Bugs Bunny was never the barker to promo for STARFest directly, but if the wascally cartoon wabbit could, I’m sure that he would offer his familiar refrain: “Overture, curtains, lights! This is it: the night of nights!”
The cavalcade of literati commences tonight and carries on for nearly two weeks as 11 authors of various stripes bring their books through town. It’s a rare opportunity to meet with some of your favourite writers including Donna Morrissey, Peter Robinson or Anita Rau Badami who has the privilege of wrapping up the last event on Tuesday, Oct. 25.
In this two-part feature, I’m going to check in with a few of the frontrunners, starting with Globe and Mail journalist and non-fiction scribe Ian Brown.
And don’t forget about the gala evening with Clara Hughes, the six-time summer and winter olympic champion who arrives this Friday to talk about her book Open Heart, Open Mind. The very personal memoir details the athlete’s struggles with depression. Tickets are $55 and all proceeds are going towards St. Albert mental health initiatives.
Details and ticket information can all be found at www.starfest.ca.
But as for tonight... what heights we'll hit, on with the show, this is it.
Tonight at 7 p.m. with host Jana Pruden at Forsyth Hall. SOLD OUT.
Turning 60 was more than just another birthday for acclaimed Globe and Mail journalist and non-fiction maestro Ian Brown. The occasion also afforded him the chance to reflect on his years and discuss the psychological, intellectual and physical shifts within him. He did so beginning with a diary of Facebook posts, a decidedly youthful way to connect with his friends and readers.
He then took a year’s worth of those posts and turned it into a book called Sixty: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning? A Diary of My Sixty-First Year.
Some of his other works include What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men, and Man Overboard. The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son, won British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the country’s richest non-fiction prize.
Brown wasn’t available for comment so I’m left to speculate on what he might be working on next. If you make it to tonight’s appearance, let me know.
Saturday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. with host Laurie Greenwood at Forsyth Hall. Tickets are $5.
“It’s a bit of a homecoming for me,” she began, remembering the Millet farm where she once lived only two decades ago. Now based in B.C. both personally and literarily, as evidenced by A Recipe for Bees and The Cure for Death by Lightning. Place is just as important as people in her stories and that’s never been more true than with her novel.
The Spawning Grounds doesn’t just have a title that evokes much of the imagery of her ‘west of the Rockies’ roots. The family saga immerses itself in its geography and the history of the Thompson-Shasta region while dealing with cross-cultural relationships between people of Caucasian and Indigenous descent.
“I’m going back to the home landscape simply because I’m in love with it,” she continued, admitting that she devotes so much of her attention to that aspect of storytelling that the scenery almost becomes a character. “In this book, I ended up taking it a step further.”
She uses magic realism to flesh out that character that participates in the narrative and how the other human characters interact with it based on their differing worldviews. She writes about how their mental and physical health is affected along with their relationship to that changing environment while playing with the boundary lines between our real and imagined worlds and between our urban and natural environments. Like she says, “It’s got many levels to it.”
She ain’t kidding. She’s the first writer that I’ve heard of to have ever attempted this literary strategy and just to hear about that process alone makes her event worth attending. Also, the book only came out a few weeks ago so she’s still fresh and energetic in the book promotion stage. This promises to be a lively and edifying event on the STARFest schedule.
Sunday, Oct. 16 at 2 p.m. with host Thomas Trofimuk at Forsyth Hall. SOLD OUT.
There’s much to be said for Plum Johnson who published her first book, the RBC Taylor Prize winning memoir They Left Us Everything, in her late sixties. It was a personal account of the year after her mother passed away, a time fraught not just with grieving but also the unavoidable housekeeping business that comes hand in hand with it.
“The story of my book is really the story of so many people my age. They used to describe us as the Sandwich Generation ... and then we were called the Club Sandwich because our children started to move back home and our parents started to get sick. And then my quip is that we then all become toast,” she joked. “That’s what happened to me.”
When her mother died, Johnson chronicled the aftermath with as much wit as she could muster under the circumstances, and it’s no small measure of wit at that. She spent months upon months in the lakefront house that was her childhood home all the while cleaning, packing, organizing, reminiscing, and deciding what long-held mementoes to part with. It was a place that had stood as an ongoing collection of everything under the sun over half a century. There were 23 rooms stuffed with family history, antiques, and oxygen tanks.
One probably doesn’t have to stretch the imagination much to envision the clutter or the stress that she inherited. Of her and her siblings, she was the one elected to clear out the place to get it ready for sale. Perhaps she underestimated the time commitment that would be involved.
“I thought I was going for six weeks but I ended up staying there for two years. The house didn’t sell and didn’t sell. That gave me the time to reflect. I thought that maybe there was a book there. I thought I was just going to write about saying good-bye to everything but what bubbled up was my chewy relationship with my mother and the resentment that I felt at spending 20 years as her caregiver.”
People will surely cry and laugh, or laugh while crying, as Johnson regales the audience with stories both from behind the scenes at her parents’ house and on the road to publishing. And while she’s at it, she might talk about her experience in various forms of art such as illustration, painting and printmaking while she’s here too.
Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. with host Paula Simons at Forsyth Hall. Tickets are $5
It’s a bit of a full circle for Alissa York who was born in Athabasca but has moved around to Victoria, Montreal, Toronto, and Whitehorse perhaps to get a kind of overall perspective on Canada. Now on the eve of returning to Alberta for her appearance at STARFest, she has a new book to mark the occasion. She shares some of the inquisitive wanderlust as its protagonist.
The Naturalist is set 150 years ago at a time when Charles Darwin was redefining how people saw the people while also giving it a new kind of intellectual-scientist explorer hero to idolize. In the story, Paul Ash is compelled to take a leave of absence from Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology to travel to the Amazon where he was born.
It’s not a celebratory trip or even one of discovery, rather one that has a hint of that same full geographic circle its author is about to enjoy. His amateur naturalist father Walter died there during a long-planned expedition and it’s the son’s job to pick up where the father left off. He would rather have stayed in the research library than trek off into the mud and jungle. He goes anyway to collect specimens and document species but he finds a kind of family and home waiting for him too.
“He’s wanted to go back there for 20 years and he dies in an accident. That happens right at the beginning of the book. His loved ones are left to carry on without him. You have that story of the people going into that space and dealing with their grief as they’re moving through the centre of the lifeforce of the planet,” York described, adding that there’s also an “echo story” offered through Walter’s naturalist notebooks cataloguing his last 20 years along with the diary of his other Amazon trip where Paul came into the world.
