Canadian literary event round-up: Oct. 21-27

The literary scene is lively this week with many festivals underway. Here’s a sample of what’s happening across the country:

• LitFest non-fiction festival, various locations, Edmonton (until Oct. 23, tickets at litfestalberta.org)
• Vancouver International Writers Festival, various locations, Granville Island (until Oct. 23, tickets at writersfest.bc.ca)
• Ottawa International Writers’ Festival, various locations, Ottawa (until Oct. 25, tickets at writersfestival.org)
• International Festival of Authors, various locations, Ontario (until Oct. 30, tickets at readings.org)
• Gaspereau Press’s 12^th annual Wayzgoose and open house, Kentville, Nova Scotia (Oct. 22, all day, free)
• Roald Dahl Day with screening of James and the Giant Peach plus contests, Gladstone Hotel, Toronto (Oct. 23, 11 a.m., $10)
• Canzine, 918 Bathurst Centre, Toronto (Oct. 23, 1 p.m., $5)
• Psychologist Shelagh Robinson demos Mirror Read Books, Babar Books, Pointe-Claire, Quebec (Oct. 24, 2 p.m., free)
• François Cusset reads from The Inverted Gaze, Type Books, Toronto (Oct. 26, 7 p.m., free)
• Scrivener Creative Review launches its latest issue with guest reading by Jason Price Everett, Papeterie Nota Bene, Montreal (Oct. 27, 4:30 p.m., $5 for entry, a copy, and a cupcake)

Ottawa bibliophile helps tourists book their travel

Nigel Beale is an Ottawa resident, broadcaster, and inveterate book lover. He is also the owner and publisher of a new website, Literary Tourist, intended to assist bibliophilic travellers wishing to locate and explore interesting literary sites around the world. Literary Tourist’s searchable database lists used and new bookstores, independent bookstores, as well as literary landmarks, writers’ festivals, and rare libraries.

According to the site, the database “represents one of the world’s most comprehensive continuously updated directories of used bookstores and literary destinations” and “contains valuable, detailed information and reviews designed to help traveling bibliophiles determine how best to spend their time.”

From the Ottawa Citizen:

The idea, says Beale, was to create a travel resource for people who love books.

He says he’s concerned about used bookstores closing down, and hopes that by stimulating tourism, he can keep some stores in business.

Beale started his venture by buying Book Hunter Press, a small publishing firm that put out a guide to used bookstores in North America.

According to the Citizen, the website Biblio.com has signed on as a partner “to help promote independent bookstores.”

The Scream Literary Festival goes quiet

Earlier this week, artistic director Bill Kennedy announced this summer will be the last for the Scream Literary Festival. In a letter posted on the event’s website, Kennedy explains the decision to put a sock in Scream comes out of the hope of preserving its progressive image in a literary industry that “survives through its many compromises.”

“It’s better to end it well than to watch its contrarian spirit diminish,” he adds.

The opening night reading, followed by a wake, will take place in Toronto on July 7, with the event’s Mainstage in High Park scheduled for July 11. After 18 years of indie literary programming that has featured an overwhelming amount of innovative Canadian talent, the festival won’t be going out with a whimper. For this last year, Kennedy asks supporters to help Scream make some noise by putting on independent Scream-themed events during the festival’s run in what they’re calling “Wreck our brand: a Scream unFestival.” From the website:

It could be a reading, a workshop, a new series, an homage, a critique, a protest or what-have-you. You don’t need our permission – hell, we’re not going to support it directly – but do something in a Screamly spirit and we’ll post the info to our site.… [N]othing is more in keeping with the origins of the Scream than making an event without money or support, so go and build something that matters to you.

Atwood-bashing begins over “Fox News North”

Margaret Atwood is once again lending her name to a worthy cause, and like her support for the environment, brown-bag lunches, and stay-at-home book tours, the celebrated novelist’s actions have generated some mild controversy in the Canadian media.

