The return of the Ottawa International Writers Festival
As I write, I can’t escape from a story in M.A.C. Farrant’s absurd and beautifully melancholic collection The Breakdown So Far. A shape-changing baby delights a mother and her girlfriend with constant novelty of form, surprising them in a beautiful variety of shapes until one day he sickens, and dies soon after. The mother is understandably crushed.
“Doom,” the mother wailed. “How much longer will doomed creatures continue to steal our hearts?”
This seems to me ironically apt as I write about one of Ottawa’s most interesting but least noticed events. This month brings the spring edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, a festival that valiantly struggles for audiences in a city marked with tremendous indifference. In past years I’ve seen the same faces on the same faithful lovers of literature. I’ve noted haircuts alter like geological formations revisited, new shoes become old in the blink of memory between festivals, bodies change like shorelines. But ultimately they are always the same, and they are always few. It is bizarre considering the makeup of this city: highly educated civil servants of every federal department; two universities teeming with students. One might think these people would be interested in internationally recognized writers and thinkers. One would be wrong.
The festival runs April 15 to 22 and features some of the most respected writers in the world from every single discipline of writing and thought. Here are some highlights:
Tom Harpur is an internationally renowned scholar of divinity and a former Anglican priest who has spent a lifetime studying scriptural interpretation and religious history. His latest work, Water Into Wine, expands in scholarly fashion the hypothesis that it is profitable and proper to interpret the major New Testament gospels as, in his own words, the “allegories, parables, word pictures and myths I believe they were originally intended and understood to be,” rather than maintaining “the pretence” that they are a historical document chronicling the life of a single man touched by divinity. His book is an incredible work of historical and literary comparison from a first-class scholar. This touchstone issue is treated with tact and respect by a person with genuine affection for the subject. Harpur writes not simply to challenge orthodox belief, but to encourage the faithful to strengthen themselves through questioning. You can see him April 15 at the inaugural event.
M.A.C. Farrant’s eighth book of prose pieces, The Breakdown So Far, is a fantastic and whimsical challenge to the intellectual doom of everyday life. She is an elegant and spare writer, whipping up a foam of visionary ideas with a few short strokes of language. Her work seems not simply an outward movement into revealing the world, rather her language moves in upon itself, creating the world through its own folds and turns: “We bring our perfect intelligence to bear upon the situation, which is to say, our lives, which is to say our reasons; where the essential story is the one in which the world outlives our dreams.” You can see her April 19.
In 2002, George Bowering was made Poet Laureate of Canada. What this means, I’m still not really sure. Bowering wrote excellent poems before he was anointed, which he continued to do afterwards. I think nothing really changed but his appellation, a fact which strikes me as a perfect statement describing most governmental actions. His collection Vermeer’s Light is a selection of poems written over 40 years of his career. It is a meditation of sorts by a master craftsman upon the nature and stature of his work. His poems range in subject, type and style with such diligence that you begin to read the whole work as a greeting, as if to say, “This is me. Here I am – as much as I can show.” No matter the poem, Bowering’s particular style of forthright language and bone-dry humour shines through, as with the title poem: “Vermeer’s light/ on a chicken head/ puts the lie to form,/ allows his love/ for content/ or not.”
The full schedule of events includes internationally acclaimed French novelist Benoît Duteurtre, Canadian poets like Erin Mouré and Carmine Starnino, acclaimed novelist Barbara Gowdy, and an Earth Day lecture by none other than David Suzuki himself. Surf to www.writersfestival.org.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Apr 12, 2007
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=11847
