Today I had a wonderful Literacy Luncheon celebrating the YMCA’s Peer Youth Tutor Program. This is an initiative very near and dear to my heart and for the last 11 years the Festival has provided an author for the lunch that celebrates generous and caring teenagers who commit to tutoring younger students in reading and writing for an entire school year. This is grassroots literacy in action! What an amazing group of students. It was nice to hear the heartfelt words of our Lieutenant Governor, Graydon Nicholas as he recounted his struggle with reading when he started school and the fact that he had to repeat Grade 1. He certainly was an inspiration for everyone there (that is him in the photo with young reading fanatic, Abby Hackett)!
Charlie Foran did an excellent job using hockey heroes to demonstrate what it takes to make it. His message was that while skill is very important, pure desire and hard work can go a long way too. He used the current example of Roberto Luongo and his epic struggle (and the reason that so many people didn’t go to sleep until 2:00 am!).
I then raced over to the Moncton Public Library to hear Johanna Skibsrud’s book club. Mike Landry, Arts and Culture Editor at the Telegraph-Journal did a wonderful job of asking Johanna great questions and then the floor was opened up for everyone. I also got to chat with Johanna about her school visits and they sounded fabulous! In order to get the point across about the writing process (being a process) she had the kids write something and then tell them afterwards that they now needed to cut it in half. She recounted hilarious stories about how she had had to cut out fully developed characters because they no longer “fit” the story.
The Festival's seemingly tireless Executive Director Danielle LeBlanc grabbed me on my way out and let me know that we had just received a cancellation: Karen Connelly was extremely ill and could not fly. What were we going to do? We tried to find a local replacement, but unfortunately, it was just too late so Thursday’s roundtable will be one person short, a couple of school visits will be cancelled and a night howl author will be flying solo. Cancellations are sadly an inevitable part of the organizational process.
Tonight was tough because unless you could clone yourself in quadruplicate, it was simply impossible to take everything in. Gilles Leroy had a book club at 6:00 at the beautiful L’Idylle restaurant in Dieppe; Deborah Carr was chatting about her new book Sanctuary: The Story of Naturalist Mary Majka; Susan Juby was speaking at the District 2 Superintendent Speaker Series; B.W. Powe presented a lecture on Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye (and received a LONG standing ovation and great accolades for a fabulous lecture, I am told) and PWAC presented Réveille (adults reading from their adolescent diaries!). However, I chose my favourite event of the entire Festival, Café Underground. What talent (that is poet, singer/songwriter Jenny Hubbard in the photo)! This year you could really see the benefit of the workshops that the students participated in during the afternoon. Every single student was self-possessed, confident and extremely professional on stage…and they had lots to be proud of! Love (lost and found), science fiction, a monologue, a dating treatise, racism and education were just a few of the topics and styles. We also live-streamed the event this year (we should have it up on our web site soon) so it allowed people all over to be able to watch the event in real time (I know that Dr. Martin Braces was watching on-line – a very important sponsor for our Youth program) and I ran into Tom Alexander from SWN Resources Canada another sponsor and told him how his goal of giving creative kids better presentation skills had paid off!
Today I met Fereshteh Molavi who seems so lovely and I had a brief opportunity to get caught up with Shandi Mitchell (she’s nervous too about being on stage with Margaret Atwood!).
I dropped a t-shirt by a young volunteer’s house on my way home and she told me about Kenneth Oppel’s visit to her school and she was simply amazed by how funny he was. She is thrilled to introduce him at KidsFest on Saturday!
What a day! I better get to bed…that interview on Rogers 91.9 at 6:45 am tomorrow will come early. I will definitely need my A-game tomorrow…and that is just to pick-up Margaret Atwood at the airport!
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