This is the first of a three-part story about Words Alive.
When my short story “Heat Death, or, Answering the Ouroboros Question*” was accepted for publication in Tesseracts 14, I was asked if I’d be interested in doing a reading at the upcoming Words Alive festival. The answer, of course, was “Of course!”
This past weekend was the festival. What a blast it was.
The festival took place over two days. Friday evening there were readings by three authors — Craig Russell, a local author, who read from his novel Black Bottle Man, reviewed by yours truly earlier this year; Michelle Berry, reading from her novel This Book Will Not Save Your Life, a book about morbid obesity, arson, magicians, and all manner of family drama; and Thomas Trofimuk, who read from both his novel Waiting for Columbus — about a man in a modern-day Seville asylum who believes he’s Christopher Columbus — and from a forthcoming novel whose title eludes me at the moment.
After the readings, there was a wine and cheese event, and writers mingled with the crowd. I met a gent who works at Winnipeg’s McNally-Robinson bookstore, ordering SF/F, which is pretty much my writing bailiwick. (Hi there, Chadwick, if you’re reading this!) I also had a chance to chat with both Michelle and with Thomas, who signed the copy of his book that I bought. All the writers I met this weekend were very friendly, very happy to be here, and very interested in what their reader (and, in my case, potential readers) had to say.
Stay tuned! Tomorrow I’ll talk about the seminars I went to during the day on Saturday (Screenwriting and Writing for Young Adults), and then I’ll dive headlong into my own reading on Saturday night!
Part 2 will be published tomorrow.
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* Yes, the title really is that pretentious.
who read from both his novel
Oops, thanks John.