After a few tentative days, July descended with hot sultry afternoons, warm seas for swimming and surreal sunsets over Baynes Sound. It is my twenty-first year watching the sunset from here and each one is a new experience.
I have settled into the rhythms and traditions of the summer weeks at the cabin. This year I attended the Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival. I asked one of the organizers how many years the Festival has been running. It depends on what you mean. There is good evidence of a Festival since 2002, so perhaps the 17th one?
When I was working full time and when holiday time was more precious, while enjoying this event, its intimate format and nationally renowned speakers, part of me would resent spending my precious free summer hours indoors at the Denman Activity Centre or missing my evening swim and sunset watching by attending the event at the Community Hall. This year was different and I had the luxury of fitting in all the pleasure without any pressure.
The delights of the Festival include the intimate venues, often with less than two hundred attendees. There are the intelligent and energetic volunteers and organizers many of whom are writers themselves. Readers and writers mill about chatting in informal and animated groupings.
This year, I had the pleasure of listening to Beverley McLachlin share her process of the writing her first novel, the legal thriller Full Disclosure (not to be confused with Stormy Daniels Full Disclosure) and later in an insightful interview by Des Kennedy where I learned of her childhood in Pincer Creek and eventual ascension to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. I was able to thank her for navigating the legal waters from Rodriguez in 1993 (5-4 against) to the Carter decision in 2015 (unanimous for) which paved the way for Bill C-14 and the legalization of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in June 2016. Beverly alluded to “imposter syndrome” as she was a female forerunner in a male world for most of the achievements in her career. She also alluded to her impatient character. I say working for twenty-two years to achieve the legalization of MAiD suggests tremendous patience and savvy.
I met Kathy Page, a fiction writer who lives on Salt Spring Island. Kathy is an understated eloquent powerhouse with neat short grey-toned hair. At the evening panel, she wore an elegant black jersey dress accessorized with a beautiful long blue scarf. She skillfully manoeuvers along on the wavering slackline that separates memoir and fiction with her descriptive precision and sense of humour in her recent eighth novel Dear Evelyn. This is a whole life yet chronoclasmic story that follows the emotional and painful trajectory of a seventy-year long marriage. It was inspired by a collection of letters from her father to her mother. She read a passage from Dear Evelyn where Miles the elderly husband is now confined to a care home. He is dependent on carers to perform the intimate act of shaving, an important ritual for him that defined his masculinity and sense of self. His increasingly difficult wife is oblivious to his distraught state at his loss of independence. Ms Page’s prose compellingly conveys the frustration, shame, indignity and helplessness of this character, Harry Miles. I don’t think I will ever watch a man shaving or unshaven again without thinking of this passage.
I am enjoying her recent book of short stories, The Two of Us a Globe and Mail Best Book from 2016 and then I’ll get to Dear Evelyn.
David Chariandry, author of Brother read from his latest book, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, a letter to my daughter. David is a diminutive brown-skinned man whose dark curly hair is covered with a faint mesh of fine grey strands. He is of South Asian and African heritage and identifies as Black. He shared a hideous joy-robbing vignette of everyday racism that he encountered with his daughter when she was three. He was inspired by the work of James Baldwin. I was reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates essay to his teenage son, Between the World and Me.
I asked him about the conversation that he had with his thirteen-year-old daughter as he sought permission to publish his story. How did he ensure that she understood what she was consenting to? David explained in his humble, polite and thoughtful way that they had talked at length about the issues of the publication. His daughter insisted that she would have final editorial authority about the content.
We talked further about the generation divides in concepts of privacy with the pervasion of globally accessible media. Perhaps my definition of privacy is no longer attainable? He talked about the importance of preserving one’s name and story. He considered the criminal historical instances where name and personhood were forcibly removed. For these reasons, his daughter is not named in the book nor is there an identifiable likeness of her provided in the book or any of the press associated with it. He hopes that when she is ready she will share her own story.
There was lots more, so many more stories and personalities, all those Readers and Writers. Consider looking at the website or Facebook page for more information. Maybe consider attending next year? And now I have to return to my own neglected writing projects.