By Noah Richler.

There is amusing irony to be found in the fact of Margaret Atwood having embarked on the extraordinary tour that makes its stop in Calgary tonight.

Atwood is without question one of the world’s most renowned literary novelists, a nominee for this year’s Giller Prize and surely a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, too. This conversation has been going not for a few years but in fact a couple of decades. I used to think it brazen; now such a coronation strikes me as imminent and justified. Among living novelists, whose contribution has been greater? (If I have to explain to you why I am pushing for Atwood and not Dan Brown then you might as well skip this column.)

Atwood’s output is prodigious, and extraordinary because she always meets her own high and exacting standards. She is a poet, an essayist and a novelist of myriad genres—one, of “speculative” (rather than “science”) fiction, of which her new novel The Year of the Flood is the most recent example—that she has pretty well appropriated, if not invented, for herself. She is a terrifically hard worker who treats her audience and the work of meeting them with respect. And she is gaining, these days, a fairly unassailable reputation as a seer—consider the prescience of her Massey Lectures, last year (Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth) and now her continued focus on the environment and humans’ perilous disregard of it.

What is amusing is that this Margaret Atwood is the same one who, a few years ago, introduced the Longpen™ as a way to end, now “extend,” authors’ book tours. There was sense in this. Calgary is a fortunate city in that, year after year, Wordfest brings international authors of the highest calibre to readers in the city—something that is less easy to achieve in, say, Medicine Hat. Atwood’s video machine with its virtual and immediate calligraphic arm promised readers in the most remote places the chance to have a book signed by a favorite author, though there is no denying that some publishers will have seen the Longpen™ as a way to forego the expensive business of touring authors and allowing them to meet and build their followings and to partake in the community activity of literary festivals.

Now, however, the incomparable Margaret Atwood has proved not only that touring is still a good idea, but that there is nobody who does so with more originality than her: if you are one of the fortunates who has a ticket to tonight’s Calgary stop of her The Year of the Flood roadshow, then you will be treated to a choir, to readings and to the hymns of a post-apocalyptic world that the author wrote for the novel, put to original music. And, of course, to Ms Atwood.

Even if the Nobel Prize committee does not do the right thing and get around to honouring Atwood, you will remember this evening always. Be glad.                       -30-

A full moon on 9th Avenue lights the way to the Vertigo theatre and its WordFest marquee, Wednesday night.

In the lobby of the Palliser, the venerable CP hotel where the WordFest is based, there was Neve Fischmann, the film producer, on his cell phone pacing the lobby—and still there after returning from the Avenue Diner on the Stephen Avenue Mall, one of my favorite Calgary haunts as it offers possibly the best breakfasts in the west. Even by oil country standards, Calgary being the city where Blackberry pouches have replaced gun holsters on upstanding citizens’ belts (where, I wonder, do the women put them—will garter belts, adjusted for this new communications age, make a comeback?), Fischman’s call was a long one. An hour, maybe?

And there since the early morning: bystanders watch the file of authors at WordFest hoping for rush tickets.

Of course he could have been pretending, posturing for a little importance as Nigerians used to do when I was in that country years ago, every businessman-wannabe toting a cell phone (and they were big in those days) even though the country had no networks yet. Amusingly, Fischmann, along with actor Paul Gross, who is to the Canadian film industry biz as Patrick Lane boasts of being to the world of Canadian novels—undoubtedly talented, if unusually old for the part—was in town for Passchendaele, the First World War movie that only afterwards became a book. And that’s amusing because the truth of the matter is that yesterday, Wednesday October 15^th, the most interesting movie showing, by a long shot, was the quite astonishing showcase, “Moving Stories,” of about fifteen short films inspired by novels and short stories.

Take, for instance, Calgarian Corey Lee’s short film, “Perfection of the Moment,” based on the short story from John Gould’s 2003 Giller-nominated collection of short stories, Kilter: 55 Fictions.

Chapters and Indigo are making a fortune these days, and someone should nudge book queen Heather Reisman and have her badger hubby Gerry Schwartz into putting book movie shorts like this into his Cineplex chain of cinemas as a nod to the money book sales have brought Canada’s wealthy couple. They’d stand their own, certainly, and prove just what an amazing array of talent the country produces in all spheres.