The latest episode erupted on Tuesday when Atwood announced (via Twitter) that she had added her name to a petition protesting Sun Media’s efforts to launch a Fox TV-style news channel in Canada (the channel is being dubbed “Fox News North” and “Tory TV”). That immediately prompted a response, also via Twitter, from Sun Media national bureau chief David Akin accusing Atwood of supporting “an anti-free speech movement” and effectively accusing “me and my colleagues of hate speech.”

Atwood in turn replied that the issue isn’t about free speech per se, but rather Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s meddlesome involvement with the CRTC, which recently denied the network a top-tier broadcast licence. As Atwood puts it in fewer than 140 characters, “we shouldn’t B Forced to Pay for it, & CRTC chair should be arms’ length, not Harper tool. Fox free 2 set itself up.” She elaborates her position in The Globe and Mail:

“Of course Fox & Co. can set up a channel or whatever they want to do, if it’s legal etc.,” she told The Globe and Mail in an email. “But it shouldn’t happen this way. It’s like the head-of-census affair – gov’t direct meddling in affairs that are supposed to be arm’s length – so do what they say or they fire you.

“It’s part of the ‘I make the rules around here,’ Harper-is-a-king thing,” she wrote.

In today’s National Post, columnist Kelly McParland hits back with an editorial deriding Atwood for “sign[ing] onto this silliness.” Atwood, McParland writes, “stands for good stuff like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, except when it comes to the case of people who don’t agree with her…. Right Peggy? Because you can’t be a good Canadian if you’re a Conservative. Everyone at the CanLit festivals agrees, so it must be true.”

The Post‘s paranoid speculation about a left-leaning CanLit cabal is nothing new. Assuming that at least some of Quillblog’s readers will want to follow Atwood in rejecting Fox News North, you can do so by adding your name to the petition here.

Worth thousands and thousands of words: photos 2008

Launches, parties, awards, festivals: here‘s a look back at the year in Quillblog event photos.

Bookmarks: More on IFOA, Payback, and the limitations of big-box bookstores

• Margaret Atwood talks to Salon about her well-timed meditation on debt, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
• Are Canadian authors’ festivals the greatest?
• More gripes about those nasty chain bookstores
• Reed Elsevier beginning to look desperate in its sale of Reed Business Information
• The 10 most expensive Edgar Allan Poe books, as sold on Abebooks.com
• Gus Van Sant bears a striking resemblance to Tom Wolfe. Oh, and he’s planning a film version of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Event photos: the big roundup

A few snaps from here and there.

Andrew Pyper meets Maureen Jennings at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. (Photo by Iden Ford and courtesy of Dundurn Press.)

Also at the Ottawa fest, ReLit Awards founder Kenneth J. Harvey (left) awards this year’s prize rings. Winners are (left to right) Roberta Rees for her short-story collection Long After Fathers (Coteau Books), Gillian Wigmore for her poetry collection Soft Geography (Caitlin Press), and Gil Adamson for her novel The Outlander (House of Anansi Press). (Photo by John W. MacDonald.)

Sharon McKay launches her newest book, War Brothers (Penguin Canada), at Different Drummer Books in Ontario. (Photo courtesy of Different Drummer.)

The soon-to-open Coach House Press exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. (Photo by Stan Bevington.)

Mike Knowles launches his debut crime thriller, Darwin’s Nightmare (ECW Press) at Bryan Prince Bookseller in Hamilton. Above, Knowles, left, with Prince. (Photo courtesy of ECW Press.)

Another ECW author, Alex Gillis, lauches his tae kwon do history A Killing Art at a Toronto restaurant. (Photo courtesy of ECW Press.)

