Tuesday started out as a quiet day at the Festival with the regular tasks: proofing press releases, updating the Facebook page, finalizing speeches, nothing too exciting. That is, until I got the call. We had an extremely ill author who needed to be taken to the hospital and everyone at headquarters was busy getting authors to their school visits and preparing for the Official Opening press conference. Did I know anyone who could drop everything and take an author to the hospital? I made one call to a very special volunteer who did just that. She was in her car driving to the hotel within four minutes of my call, picked up the author, waited with her in Emergency and made sure she made it safely back to the hotel…a morning’s contribution to the Festival and to living up to our reputation of looking after our authors. (Thanks to Linda Hawkes, volunteer extraordinaire, Helaine Becker is recovering well from her wicked food poisoning!)
The Official Opening press conference is truly an opportunity for the Festival to give our many partners and sponsors the opportunity to shine. I was very impressed by the level of the discourse of all the people who spoke, but when I heard Marie-Claude Blais (Minister of Justice and Consumer Affairs) talk about how much her kids love reading and how she gets such a kick out of their joy and feeding their imaginations through books, it was great. And, of course, it isn’t every day you get to hear a banker quote Frye (in English and French), but that is exactly what Ali Massoudi from TD Bank did (and it was my favourite quote: The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.).
But, it is always the Poet flyé who steals the show at this press conference and Gabriel Robichaud (or I should say the “king”) was amazing! His opening poem set the stage for what could be a crazy week in this kingdom…I think he may be going a bit overboard with this whole “king-thing”, but we’ll see (he is pretty attached to his crown!). I will have the honour of co-hosting Soirée Frye on Thursday night with Gabriel…should be interesting!
The afternoon was filled with e-mails (8 boxes of new books coming from the Canadian Children’s Book Information Centre courtesy of the Festival and will be donated to Northrop Frye School which is currently without any books for its library!) and a cheque presentation ($10,000 from Scotiabank…yippee!).
Since there were two events on at 6:00 pm I ran in early to Frye’s former high school (now the Aberdeen Cultural Centre) and checked out Editions Perce Neige’s great book launch event. The ambiance was terrific on the second floor with newly renovated exposed brick and beautiful wood floors (and I loved the patio lanterns!). More than 100 people attended. I then ran over to Navigator’s Pub to hear and video tape Michael Happy’s “Frye 101” presentation. It was an excellent introduction to Frye, focusing on “education” and “imagination” but the questions (and there were MANY!) led the discussion in fascinating ways. I guess the most important thing that I took away from the event (besides being absolutely dumb-founded by Michael’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Frye!) was that we must feed our heads with everything, even sometimes the most inane pop culture because there was literally nothing that Frye was not interested in.
Hockey and Hops started at 8:00 pm at City Grill and there was a great crowd, considering the Canadiens were playing and we were discussing Maurice “Rocket” Richard with author Charlie Foran! The local Habs fans were terrific, asking great questions to Charlie about the process of the book and some of the behind the scenes information he found (or didn’t find!) in the writing of the book. I guess for this reluctant hockey mom, I wasn’t fully aware of the politics of it all. (Politics in hockey? Why should I be surprised?) Thanks to John Dallaire, Tim Belliveau, Peter Gorman and host Christine Manore for making it such a great event.
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