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When thinking about a writer, the image that comes to mind is probably a tortured soul slaving away at a keyboard. Or someone at Starbucks. That may be true, the solitary thinker, the lone writer, but that very often is not the case. It takes a village to raise a child, it takes an industry to get a book printed.
Tom Cull, poet extraordinaire (Via Wordsfest.ca)
“Some people do sit alone in their room, write their work, send it off for publication– hopefully get accepted and kind of build their careers that way. But that’s never been how I operate.”
Tom Cull is a local poet. He teaches at King’s University, is an environmentalist, and a part of the writing community here. Community is critical to Tom’s work.
“I always suggest for new writers to find their community and that they give their time and participate. That they be audience members so that when it’s their turn to produce, they likewise are supported by a community who will buy their work, give them feedback, attend their events.”
That’s where Wordsfest comes in.
Resilience and Recovery
The wizard behind the curtain, Josh Lambier (Via twitter).
Wordsfest is the London Literary festival. Its in its 8th year now and they have been growing every year. Josh Lambier is the Artistic Director of Wordsfest. He has been there since day one.
“The words festival got started because there were a group of creative professionals in the city who came together. And we had this realization that the City of London, Ontario despite the long history of prolific authors and artists that have come from the area in the region– we didn’t have a literary festival to celebrate that . . . people like Alice Monroe, a Nobel Prize winning author, was an undergraduate student at Western University. Robertson Davies, who came from there. Emma Donoghue, who lives here. James Rainey, the great dramatist– all of these amazing figures of Canadian literary history, and we didn’t have a literary festival in London, Ontario to celebrate it.”
There was a group of us on a volunteer basis that came together to start the words festival. And this is our eighth year, so eight years ago, and that’s we’ve been going strong ever since.”
A lot has changed in the last eight years. It’s grown exponentially. It’s also changed a lot, especially in the last 18 months. But then again, what hasn’t?
Cull says that the pandemic hasn’t been all bad.
“Of course with COVID in the last couple of years . . . It’s really been a game changer. And you know, with some surprising and actually pleasing results. It’s not all bad news.”
Cull says that, for once, the pandemic expanded rather than limited.
“The numbers are way up in terms of attendance. When you don’t have to attend IRL, people can be from all over the country. And not just the country– outside of the country as well. And the other great thing about it is from a funding perspective, authors who we normally would have to fly in from New York or wherever . . . we’re not having to cover travel costs. For the artists, they just have to kind of pop on at 7:30 or whenever the thing is, and they’re completely done.”
This year is also expanding the time frame. In previous years Wordsfest was relegated to a few weekends. Now that its online? The show is taking over the whole month of November. And its not just poets and playwrights that are filling the bill—as Lambier explains.
“So our title, the literary and creative arts, allows us a wider berth in terms of how we put together our programming. I’m very mindful to that. We do a lot of events that deal with big thinking as well. Sometimes it’s science. We have an event on patient care and there’s a poet on that event as well. So we have a way of taking a creative perspective on it, even as we’re taking those other disciplines in as well.”
This years theme is Resilience and Recovery. Not every seminar will revolve around that, but it will be felt in more than a few of the seminars. The biggest connection between all of the talks, fiction, nonfiction, true-crime, or comic collecting is community.
The idea of the solitary writer is not necessarily an accurate one. Not now, and not in the past.
“It probably is a lingering legacy of that romantic notion of the genius.” Lambier says, “The genius is the singular figure that is such an anomaly and works on their own. But if you look through literary history, and this is true for London, as well, it is about community.”
Wordsfest 2021 runs the whole of November, so if anything catches your eye, be sure to check it out while you can.
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