HOT AIR elsewhere!

If you're looking for bloggy goodness of the HOT AIR variety now that the 2008 edition of THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival is almost upon us, please see:




thinair2008.blogspot.com

In addition to a new URL and template, we've got five bloggers this year (not counting me) and a few more bells and whistles in our tech back-pocket.

Fun! Come visit!

Reeling...

Mmm. Looking over my photos, it seems that I took a lot of crowd shots and not a lot of pics of individual people, listening to authors perform their work.

Partly because people don't like point-and-shoots in their faces while they're trying to listen to literature but also because I needed particular shots of authors and crowds for my posts to HOT AIR and I didn't have the wherewithal for much more, image-wise...

I also took a bunch of THIN AIR staff photos, mostly because they saw I had a camera and they swooped down and asked me to.

Ah well, there's always next year's snappy highlight reel.

In the meantime, here it is:

Click here for
for 2007 THIN AIR
Highlight Reel.

Reading: Lawrence Hill

So, FINALLY here's the Lawrence Hill video I promised. It wasn't just HOT AIR! (Heh.)

Enough time has elapsed since THIN AIR that I could sit down and slice up the twenty minute video I shot of Hill's wide-ranging and charming introduction to his brace of new books. Part of the issue was that a twenty minute video was huge, hard-disk-wise, so I had to shuffle external hard drives and laptops to make it work.

"But it's taken soooo long, he's not even on the Giller long-list anymore!" I can hear you all exclaiming, long-suffering and wearied.

But still. You can watch the video and remember a day, a month ago, when the weather was a little warmer and the authors teemed.

Fun! (and Sorry!)

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Lawrence Hill, formerly a reporter with The Globe and Mail and parliamentary correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, has captured both critics and audiences with his fiction and non-fiction.

His titles include Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, a memoir of growing up in a mixed race family, and novels Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing.

He has released two books this year: The Deserter’s Tale (Anansi) is the account of Joshua Keys, the young soldier who was devastated by his experience in Iraq, and The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins), a sprawling epic of slavery that winds through Canadian history.

Hill lives in Burlington, Ontario.

ack!

Oh, I've been a bad blogger. Since Paul Yee made himself at home in these parts, I haven't posted any of the copy I promised you faithful HOT AIR readers.

Lawrence Hill is languishing on my hard-drive. Karen Dudley is wasting away on my desktop. Countless festival authors and their audiences are becoming a figment of my far-too busy imagination...

All I can say is...tomorrow? (Maybe?)

Fin

It's the Monday after the festival and it's safe to say that the 2007 edition of THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival is no more.

That is not to say that I'm finished blowing HOT AIR...though the events I attended and the conversations I had are quickly fading from my all-too-human memory, the multimedia evidence of same has still to be exhumed from my video camera, my stills camera, and my computer.

To wit, I've got videos of readings by two former Manitobans, Lawrence Hill and Pamela Banting, a commentary (with artfully blurry pics yet!) on Saturday afternoon's Bitter Pint of Murder event, and a highlight reel of pictures that never made it up on the blog during the week yet to post.

But you'll have to bear with me. I've got the life I neglected whilst HOT AIRing to tend to...

That said, it shouldn't take me too long to get my (multimedia) act together, so check back soon!

Yours,

Ariel

Reading Copy: Paul Yee

Paul Yee is the leading chronicler of the Chinese immigration experience in Canada. He has to his credit many acclaimed books for young people, including The Jade Necklace, The Bone Collector's Son, and Ghost Train, which won the 1996 Governor General's Award. Recent titles include What Happened Last Summer (Tradewind), a collection of stories featuring Asian-Canadian teens, and Shu-li and Tamara (Tradewind), a picture book for middle readers. Saltwater City, a non-fiction book for adults, won the Vancouver Book Prize. His newest non-fiction book is Chinatown (Lorimer). Yee lives in Toronto.

Click here for
Paul Yee's
Reading Copy.

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This is a special edition of Reading Copy. It's longer (3 minutes or so, as compared to the 2 mins that the others maxed out at) and features pictures of Paul Yee performing the story Alone No Longer from his Groundwood Books collection Dead Man's Gold instead of pictures of a reading copy.

