A: They're a part of the fabulous and amazing 'Word on the Street' festival that was on today about three blocks from my house in Queen's Park.
http://www.thewordonthestreet.ca/wots/toronto
http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/books/story/2008/09/26/word-street.html
According to the CBC, there were going to be around 200,000 people there today and it certainly felt busy but also very, very relaxing. Oh, and inspiring.
For several hours, writers and publishers speaking and reading their works in smallish tents (and a couple of good sized marquees) dotted around the park. It felt a bit like WOMAD but for books, and I loved it. The mixture was fantastic - people reading their own work from various genres ('serious' fiction, magazine writing, genre fiction, poetry, memoir, cookbooks, self-help books, kid's books, YA and so on) as well as people speaking in panels on various book-related themes.
I love literary readings: they're really just storytime for grownups. When literary readings are usually a case of going out to hear one, two or maybe three writers, today I heard a vast range of people read from their work... I heard poetry about lactating; snippets from a memoir about a career of publishing Canadian authors, YA fiction about a girl who can't get on with her mother; short stories and novel extracts about a woman working in a cafe whose boss makes her kick out a homeless woman, a Jamaican student arrested by police in Toronto for the mistake of WWB (Walking While Black) on a rainy night, a young girl who quietly learns to hate her own body, a sister and father who fall through the ice when skating on a frozen river... and more... hehe I realise these all sound like dire stories! Well, I suppose the Canadian national psyche could be as morose and harsh as the NZ one... but also, I suppose this is the stuff one remembers at 11pm at night...
The tents for readings were dotted all over the park and then around the outside were rows and rows of tents with bookish organisations (publishers, magazines, more writing organisations and groups and alliances and associations than you can shake a stick at - horror writers, writers against oppression, crime writers, Canadian PEN, and so on...) and you could even get gorgeous spunky 'book porn' - books, yes, but also tshirts and bags and waterbottles and magnets and bookmarks which were pro-reading and pro-books...
The panel discussions and questions were awesome - one guy spoke about how he supposed people who write fiction are doing it because they know that reading saved their own lives and they are passing that one for other people. He suggested that people read non-fiction so they can learn thing, and they read fiction so they can learn. A woman passed on advice from a former writing teacher and acclaimed novellist, Anne Michaels, who refuted conventional writing advice by saying "write not what you know but what you want to know."
What do I want to know?
I want to know why we don't have anything like this at home. I was struck - deeply struck - by how amazing it was to be in a crowd of people who care about books, and I want to know whether and how this kind of thing could happen at home. This is the power of critical mass, I suppose. Toronto simply has a big enough population whose bookish percentage of the community will be a larger number than Wellington or Auckland, for example. And yet there was something else as well - Akld, Welly and ChCh have their Readers and Writers festivals but they are expensive and held in locations (at at times) where they can't be browsed or even easily accessed. They end up being a club rather than a festival. At the most recent festival in Wellington, only one (only one!) of the many, many international and NZ writers was not white, until an additional side reading starring Patricia Grace and Briar Grace Smith (from memory) was put together. Those festivals aren't celebrations of books as much as they are celebrations of white middleclass Culture with a capital C. The NZ literary scene is appallingly divided between a small circle of privileged buddies and a large number of disparate, struggling, interesting individuals and small groups. Those on the Inside wring their little hands and whine with their Liberal Whines about there not being many Maori poets (to name an example I was talking about with someone this week) at the same time as they are blissfully unaware of the machinations which keep them in the limelight and keep everyone else offstage!
Sure, things could be said about who was/ wasn't there today at Queen's Park, but it was free and diverse and represented a wide range of literary, bookish and writing interests, and it was held on a Sunday. A lovely, beautiful gorgeous Sunday in late September. A Sunday which reminded me why I'd come to Toronto for my sabbatical, which fed me some stories, which gave me things to think about, which made me ask questions about home...
A Sunday on which, yes, of course I found my way over to the stalls between a couple of sessions, and I was very pleased to find a tshirt I'll wear with pride:
Speaking of tshirts, at the end of a session in one of the tents today I saw a woman walking past with a yellow tshirt which had one word printed on the front in large red letters: "NERD."
I write a lot about my community, my family, my students, my friends as 'my people.' Nerds? The word on the street is that these are my people too :)
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