An Afternoon at Victoria Writer's Festival

“Sparks flew. The energy of the room changed. An aura of calm, dogged discussion had pervaded the committee room for the past week. With only one comment, severely edged with frustration, heads turned, pens and pencils dropped and chairs scraped away from the long scratched and well used boardroom table. Paper coffee cups, empty water pitchers, yellow legal pads and crumpled paper littered what was really just a work table.

The same thorny issue had been presented to them every day. Each morning the mundane housekeeping of the society was dispatched easily. As the week progressed, the issue took up more and more time. It was a Friday. A decision had to be made ~ how will we address Sex and Family Dynamics at the Writer’s Festival!”

*****

The above is my imagined sketch of just one of the meetings that would have occurred to establish this second annual Victoria Writer’s Festival. Fastidiously planned workshops and panels, a book launch and readings have carried attendees through story and poem. After attending two more sessions of the Victoria Writer’s Festival this afternoon with three friends and in the company of a host of writers, it was obvious that decisions made about Sex and Family were very successful. The Writers’s Festival began on October 17 and is, at this writing is just concluding. Gray skies, red and gold trees, and fallen leaves decorated the grounds of Camosun College, on the Lansdowne Campus where the majority of the Festival is being held.

Reading in Bed: Sex Between the Lines at 1 pm bluntly, but poetically, described ‘Prostitution, burlesque, Playboy Bunnies, ancient Greek hotness, eco-eroticism, and the minutiae of gay life’. It was followed by Love Familiar: Our Families, Ourselves at 2:45pm with readings of prose about ‘Family in fiction, in poetry and in a writer’s life: on boundaries, making strange, exposing, confirming, escaping, inventing and offering family’. Each author on both panels read from their literary works. Following questions from the facilitator, the panels answered questions from members of the audience about their experiences with writing.

“Don’t bend;don’t water it down;
don’t try to make it logical;
don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. 
Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

~ Franz Kafka