Will the real Will Ferguson please stand up?

There’s no doubt that the house will be full when Will Ferguson returns to St. Albert. The only question that remains in people’s minds is will he be funny or not?

“I’m really not certain what to expect,” stated Paula Simons, the acclaimed Edmonton Journal columnist who will be hosting the event.

“His writing is so diverse,” began Heather Dolman, the St. Albert Public Library’s public services manager. “He appeals to a very wide audience so we have booked the Arden Theatre to make sure that everyone who wants to see him can do so.”

He can certainly satisfy the most heterogeneous gathering of fans and literary critics when he makes his second appearance in just less than two weeks. He’s probably best known for his bestselling books of humour like Canadian Pie, Happiness, Why I Hate Canadians?, and How to Be a Canadian (co-written with his brother Ian). You don’t win the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour three times for writing soup recipes, but I bet he could if he tried.

He’s also probably best known for his travelogues. Not content to sit still for too long, Ferguson has made a fine habit of seeing the world and then writing about it. He did a 900-km walkabout across Northern Ireland for Beyond Belfast, and was the first person to hitchhike the length of Japan for Hitching Rides with Buddha. Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw was the literary result of a three-year traipse across this northern land.

Actually, he’s now probably best known for his most recent novel, 419, the Giller winner about Nigeria and a teacher who gets caught up in an international financial scam.

“419 was such a departure from anything he’d ever done before,” Simons said. “This book was so unexpected. It’s such a powerful human drama set in a completely different universe from Spanish Fly, and written in a completely different idiom than anything he’d done before.”

This will be the second time that the “man of many genres” has stopped by this fair burg. He also opened the library’s first STARFest Readers’ Festival back in October, 2011.

“He was a big deal when we had him here then,” Dolman explained. “He had the audience reeling with laughter and got our readers’ festival off to a great start, so we grasped the opportunity to have him here again.”

For his part, Ferguson said that he would try to offer a little bit of everything, reading from some of his humorous works as well as 419. And then he’s going to attempt a sort of intellectual magic by making the comparison between them stronger than the contrast more than most people would think.

“I’m going to make the case that the humorist and the literary novelist are not that far apart. Hopefully, people will see a parallel between the two,” he said.

There’s only one thing that could possibly go wrong, however: that the audience won’t be able to distinguish between what’s funny and what’s tragic when he’s reading it on the stage.

“I hope they’re not stony-faced during the humour and laughing at the drama. That would not be good,” he chuckled.

Dolman ended by saying that everyone is in for even more of a treat with Simons asking the questions.

“She does such a great job. I think this will be an impressive double-act!”