This is because Yee doesn't use a reading copy - and, given that he memorizes his stories at home, he doesn't have the marked up texts he uses as memory aids either.

I decided to use portraits of Yee because in a way, his memory (and the stories he has spooled up there) is his reading copy.

Photos: Poetry Bash

Andris Taskans, Prairie Fire editor, looks on while an audience member scopes out Victorian Trisha Cull's Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Prize ring, which was presented just before Cull's reading. And what a hunk of turquoise it is (covet covet)!

Apparently, 2006 was a good year for Cull. She was also shortlisted for the 3-Day Novel Contest won by fellow THIN AIR author Brendan McLeod.



THIN AIR Director and poet Charlene Diehl assumes her trademark "I'm a bat" pose at intermission. From the podium, Charlene lamented the end of the festival insofar as she would have to put away all her dramatic clothing until next year.



THIN AIR festival staff assemble to view General Manager Perry Grosshans' shoes.

You can't quite see it in this pic, but there's an overhanging chrome lamp in the 'living room' the authors (and in this case, festival staff) inhabit while on stage.

Poet Paul Savoie, who was originally from St. Boniface but who has called Ontario home since the 70s, gonged his head on the lamp while rising for his reading. Eek!



Poet and U of M Prof Alison Calder (in a sparkly sparkly ensemble) chats with Poet and U of M Ph D Candidate Melanie Branagan.

Calder had a busy week, dividing her time between THIN AIR campus program events at the U of M and The Prairies in 3-D: Disorientations, Diversities, Dispersals conference hosted by St. John's College.

Calder even split her Saturday, presenting her paper, Fear of Flooding: Mapping Competing Spatial Definitions in Winnipeg, earlier in the day.

Roch Carrier and The Hockey Sweater

Well, my favourite event so far has to be Roch Carrier reading The Hockey Sweater to a roomful of the youngest festival attendees at the Millennium Library this afternoon.

He had the children cheering for the Habs as he read the story; Carrier didn’t so much read the story as he did perform it. He made that boy who believed he was Rocket Richard, shamefully forced to wear the Toronto Maple Leafs jersey, come to life. We were with him as he helplessly pulled on the blue and white jersey, as he broke his hockey stick out of frustration and as he prayed for a 1,000 moths to come and eat the jersey.

There were many mouths agape this afternoon - mine included. Carrier has probably read this book hundreds of times, but he read it with such enthusiasm and authenticity I think we all felt like it was the first time. Even my ten-month old son – who never sits still – was enthralled.

After the reading Carrier took questions and regaled his audience with tales of his meetings with Maurice Richard.

Every time I pull out a five-dollar bill to get that latte at Starbucks I will think warmly of the afternoon I heard Roch Carrier perform The Hockey Sweater. I was so swept up in the whole thing I might have grabbed whatever hockey-related books I could find on the shelves and had them signed by Roch Carrier.

Photos: Writing Through Race

There are two things I know about THIN AIR. I may not enjoy every event I attend or even get in some good chat but Saturday's Poetry Bash and the panel discussion on the Friday afternoon at the U of Wpg are always always...well, memorable.

I'm not sure if it's the performing mojo of the Eckhardt-Grammate Hall at the U of Wpg, with its excellent accoustics (no competing with cash registers or espresso machines or even the scrape of chairs) or the careful curating of the event itself, but I always leave with a species of of heady inspiration.



This year's panel was entitled Writing Through Race and featured David Chariandy, Lawrence Hill, and Paul Yee as well as the facilitating powers of Winnipeg poet/mystery writer/prof Catherine Hunter.

David Chariandy and Lawrence Hill both spoke to the themes that underpin their most recent books and then gave brief readings from the texts. Both were eloquent on the subject of race and research and how forgetting/remembering work for immigrants but when it was Paul Yee's turn, he learned forward, flashed a smile, then started telling his story.



No text, no notes, just him and the story and us. The lot of us together, being told a story. It evoked childhood and so was familiar and intimate but it was also an adult experience. When he finished, both Hill and Chariandy joined the audience in applause, having somehow been made audience members too.

I've a video of Hill reading from his Book of Negroes and a special bookless version of Reading Copy that I did with Yee (almost making him late for his flight home, incidentally) but in the meantime, here's a photo or two from the event...