Event photo: Coady, Robertson, and Babstock in Prague

You may think, looking at the photo below, that this is a shot of two unsuspecting tourists about to be fleeced by a suspicious-looking con man. But in fact it is authors Lynn Coady, Ray Robertson, and Ken Babstock in Prague. All three authors were in the Czech Republic to participate in the Month of Authors Reading Festival, which took place in the town of Brno in late July. The focus this year was on Canadian writers. Joining the three below were such authors as Michael Crummey, Madeleine Thien, Thomas Wharton, Eden Robinson, Louise Desjardins, and Sheila Heti. (Photo courtesy of Ray Robertson)

I never asked for travel grant, says Gwynne Dyer

There’s a new twist on the saga of the Conservatives axing the Department of Foreign Affairs’ arts travel grants. The leaked document advocating the cuts singled out, among others, author Gwynne Dyer, who got $3,000 to give a series of lectures at a conference in Cuba. Dyer is a “left-leaning columnist and author who has plenty of money to travel on his own,” wrote the anonymous Tory insider.

The Globe and Mail would seem to agree: in an editorial that was generally critical of the cuts, the paper conceded that the Tories had some valid concerns, saying Dyer’s grant “never should have been approved, and the criteria should be tightened to prevent such abuses.”

That prompted a letter to the editor from the author, who understandably objects to being viewed as a “freeloader”:

But, in fact, I was asked to go to Cuba in early 2007 by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Some embassies in Havana were bringing in experts to talk to groups of influential Cubans about how things work in free societies. Fidel Castro was on the way out, and the embassies were being creatively subversive. I talked about the media to young journalists, and about civil-military ties in a democracy to senior military people.

I didn’t get paid for the work, but the Canadian embassy gave me $3,000 in cash to cover my travel costs. I never applied for a grant, and I never heard of PromArt until last week, but obviously some wily accountant at Foreign Affairs took the money for the Cuban project out of the wrong pocket. Stephen Harper’s ministers just can’t keep control of their departments.

The Globe, to its credit, did a follow-up news piece on the twist, and also delved a bit more into the political strategy at work:

Conservatives say the Prime Minister’s Office, not the Foreign Affairs Department, leaked the axing of PromArt, in an effort to seize the initiative before the news got out. The Conservatives focus much of their election message on the less affluent middle-class, and like to portray themselves as favouring NASCAR and curling over cocktails and galleries.

This time, the party highlighted a handful of projects that might raise public ire for funding lefty, artsy or controversial projects, and steered clear of the far larger sums that go to bringing foreign buyers to Canadian film festivals, for example, or Quebec-based dance troupes or theatre production companies. And they focused their message mostly on news outlets in the West.

A cabinet committee had already secretly decided to cut the programs under a process called strategic review, aimed at finding money to create other programs.

Tories cancel cultural travel grants

From the Toronto Star:

The federal government has scrapped a travel assistance program to promote Canadian culture abroad, suggesting it catered to fringe groups, the well-off and left-wingers.

The decision yesterday to cancel the $4.7 million program offered by Department of Foreign Affairs effective March 31, 2009, drew sharp rebuke from critics, with one calling it yet another example of censorship by the government.

[...]

Gwynne Dyer, who received $3,000 to give lectures in Canadian foreign policy and defence issues in Cuba in March 2007, was described as a “left-leaning columnist and author who has plenty of money to travel on his own.”

In another case, the North-South Institute received $18,000 to help co-ordinate a Caribbean-Cuban conference in Havana in December 2006. The institute was described as a “left-wing anti-globalization think tank.

“Why are we paying for these people to attend anti-western conferences in Cuba?” the anonymous author asked.

Former CBC journalist Avi Lewis, now a reporter with Al Jazeera, was described a “general radical” who could easily afford to travel on his own dime.

A production company, Klein Lewis Productions, co-owned by him and his wife, Naomi Klein, an author and social activist, received a grant of $3,500 to promote the film The Take at films festivals in New Zealand and Australia.

“Klein has sold millions of books, and certainly does not need $3,500 from the government of Canada,” the note stated.

The issue of whether Dyer or Lewis could have paid their own way is irrelevant – although, okay, they probably could have – this is just more pettiness and narrow-minded ideological puritanism from a government that seems to be staffed entirely with cranky AM radio hosts.