Posted by Don Officer (Moderator) on April 20, 2008, 10:24 pm
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Let me begin this post by profoundly thanking Neil, Sean, Leslie, Thea, Kate and all the volunteers for giving body to the most tightly condensed period of sustained, meaningful learning I can personally recall. We have tried in this discussion to give site visitors a sense of the threads that make the Ottawa International Writers Festival an intensely concentrated yet eventually uncontainable multiplicity of neural explosions and echoing emotions.
A full 24 hours since attending my last Festival event, I have to say it is still an overwhelming experience that will leave neither my head nor heart alone. Having the privilege to read so many of the authors before hearing from them in person - and then to meet them - deepened the experience immeasurably.
Like most people with any kind of professional career, I have been to many conferences, lectures and workshops. Salutory attempts are made to link such events to current concerns and common threads. The OIWF is not like any of those happenings. The links are much more significant, but divisions are not brushed aside just to keep everything flowing.
First of all, the passion is palpable. Audiences consist of the experienced, the knowledgeable, and frequently friends or fans of the writers; but there are also those drawn to the Festival by pure curiosity or the need to know. Sessions are peopled by those in love with books, ideas or the need to check out their own positions.
Books, ideas and pure literature link everyone at the OIWF in a series of fascinating loops that embody our culture in miniature. You can feel that presence as you walk around the National Archives and Library building. Yet this home for the Festival is no museum for the irreverant poets, the irrepressible iconoclasts nor the larger than life figures looming from our past and doubtless into our future.
In closing this post, I want to say two things: Fist, in such a mesmerizing confluence you meet incredible people: all of them vivedly creative and alert. They find you out in the halls, in the seats, over supper and in spaces set aside for reflection. Friendships form and deepen. You are reminded what living and thinking together is supposed to be about. As Sean asked me somewhere around Wednesday, "Does it get any better?"
The Ottawa literary community, linked as it is to a national family has been monitoring the readings and cabarets. Blogs and photos are out there to keep the discussion going and connect you with work you sampled or missed. I would commend the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter at
http://www.ottawapoetry.blogspot.com/ as well as Amanda Earl's, Rob McLennan's and Pearl Pirie's own blogs which you can access through the Newsletter.
Since I know of nobody who has taken on the task, and am probably in a fairly good position to try, I promise you some linked blognotes referencing the main "ideas" threads of the festival in the next few days. Readers like Samantha Power, Gary Markus, Barrie Wilson, Rex Weyler, Erna Paris, Patricia Pearson, Marq De Viliers and others equally eloquent leave their impressions. Please don't let it all rest with me though. Meanwhile and thereafter, send us your impressions.
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