Thank goodness literary festivals are (not surprisingly) run by optimistic, creative folks. This means that though we can’t gather together in person over stories, poems and scintillating talk this fall, we can still take in what makes those gatherings crackle. We can even “attend” readings and talks that might normally be too far-flung——or be read to while watching a wonky homemade film! (That’s a teaser, folks.) The Last Goldfish is making the virtual rounds as follows:
On foot with The Last Goldfish, & Reading Out Loud (with Friends!)
For #THINAIR2020, the Winnipeg International Virtual Writers Festival, I have created two distinct video presentations.
In my feature reading for the festival, “The Last Goldfish in Ottawa,” I read to listeners from my book while taking them on a tour of the downtown Ottawa neighbourhood where I lived when I first started the manuscript, way back in 1994-95. Presences and sensations resonate in unexpected ways between that homey urban streetscape and my story—and its making.
“Reading Out Loud With Friends” is a short, vibrant video collage featuring readings on friendship, chosen and presented by a handful of my friends, from literature past and present, serious and light—from A. A. Milne to L. M . Montgomery; from Arthur Conan Doyle to the theme song from “The Golden Girls.”
Readers include National Post film critic Chris Knight; high school teacher Kristin McLaren, a Canadian ex-pat in Maine; Fredericton writer Sherry Coffey; journalist and managing partner of vacay.ca, Rod Charles; CTV’s “The Social” co-host (and now Toronto-Centre Liberal MP candidate!) Marci Ien; radio producer, media artist, writer and all-around community-enlivening force of nature Janna Graham of Yellowknife; author of the upcoming Véhicule Press sonnet collection, Lost Family: A Memoir, John Barton of Victoria, where he serves as poet laureate (John is also, at heart, of Calgary, of Ottawa, and of other Canadian locales); the warm, exuberant and brilliant poet, memoirist, teacher, editor, Yvonne Blomer of Victoria, that city’s previous poet laureate, editor of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2020) and author of Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lampur (Palimpsest Press, 2017).
Writers Festival Radio: “Living with Dying Part One“
The Ottawa International Writers Festival has created a fantastic podcast series featuring authors ranging from Aislinn Hunter to Andrew Pyper to Michelle Good—to me. In this episode, poet Ellen Chang-Richardson interviews me about the power of friendship, the great debate over running through raindrops, the anger (and other emotions) that accompany grief, and what I’ll call the longhaul of loss. It’s serious, meaty talk with hope & joy at its core.
‘On Being Alive‘: ‘I’m probably no see you again!’
The Eden Mills Writers’ Festival’s “On Being Alive” panel featured Dakshana Bascaramurty, author of This is Not the End of Me; John Gould, author of The End of Me; and Ray Robertson, author of How to Die: A Book About Being Alive.
As companion to their rich, wide-ranging discussion about life, death and writing, the festival put together a reading list that includes The Last Goldfish and a Q&A with me, in which I explain why it was not courage but compulsion that led to the writing of my book, the impossibility of ever truly accepting that a loved one is gone, and how memories of my grandmother’s attitude toward death inform my own.