolific as that of the character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Banks has masterfully deduced his way through two-dozen full novels along with a heaping handful of other short stories and novellas. Some of these works have been adapted for television in recent years, doing much to expand the popularity of both the author and his creation.
Consider this author to be prolific too, which probably means that there's no shortage of interesting crimes that he can scheme up for his hero to solve.
Donna Morrissey
Saturday, Oct. 22 at 2 p.m. at Forsyth Hall. Tickets are $5.
Donna Morrissey isn't the first person to write about Newfoundland and its people but she does it in a way that nobody else does. Kit's Law, Downhill Chance, Sylvanus Now, What They Wanted (inspired by her time living in Grande Prairie), and The Deception of Livvy Higgs all dealt with the struggles and losses these steadfast East Coasters face, how they deal with the pain, and a fine description of the spiritual road that they all take to become more enlightened at the end.
Now she's back with a new work called The Fortunate Brother, just published last month. It's told from the perspective of Kyle, the titular brother, but the author explains that it's a multi-layered work. It tells the story of one family coping with their other son's tragic death in an Alberta tar sands operation while facing the judicial system investigating a mysterious murder that occurred right on their doorstep. And that's not all either.
"There is the added drama of Kyle's mother's diagnoses of breast cancer, and his father's demise into the bottle. Other secrets come to surface and …" she digressed, momentarily, "I guess it's a page-turner, as they say."
Morrissey said that it's inspired by her own story and that of her brothers. She works hard to flesh out these characters so that they aren't simply copies of the real people. Perhaps that's another good reason why she doesn't crank out these books every year or two like some authors.
Frankly, she sounds like a bit of a perfectionist but the results are in her immense fan base and in her critical accolades.
"I take immense time with my characters. I research thoroughly and I rewrite constantly. Each line has to flow perfectly, and each time I rewrite, I change huge blobs of writing so the rhythm is perfect, as are the pitch and tone, the psychological landscape of the characters as well as the settings the stories take place in," she continued, with aplomb.
"My publisher and agent are very patient. They nudge me along, but in the end, they would never sacrifice the quality of my writing for quantity. Thank God. Meanwhile, my house and office is a freakin' mess."
Michael Redhill (a.k.a. Inger Ash Wolfe)
Saturday, Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. with host Marty Chan at Forsyth Hall. Tickets are $5.
As an author familiar with a wide variety of genres including poetry, stage plays as well as fiction, Michael Redhill is really, really good at making things up.
At one point, he decided that he needed to make up something about himself. He created a nom de plume: Inger Ash Wolfe. It allowed him the freedom to explore new literary territory in a way that he couldn't have done otherwise.
"We are already do many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable," Redhill wrote in a revealing Globe and Mail essay, years after his persona had taken a foothold and garnered much speculation about the writer's true identity.
"I decided I'd write The Calling as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me."
That novel, the first under the pseudonym, played much with the idea of hidden identity anyway, so it worked. He's written as Wolfe ever since, up to last year's The Night Bell.
Dianne Warren
Sunday, Oct. 23 at 2 p.m. with host Marina Endicott at Forsyth Hall. Tickets are $5.
Don't confuse author Dianne Warren with the songstress of the same name. This Dianne Warren is the Prairie-based writer of short stories, stage plays and now, two novels. She writes from the heart and her personal history steeped in Saskatchewan geography and psychology. Some call it dry humour.
Cool Water, her first novel, was set in a small town called Juliet with all of the townspeople playing their parts as only they can, all over the course of just a single day. It's as richly observant as a Garrison Keillor work, but with more sand dunes. Dry humour? There's nothing drier than a dune, if I might say so.
Liberty Street, published just last year, is a more focused work as one character tries to see the world but ends up right back at home – another small town in Saskatchewan – to figure her life out. If anyone is coming to STARFest to champion the prairie novel, it's Warren.
Anita Rau Badami
Tuesday, Oct. 25 at 7 p.m. with host Angie Abdou at the Arden Theatre. Tickets are $10.
There's little that India-born Anita Rau Badami hasn't done in the world of published writing. She sold her first short story when she was only 18. She has worked as an advertising copywriter, freelanced for major Indian newspapers and published stories in children's magazines. Her graduate thesis became her first novel, Tamarind Mem, published worldwide two decades ago now.
In that time, she has written three other novels including The Hero's Walk, which won the Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize, was named the Washington Post's Best Book, and was also nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Oh, and she was also recently the writer in residence at Athabasca University so she's no stranger to Alberta.
Throughout all of her work, she has written about the complexities of Indian family life and with the cultural gap that emerges when Indians move to the west. Characters, she explains, are necessary ingredients for effective storytelling and she chooses to portray characters who inhabit two cultural territories to establish much of the conflict.
"My characters … are in the process of negotiating a space for themselves between inherited histories and their own lives, or are engaged in a conflict with older generations who might still inhabit the past in some way," she began. "The intersection of cultures, the space between generations both spatial and temporal, these are treasure troves for a novelist."
Of course, the conflict isn't all internal. India has faced much political and military strife culminating in a variety of atrocities including the Golden Temple massacre, assassinations, and even the Air India bombing. To be a contemporary Indian writer, even if she no longer lives in that country, means to write about all of those big moments that influence the collective psychology of its one billion plus inhabitants.
She wrote Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? to bring some of those events into her work.
"I was living in India when the Golden Temple Massacre occurred and happened to be a witness, through the window of a bus, to the murder of a stranger, a Sikh man, the day after the then prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated. A year later, when the Air India flight was bombed, my neighbour in Chennai died," she explained.
"So in a strange sort of way, I was involved in two incidents which were related but which happened in two different countries. It took me 20 years to process this link, which had political as well as historical links between two countries which were once British colonies. The thing that compelled me to write my novel was the fact that none of the perpetrators of murder in both countries was brought to justice."
So yes, her books are generally serious, she admits, but "there is a good dash of humour in the mix; life isn't all sad, there is plenty to laugh about, you know."
On that note, it might be interesting to note that she is also an avid visual artist, an activity that she says feeds her writing and vice versa.
She looks forward to coming to St. Albert to talk to her readers.
"Writing assumes another life when it is read, so meeting readers, chatting with them, is what I will be doing and getting a lot of pleasure out of it."
