Hosting
at the IFOA
by Ibi Kaslik
Read TDR's
Interview with Ibi
Hosting at the International
Festival of Authors (IFOA) is always a gratifying and exhausting
experience. But every year the reasons change. Hosting puts you in the
unique position of hanging off the coat tails of famed and
up-and-coming rockstars of lit. You get all the negative effects of a
performance: anxiety, sweaty palms and tongue-tied moments without the
benefit of selling two copies of your book afterwards. So why do it? I’ll
get to that. But first, a short history of this author’s, author
festival journey…
When I first started attending
festivals – read: crashing the hospitality suite dubbed
"hostility suite" – it was all about the party. How much
free wine could be imbibed and/or stolen? How many friends could we
sneak into the suite? How many packets of nuts and cheese plates could
we consume? Could we convince cool, New Yorker, Tama Janowitz to play
spin the bottle? As a young, starving writer, much of being part of
festival life revolved around the sheer novelty of crashing your way
into Canadian literati.
With a little more experience with free
booze, readings, and social decorum, and, oh yeah, a book to my name, I
left my Dorothy Parker ways behind – or at least relinquished them to
the smoking room. These days it's all about how many diverse writers I can
interact with and hear. But it’s not about schmoozing, I swear.
Besides, there doesn’t exist, I don’t think, a mercenary dynamic
among writers; what you get from a festival, whether you’re
participating, hosting, or crashing is inspiration, a gentle reminder of
the fact that we’re all in this ridiculous career choice together.
2006 was a good year for meeting peeps,
for inspiration. And though it feels cheap to litanize the stars I
rubbed corduroy elbows with, I am a bit el-chepo. So, let’s get to
this: the unassuming Jonathan Safran Foer drew a picture (or is it a
diagram?) in my copy of EII. The lovely Ami McKay and I talked about
babies and writing. The intense Lewis DeSoto and I had a conversation
about photography where I babbled needlessly about the power of light.
Gautam Malkani has a day job (but I didn’t see him in the hostility
suite). The down to earth Sarah Waters charmed audiences with her
penchant for sexual innuendo. The sophisticated Caroline Adderson – whom
I believed was robbed by not being short-listed for a Giller for Pleased To
Meet You – wowed and confused audiences with her poetics.
But I’d be remiss not to mention the
one writer, whom I was too shy to meet, but whom I had the honour of
witnessing: Gay Talese. The 74-year-old career journalist, who should be
credited as the grandfather of creative non-fiction, held a reading in
the Premiere Dance theatre. Mr. Talese cut a dashing figure with his
Dick Tracy suits, his shock of white hair and his wing-tipped shoes. As
he regaled the audience with his humane ideas about writing – writing
real stories about real people – I was struck by his honesty, by the
wealth of experience and range we all need as writers to sustain both
our lives and our imaginations.
Mr. Talese read a short excerpt from
his memoir A Writing Life. It was a section about his arriving in
Italy, dressed in a US military uniform, unbeknownst to his overbearing
father back home in America. When he was finished, I looked around to
observe the gasps of the audience members. I was gasping along with
them. Why? Because Mr. Talese had achieved the kind of reaction every
writer dreams of: the crowd wanted more. It is not hyperbolic to say
that I, and the rest of the enormous crowd, could have listened to Mr.
Talese read all afternoon. His deceptively simple prose uncovered
complex truths about culture and his own life and lulled me in a way I
hadn’t been lulled by words since I was a child.
Later that day, Mr. Talese arrived at
the suite and politely inquired if he could finagle a drink. The
organizers giggled at his old world charm, his flirtatiousness. I
watched as he made his way to the bar and sidestepped a couple of
science writers to mix his drink. As I watched him, I thought about how
I had always believed that writing should be a mysterious process, that my
own simple definition of the writing process lacked a lofty intellectual
richness.
I couldn’t find it in myself to turn
on the charm and approach him, to get my book signed and add his name to
the list of wonderful writers and thinkers I’d encountered. Because I
knew that he had already given me my story, my angle, my IFOA gift
basket. He had confirmed for me the single thing I have always been too
scared to articulate about writing and life: that writing is simple, it
is just truth.
Ibi Kaslik is the
author of the critically acclaimed novel "Skinny". |
