Blogger Nikki Reimer reports from the opening of the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival

The 21st Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival got officially underway with Grand Openings, an event that featured seven writers of different styles and backgrounds. As one patron remarked, it made for a “very multicultural evening.”
The stories of the evening encompassed a truly diverse and international range of voice and experience that often addressed what it means to be "other" — to be alienated from one’s family or one’s birthplace, to be the immigrant struggling in an often hostile environment, or to be the victim on the receiving end of a bully’s taunts.
Rawi Hage read from Cockroach (House of Anansi), the only novel shortlisted for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award for fiction. The unnamed immigrant narrator transported us to wintry Montreal. The excerpt was gritty and urban, raw and sexual, and pulled no punches on the immigrant experience. Maybe some immigrants want to better their lives, the narrator suggests, but “I want to better my death.”
Poet and short story writer Lorna Goodison, who read in a confident, lilting and lyrical voice (and charmingly referred to ubiquitous artistic director Hal Wake as “Prince Hal”), shared moving passages from her memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (McClelland & Stewart), and not-so-moving recollections of the “cows horseshit flies mosquitoes” of Jamaica’s Harvey River that her uncle longed to escape.
Nadeem Aslam and Jonathan Raban invoked the post-9/11 global reality from very different perspectives. Aslam read from The Wasted Vigil (Bond Street Books), which poetically depicts war-ravaged Afghanistan. His description of an “impaled library” (one of the characters has nailed all of the house’s books to the ceiling) was so evocative I still can’t get the image out of my head.
Jonathan Raban treated the audience to terminally angry, HIV-positive Tad Zachary’s savage eviscerations of post-9/11 life in anxiety-ridden middle-class America. Judging from the cheers he received in response, he did indeed touch a current nerve.
George Pelecanos, a late substitution for Ursula K. LeGuin, did not disappoint: he read a captivating excerpt from The Turnaround (Little, Brown & Company). His language is simple and spare but exact, and creates a compelling portrait of racial tension in 1970s America.
Donna Morrissey, ribald and warm, was like every Newfoundland expat I’ve ever encountered: capable of the saltiest, most musical dialogue imaginable. To listen to her lively reading of What They Wanted (Viking) was indeed a treat. One never wants to conflate narrator with author, even in fiction drawn from real life, but I truly wanted to sit down and share a pint with this woman after the reading.
Shane Koyczan warmed up the crowd with a bit of a poetic detour, a punchy “speech on the war against terror written using Steven Segal movie titles” poem. He then read from his novel Stickboy, which recalled a shocking incident of childhood bullying.
Grand Openings set the stage for the more than 60 events to follow in the popular festival, which this year features such literary stars as Joseph Boyden, Nino Ricci, Daphne Marlatt and Austin Clarke. And CBC personalities such as Mark Forsythe, Sheryl McKay and Paul Grant will be on hand as hosts. If you can’t make it to the festival, which runs until October 26, be sure to check out the festival blog for a taste of what you’re missing.