Or Newfoundlander Justin Simm’s film, Night Work, based on the poem from Randall Maggs’s collection of poetry, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems. What is it about Newfoundland, that whether the book or the film or the poem or the painting is lyrical or wistful or painful and brutal (Kenneth J. Harvey’s coming to town), you so emphatically know exactly where you are? I was wary of this event because I dread literal transformations of literature into radio, or television, where the narrated writer’s mention of, say, a baby washed up on to shore or a ginger-haired kid shooting a fawn is visually represented by, say, a baby washed up on to shore or a kid shooting a fawn. But even the short films that approached this sort of film-making, didn’t. Pavane, Paul Quarrington’s kernel encapsulation of the injury at the heart of his novel The Ravine, was great too. Well performed and punctuated by graphic illustration (i.e. drawn—in that other sense, the film and the novel deliberately avoid being “graphic”) of traumatic childhood memory.

Amazing night. Congratulations, WordFest and Judith Keenan, the producer of BookShorts who organized the program.

It’s not always easy, this WordFest thing. Plenty of events, often competing (a way of getting you back in future years), and a logical street plan of numbered streets and avenues that tends to confuse out-of-towners like myself who rely on their highly developed urban jungle sense to get themselves around plainer grids like Montreal’s, or Toronto’s, where streets have names and bend and criss-cross and climb up hills and down them, dammit. “Calgary has an illogical grid but it’s really well organized,” my driver said to me. You think so? That go two blocks east on 9^th Avenue down under the bridge and to Second Street really got the better of me. I had no idea where I was, and so I did not find the Alliance Française and missed Kinne Starr’s performance, which I’d really wanted to see.

But odd things happen when you hand yourself over to circumstance without getting spooked, and so last night I stumbled upon one of the most mind-boggling Canadian multicultural experiences that I have possibly come across, leaving even this practiced defender of this great national idea wide-eyed and fascinated. You can’t make this country up, I tell you—though it might have been an early Lee Henderson scene I was looking at. (Have to take him there, come to think of it, he arrives today.)

Under the bridge behind the Palliser, at the corner of 10^th Avenue and 1^st Street, is Brava Sheesha. The corner restaurant looks like it might have started life as a soda bar and coffee shop, then been a bistro maybe. Now it’s a falafel joint, but with a difference, the light red and at the top of one wall, the flat screen TV that had drawn me in. I stepped into a room that was lit red as a bordello, and as if the habit was Western and learned early on, all the patrons were sitting at the tables along the walls and me, the newcomer, well I had to sit in the centre. But they weren’t cowboys, this lot. They were teenagers, some of them still carrying those big ridiculous paddles for feet. They were white and Filipino and Somalian and Nepali and Chinese, and not just boys but tables of young women, too. And what were they doing? Smoking hookahs and watching the hockey game. Montreal against Boston, and with a minute and a half to go Carey Price gives up one of the stupidest goals I have ever seen, having chased a puck behind the net that took a bounce off an uneven seam in the boards right to the front of the net and the Boston player there, and the score is 3-3 and there’s a tremendous trilly whoop of screams of disappointment from the table of Filipino girls, thought the white and the Chinese lads in front of me are too busy drawing smoke off the apple wood and filling their glasses with it.

“What kind of a restaurant is this?” I ask the Chinese waitress and her Arab-looking colleague at the cash.

“Middle Eastern,” she says.

“And what part of the Middle East are you from?” I ask the Arab other.

“I’m not,” she says, “I’m Albanian,” thrilled that I know something about the place because I’d actually been there.

Tanguay scores on the shootout. Now the Somalis are joining in the cheers.

So, let me recap: a Middle Eastern Shwarma joint in oil-rich Calgary, where the girl working the floor is Albanian and Somali and Chinese and Filipino kids with their baseball caps turned sideways are sharing the snaking mouthpieces of smoking hookahs with white kids rooting (to their inestimable credit) for les glorieux.

