Edmonton Economic Development Corporation: October in Festival City: from Crazy to Brainy
(firmenpresse) - EDMONTON, ALBERTA -- (Marketwire) -- 09/24/12 -- In 1969, a man named Robert Kroetsch published a novel called The Studhorse Man. It was set in , one of the oldest settlements in the western half of North America yet a place without a recognized literary life. Hazard, the hero of The Studhorse Man, rides a stallion across the High Level Bridge and beds a curator in the Legislature. The city is a place of sex and snow and self-deprecating humour and mystery.
"It has been argued," Kroetsch wrote, in The Studhorse Man, which went on to win the Governor General's Award for literature, "that to this day a few wild horses survive in the coulees and ravines of the North Saskatchewan River, there in the heart of the City of Edmonton."
Edmonton has long been a literary city, even if it was more or less unwritten until the 1960s. Professor F.M. Salter offered the first creative writing class in Canada, at the . The longest-running writer-in-residence program of its kind started at the U of A, and attracted the top writers in Canada to Edmonton in the 1970s. Margaret Atwood lived and wrote in Edmonton. Leonard Cohen's Sisters of Mercy were a couple of Edmonton girls.
Some of the greatest independent bookstores in the country were in Edmonton, and its entrepreneurial public library system also hosted and encouraged writers. Yet, until recently, the city didn't have a literary festival to rival Harbourfront in Toronto and events in Calgary and Vancouver. In 2006, arts producer Miki Andrejevic and some writers in Edmonton, including Myrna Kostash and Ted Bishop, wondered how to launch a festival that was different from the others.
There were a lot of literary parties in Canada, they reasoned, but none of them dedicated to non-fiction. was born. Writers like David Sedaris, Irshad Manji, John Vaillant, Adrienne Clarkson, and Charles Foran go to festivals. But no other festival is entirely devoted to their craft. Non-fiction writers are a special breed. They have hatched new ideas and schemes in Edmonton.
One year, on-stage, John Ralston Saul challenged the city to host a writer-in-exile. Mayor Stephen Mandel was in the audience. Three months later, Canada's first city-wide writer-in-exile program was launched in Edmonton and a Kurdish Iraqi refugee, Jalal Barzanji, was the first. He still lives in the city, and recently launched the prison memoir he wrote during his year as writer-in-exile - at LitFest.
The 2012 version of (October 17-28) will include an evening in the as-close-to-acoustically-perfect-as-possible with fiction and nonfiction writer Alexander McCall Smith, most famous for his Number One Ladies Detective Agency series. A new generation of local stars will join him in the line-up, including journalist and humourist Curtis Gillespie, acclaimed food writer Jennifer Cockrall-King, and Timothy Caulfield, who is making an international splash with The Cure for Everything.
There is always something funny at LitFest. McCall Smith is charmingly hilarious. So is David Sedaris. But until a couple of years ago, one of the funniest cities in Canada didn't have a festival devoted entirely to comedy.
The ancestral home of SCTV and ground zero for the best improvised comedy in the world is now, thanks to a very funny television presenter named Graham Neil, his friend and local comedian Andrew Grose, and an Edmonton-based bank called ATB Financial, home to a five-day, 24-comic bit of organized madness called the (October 17-21).
Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy will host a comedy hoe-down at the , part musical review and part stand-up. Jay Mohr, of Saturday Night Live, and other contemporary stars like Nikki Payne, Steve Patterson and Derek Edwards will fill venues all over the city.
October is, traditionally, a transition month. The light changes, leaves fall, and our festivals go from crazy to brainy as we prepare for winter: that place of sex and snow and self-deprecating humour and mystery.
Contacts:
Edmonton Economic Development Corporation
Renee Worrell
Communications Manager External Relations
780.932.4865
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Datum: 24.09.2012 - 11:51 Uhr
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