imagiNation 2018 in Quebec City

This past Saturday I travelled to Quebec City for the imagiNation Writers' Festival. 

I love reading and working and sleeping on the train, and I brought an overstuffed purse filled with more podcasts, albums, books, games, pens and notebooks than I could have used in 16 hours. But Quebec City is only three hours away, so after some reading and a nap, I got there in time for dinner with good friends from Montreal (also visiting Quebec City), followed by drinks with my fellow panelist and her partner.

Not only had spring not yet arrived in Quebec City, there was actually a snowstorm while I was there. I was glad to have been warned to wear my boots.

A picturesque view from my hotel window.

The next day I got ready for the festival.
  

Festival program! I wish I could have stayed all week.

I got there early and had a chance to take a tour of the building. The Morrin Centre is run by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, which was founded in 1824 and is the oldest existing learned society in Canada.

Nothing like some bracing April snow

Housed in a former jail (which held prisoners of the War of 1812!), the Morrin Centre has a gorgeous old library, as well as cells in the basement that have been preserved as a museum. It also has an old science lab: the jail was renovated in the mid-nineteenth century to house Morrin College, which awarded degrees through its affiliation with McGill University.


If you're interested in history or just love books, the Morrin Centre is well worth a visit! Just look at this library:

Me in the gorgeous library of the Morrin Centre, with the famous statue of James Wolfe in the far background. 

(Top tip to lovebirds: if you've always wanted to get married in a library, you can do so at the Morrin Centre!)

Then it was time for the panel itself. I was reading with awesome fellow Montrealer Anna Leventhal, author of Sweet Affliction. We talked about Montreal and female narrators and other writing-related topics with the lovely Julia Caron of CBC. Then I had a glass of wine, chatted with friends and festival-goers, signed some books and then it was back to the train, where I actually did manage to do some of the reading and listening I'd planned on before it was back to Montreal and real life. 

Côte Saint-Luc Reads 2014

I'm really thrilled that Bone & Bread has been chosen as this year's Côte Saint-Luc Reads pick! The Côte Saint-Luc library book club has already read and discussed it, and I get to stop by and meet some readers and librarians later this week. (Thursday, October 23rd, if you'd like to come.) I hear that there will be music...and food! I'm really excited, actually. Nervous, but maybe even more excited than nervous! This might even be a first for me. 

The event is part of Canadian Library Month....and Quebec Public Libraries Week. I wish I'd known earlier that October was Library Month. I love libraries!

Isn't it a lovely poster? It makes me a little shy to see how much of it is taken up with my photo. But I'm going to try to rise to the occasion by wearing a fancy purple dress I bought in Kensington in London... 

Time for Lives of the Saints?

Last week I finished reading Nino Ricci's The Origin of Species, and I loved it. I saw him on a panel at Blue Metropolis this year, and something he said (maybe that the book was anti-religion? but don't quote me on that) coupled with my basic knowledge of the plot (set in Montreal in the 1980s, centred on a Ph.D. student in English trying to write his dissertation) made me seize it when I saw it available at the Grande Bibliothèque. It was the same day I finally got a membership there, and I could scarcely believe my good luck at walking out with a brand-new, Governor-General Award-winning novel without having been on a waiting list for weeks.

And it didn't disappoint. It's deliciously long, with a strange adventure section set in the Galapagos that I found impossible to put down. Ricci's prose style is excellent, and he tackles all the big questions in this one novel: death, God, living authentically and ethically. It's the kind of novel that for another writer is simultaneously inspiring and deflating --- a capital N Novel with all the hallmarks of time, research, genius, effort. Read it!

Help! I'm a prisoner in the library!*

The Guardian Books Blog has an article today on books you couldn't put down once you started, in reference to an article in the Mirror about a man who had a panic attack after being locked in a library when he didn't notice it close, so absorbed was he in his reading.

There are lots of books I couldn't stop reading (most recently Kate Atkinson's excellent When Will There Be Good News?), but I can think of only a few instances of books randomly picked up in a library where I felt compelled to read to the end:

Anthem by Ayn Rand, which I found by accident in Grade Seven when we were given a library period to find a book for a book report. It was on one of those metal spinning racks alongside Gordon Korman paperbacks and copies of Island of the Blue Dolphins, masquerading as a regular sort of YA book. It had a lot going for it: a bleak dystopian future, and a forbidden love story --- the romance between Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000.

I should say that this is the only Ayn Rand I've ever read, and though I certainly found it compelling (it was completely different from anything I'd ever read before), it did not turn me into a little twelve-year-old Objectivist. At least, not that I know of...(*cue ominous music*)

And in high school I was at the Ottawa Public Library, getting books for a paper I had to write, when I started reading a collection of Pinter plays and stayed there for hours finishing it. I'd never heard of Pinter (this seems slightly appalling now, but I hope not terribly unusual), but I was fascinated by the brevity of the dialogue --- just the way it looked on the page -- though in retrospect I think my fascination was fueled in no small part by a major case of procrastination on the assignment I was there to research.

*The title of this post is a reference to a book that I had as a little kid:

Two sisters go in search of a bathroom during a blizzard and get locked in a library. I remember it being fantastically spooky! Not actually scary, but the delicious type of creepiness where you know it's only your imagination but knowing that barely helps stave off the panic.

PLR - The Public Lending Right Commission

Over on the Guardian Books Blog today, David Barnett is talking about the Public Lending Right award. In Britain, the PLR pays authors according to how often their books are checked out from public libraries. The payment is issued once a year, based on available funding and data submitted by libraries. The minimum payment is £1 and the maximum £6,600.

Writers, take note --- this glorious scheme is not only available in Britain, but in Canada, too. In Canada, however, the PLR is administered in conjunction with the Canada Council for the Arts and it works slightly differently: the payment is not based on how many times your book is checked out, but only on how many registered library catalogues your titles are found in. I have heard rumours of writers going from library to library, "donating" their books with the annual PLR payment in mind, but I suspect the actual cheque amounts to be too paltry for this kind of enterprising to be of much concern. In fact, kudos to them for doing the legwork! I wonder how many authors in Britain are coaxing friends and families to borrow their books from their local libraries?

The Canadian Public Lending Right Commission, like the British one, is also based on "available funding." As you can imagine, amounts have dwindled over the years as arts funding has been cut (boo!) and the amount of eligible Canadian writers has increased (yay!). From what I would guess, a good PLR cheque would be a couple of hundred of dollars. But it also sounds as though they have adopted a sliding scale scheme whereby newly registered books are at a premium, with payments reduced over time, shifting the support of the program to currently working writers.

So registering for the PLR is a must if you are a newly published author! The annual registration period doesn't open until February 15, but you can go to the PLR's website to sign up for a reminder email.