Which brings me back to Kinnie Starr, who’d performed before her afternoon session’s crowd the day before a piece that she said she’d written the previous night in her hotel room. So you’ll excuse me if, before missing her show at the Alliance Française, I’d taken the liberty of giving her a call and visiting Kinnie in her hotel-room cum studio where she read her new piece for me as she was in her routine of warming up. Her Canada is your Canada is mine—a place where you ask yourself where else but in this brilliant here could you possibly be.

Writing, of course, is a passion  as much as it is a profession and an obsession more than anything else. That point was made abundantly  clear when British Columbia’s Anderson-Dargatz spoke movingly about the death of her father. She said that as the family sat by his bedside in his final hours, both her and her mother (also a writer), took notes. “There’s something pathological about this writing life,” she said. “I feel like there’s a vulture on my shoulder watching all the time.”

So writing as support mechanism, as a way to order and make sense of the world. Carrie Tiffany told the rapt audience that she never meant to be a writer and, in fact, her book was rejected by all the major publishers in Australia before going on to publication and widespread acclaim.  Tiffany started out as a park ranger and describes herself as an “intensely practical person.” She said she only started writing only because images and themes kept demanding the kind of attention she couldn’t give them as an agriculture journalist.

For Desai, writing also comes out of being inspired by daily life – particularly the need to escape it. She talked of the need to somehow coalesce and transcend daily experience and thereby escape the world as we know it. She noted that, like many immigrants, she identified and understood herself as an Indian only after leaving India. Similarly, when writers find a world they can envision that is not quite the world they live in, they are able to reflect on the complicated totality that otherwise seems to utterly elude us. And so Desai spoke about writing as a lifelong quest to get “a place of no place”, a kind of writing that is both from, about, and beyond who we are and where we are.

****

At the end of the panel, a semi-serious question from the audience: “Can you be a writer if you’d had a happy childhood?” Ameen Merchant answered impishly: “If you can imagine unhappy things, then sure.”

Later this afternoon, there’s the festival finale. Don’t miss it. Where else are you going to see a Brit born in Nigeria, a Canadian who lives in France, the man described as Mexico’s edgiest literary genius, and a Canadian who’s written a novel about slavery that spans Africa, the USA, and back again? The world’s come to your doorstep and there’s nothing boring about that.

Darcy Tamayose read from her debut novel Odori. Though it starts off in the Southern, Alberta town of Rainmaker Hills, the bulk of this book transpires in ancient Okinawa and a dreamland between death and life populated by a woman in a coma and a storytelling spirit. As Tamayose so eloquently put it in the q+a session after the reading: “land is a character and there is a commonality of all places.” We might want to label her an Albertan writer (she lives in Lethbridge after all), but I’m not sure that does much to help us understand her writing or the writing of the Western Canada.

Tim Bowling also read this afternoon. He’s from BC, but his book The Bone Sharps, an eloquent, ambitious novel, is set in a late 19th and early 20th century Alberta Badlands, and the fetid trenches of World War I. Bowling was inspired to write the book after spending 5 weeks on a ranch near Dinosaur Provincial Park. He told the audience that it wasn’t like he set out to deliberately explore any particular notion of the West and its landscape. It just happened that way. I think that’s true of most artists – we set our stories where we feel the ideas we want to get across will be able to grow, live, breath, and take on their own life.

Then again, that’s maybe just the luxury we have today as Canadian writers and creators. We don’t have to justify the very idea of setting a book in, say, the smalltown Alberta town of Marvin. Marvin is where the action of Calgary first time novelist Andrew Wedderburn’s Milk Chicken Bomb takes place. Wedderburn, responding to Bowling’s book, noted that one of his inspirations as an Alberta writer is Robert Kroetsch’s hallucinatory Canadian masterpiece Badlands, the tale of a deranged archeologist willing to risk anything and everything in the quest for bones. For Wedderburn, Kroetsch’s book legitimated the idea of setting a book not just in Alberta, but in the forgotten, partially populated areas of Alberta the rest of Canada doesn’t even know exist. In Milk Chicken Bomb, Wedderburn creates a genericly distinct smalltown with a single cross street, a ramshackle IGA and a curling rink. It’s a town as recognizable in smalltown Ontario and rural Manitoba as it is in Winnipeg. And yet, there’s something almost accidentally distinct about Wedderburn’s Marvin. As he put it today, “It could have been anywhere, but it turned out that it could only be where it was. “

Clearly no one minded Hynes adopting some touch of the vernacular on stage backed up by an trio of musicians expertly weaving in and out of his tangled web. But earlier in the day when I dropped the f-word at a panel discussion before 100 or so people at Mount Royal College there was at least one muted reprimand. After the show a member of the audience approached fellow panelist Michael Winter to pass on a message to me: Swearing, the fellow said, is passé.

