Why would anyone want trouble? If you’re a writer, it’s the most natural thing to do.
Trouble was the theme of Thin Air Winnipeg’s first mainstage presentation on Monday, September 19th in the comfortable, untroubling confines of Manitoba Theatre for Young People at The Forks.
Now a fixture of our cultural landscape, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival is celebrating its 15th year promoting Canadian and international writers and their works. The appreciative audience of 150 revelled in the complications of life that derived from the minds of five of Canada’s top writers.
Charlene Diehl, director of Thin Air, framed the evening with the questions writers ask themselves – “Why do we invite trouble?” The answer seems to be that it’s a feature of the human condition.
Winnipeg author Wayne Tefs kicked off the evening with his docufiction book Bandit, about the troublesome local hero, Ken Leishman. The Flying Bandit, made famous by his daring gold heist in 1966, had seven kids and a taste for lavish living. Tefs read Leishman’s fictional first-hand account of swooping his plane down into the farmyards of rural housewives, where he wooed them with his dashing dark looks and homespun flattery to buy on the payment plan, his ‘limited supply’ of Queen Anne cookware. Such charm could never be satisfied with simple door-to-door salesmanship.
Edmonton’s Margaret Macpherson followed, reading from her latest novel, Body Trade. Two women, one sexually-seasoned and the other guileless, are stuck without transportation in a Mexican town in the 1970s – a recipe for certain trouble. Macpherson’s energetic delivery and the thumping music in the Mexican bar ramped up the concern over the choices they will have to make to get back home.
Robert J. Sawyer was the evening’s odd-man out, but his science fiction and fantasy writing has garnered him international awards (the Nebula and Hugo among them) that speak to his popularity. Sawyer commented on the trouble humans may have unleashed through their technological inventiveness in his excerpt from Wonder, the last instalment of his World Wide Web trilogy. A consciousness called Webmind has emerged from the structure of the WWW. A poor soul out in cyberspace thinks it’s God— and that it can cure his good wife’s cancer, too. What have we done?
In TheAntagonist, Lynn Coady read from emails written by Rank, a twenty-six-year-old who thinks he is solely responsible for all the problems in his short life. His efforts to defy normalcy and isolate himself are challenged by the most unlikely of angels— a fat, unappealing middle-aged woman who sits down in a bar across from him and seems to know him inside out. Trouble is Coady’s daily companion. From Edmonton as well, she is the Group Therapy columnist for the Globe and Mail.
Giller Prize winner Elizabeth Hay wrapped up the party with a reading from Alone in the Classroom. A prairie story set in 1929, an eighteen-year-old teacher— the uneducated newbie in a staff of veterans— sets her gaze on the principal. But he has eyes for a student. It’s the perfect setting for troubles that resonate through the generations, until the writer-narrator dips into her family history to solve her own problems in the present.
The wine-sipping bibliophiles were entertained by the evening of literary troubles and triumphs. But in a sober moment Diehl reminded those in attendance about writers who are visited with trouble for asking questions. An empty stool stood in place for Iranian human rights lawyer and writer Nasrin Sotoudeh, sentenced to eleven years in jail for her advocacy in defence of the right of free expression.
The International Writers Festival continues until September 24th.
Trouble in Mind: Thin Air on Monday
Columns
By Harriet Zaidman
Why would anyone want trouble? If you’re a writer, it’s the most natural thing to do.
Trouble was the theme of Thin Air Winnipeg’s first mainstage presentation on Monday, September 19th in the comfortable, untroubling confines of Manitoba Theatre for Young People at The Forks.
Charlene Diehl, director of Thin Air, framed the evening with the questions writers ask themselves – “Why do we invite trouble?” The answer seems to be that it’s a feature of the human condition.
Winnipeg author Wayne Tefs kicked off the evening with his docufiction book Bandit, about the troublesome local hero, Ken Leishman. The Flying Bandit, made famous by his daring gold heist in 1966, had seven kids and a taste for lavish living. Tefs read Leishman’s fictional first-hand account of swooping his plane down into the farmyards of rural housewives, where he wooed them with his dashing dark looks and homespun flattery to buy on the payment plan, his ‘limited supply’ of Queen Anne cookware. Such charm could never be satisfied with simple door-to-door salesmanship.
Edmonton’s Margaret Macpherson followed, reading from her latest novel, Body Trade. Two women, one sexually-seasoned and the other guileless, are stuck without transportation in a Mexican town in the 1970s – a recipe for certain trouble. Macpherson’s energetic delivery and the thumping music in the Mexican bar ramped up the concern over the choices they will have to make to get back home.
Giller Prize winner Elizabeth Hay wrapped up the party with a reading from Alone in the Classroom. A prairie story set in 1929, an eighteen-year-old teacher— the uneducated newbie in a staff of veterans— sets her gaze on the principal. But he has eyes for a student. It’s the perfect setting for troubles that resonate through the generations, until the writer-narrator dips into her family history to solve her own problems in the present.
The wine-sipping bibliophiles were entertained by the evening of literary troubles and triumphs. But in a sober moment Diehl reminded those in attendance about writers who are visited with trouble for asking questions. An empty stool stood in place for Iranian human rights lawyer and writer Nasrin Sotoudeh, sentenced to eleven years in jail for her advocacy in defence of the right of free expression.
The International Writers Festival continues until September 24th.