Yesterday was the province-wide professional day for teachers and it seems like thousands of us attended the Writers Festival on Granville Island. It is a great event for readers like me -- sometimes you get to see writers who you've loved forever (like years ago, I saw the poet Al Purdy, who was wonderful) or you discover writers that you will love in the future (like this woman yesterday, whose book I obviously haven't read yet, but who was really interesting -- her name was Yaa Gyasi and her debut novel is Homegoing about two sisters in Ghana).
The first session I saw was called "Conceit" and the theme was that writers get the seed of an idea which they can extend throughout a huge work, like Andre Alexis, whose book Fifteen Dogs tells the story of a group of dogs who receive human intelligence. I didn't like the book very much -- I thought the conceit was interesting and some of the ideas (like the conflict between the dog's nature and its new-found intelligence) were thought-provoking, but the book seemed cold, in a way. Except right at the beginning, it was very upsetting, which, of course, many animal stories are. I am not saying that a book shouldn't be upsetting, and in fact, I think the beginning of the book was the only part that I thought was great. The only one of the authors whose book I would want to read is Catherine Leroux, whose book, The Party Wall, has four stories about family relationships which ultimately interconnect. But the conversation about how writers get an idea and where they go with it was exciting. And I got an idea during the conversation about our next play -- I thought it would be fun to try to write a play about Shakespeare's early life, like when he was caught poaching on a local noble's property and his parents, John and Mary Shakespeare (Mary was apparently from a higher social strata than John) and his first meeting with Anne Hathaway and why he ran off to London to seek his fortune. I'd like to have him meet Christopher Marlowe because Christopher Marlowe is such a wild and crazy guy! I'm going to try to write it by next semester and maybe we can do it for the spring show.
The afternoon session was called "Grand and Monumental" and the four writers had chosen epic times in world history, Peter Behrens -- from Edwardian England to the Second World War, Madeline Thien -- the modern history of China, including Tiananmen Square, Colson Whitehead -- the Underground Railroad, and Yaa Gyasi -- three hundred years of the African slave trade. I'm not a big fan of historical fiction, which is more something I might listen to in the car as an audio book, but I might try Gyasi's book, just because I don't know much about Africa. Madeline Thien made a remark that stuck with us -- she said traditionally in Chinese culture, people live their lives facing the past and she contrasted it with Western culture, which she says seems to face the future. I have been wondering about that remark ever since and trying to figure out what it means.
Now, the weekend is upon us -- today, we're out to Delta for soccer (hope it doesn't rain) and then I plan to spend some quality time with Armand Gamache (the detective in the book I'm reading) in Three Pines, Quebec.
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