I’m not sure why exactly I threw that word into the wind. Robert Sawyer and I were having a pretty heated debate. The discussion was about whether or not we need the cultural gatekeepers who decide what books to publish, what shows to broadcast, what movies to finance and distribute. I argued that in the age of the web we can all decide for ourselves, everyone can have equal access to mass media, so the days of the gatekeepers are numbered and we’ll be better for it. Sawyer argued that there’s still a role for editors, publishers, and other arbiters of public taste. Michael Winter was the quieter of the 3 of us, though he did note that an experiment with publicizing his book on FaceBook had seemed to be a success, suggesting a middle path which combines cultural gatekeeping with a transperancy that sees authors reveal their process and open themselves up to direct unfiltered dialogue with their readers.

Anyway, somewhere in the midst of this discussion for some unknown reason I swore. I cussed. I cursed. No one seemed to really notice or mind at the time. Driving back downtown after the panel sci-fi writer Sawyer told us that, in fact, his readers only complain about profanity when he has a character say Jesus! or Christ! instead of, say, holy shit! If you want to shock, it seems you’re better off targeting always sensitive religious sensibilities.  So maybe our audience member was right: swearing is passé. But I dare ya to tell that to Joel Thomas Hynes.

So let me tell you a bit of what I’ve found out about the Word of Mouth poets performing tonight. Valerie Mason-John is a London based playwright, novelist, conflict resolution consultant, and performer. I’ve had a chance to spend a bit of time with her and I can tell you that she has the kind of presence that commands a room, that makes you stand up and take notice. No project seems too daunting for her to take on. If you get a chance, ask her about the time she spent in India  writing a book about the ongoing plight of women trapped in the untouchable caste. Tonight, I suspect we’ll be seeing Valerie take on the role of her alter-ego Queenie, described on her website as “one of the most startling subversions of racial imagery you’re ever likely to see on any side of the social divide.”

Another artist from overseas performing tonight is Morganics. Coming to us from Sydney, Australia, this soft-spoken gentleman blends world beats, hip-hop and his own unique Aussie sensibility. I went to his website to check out some of his music and found out that not only is he an accomplished writer and musician, but he’s also heavily involved in his community. Click on Listen and you get not just his songs, but also recordings of songs he’s worked on with high school kids in Bali, and up-and-coming aboriginal rappers in the outback. Very cool.

Okay so add Agnes Walsh, the poet laureate of Newfoundland, and Andrew Weddeburn, local Calgary indie musician and author of the very funny, sad, sly first novel Milk Chicken Bomb and you’ve got a pretty sweet night, right? But we’re not even done yet. Tonight we’ll also get to hear from one of my favourite Canadian writers, Toronto’s Mr. Stuart Ross. A indie publishing activist, poet, and fiction writer, Ross is equal parts Kafka and Krusty the Clown, a downbeat deadpan chronicler of the absurdities of modern life. At Wordfest he’s been handing out a poem called I Have Lived. Here’s a sample (for the rest you’ll just have to drop by tonight):

“I have lived in a water-filled/plastic container/that once held spumoni ice cream./I swam in endless circles/but could find neither television/nor hula-hoop and thus/had nothing to do but swim,/my whiskers brushing/the cylinder’s smooth inner walls.”

I asked Stuart how he was planning to work with the band. He rolled his eyes and told me: “Oh man, it’s a hip hop guy, a spoken word performer, and me. I’m dead man. I’m finished.” I don’t buy it for a second. Author of ten plus books, and you know what? — he’s just getting started.