Six writers shared their latest collections at Starlight Social Club on Monday, October 18
If the measure of a thriving artistic community is its capacity for collaboration, anyone checking Waterloo’s pulse on Monday, October 18 would find it beating strongest at the Starlight Social Club, where three Canadian small presses partnered to present six indie fiction writers, poets, and artists in-between.
Free to the public, the annual gathering of Coach House Books, ECW Press, and House of Anansi saw Starlight’s dance floor transformed into a relaxed audience space, with tables filled to hear six Canadian writers, new and award-winning alike, read from their most recent work.
A late start to the night’s event was off-set by free cupcakes, a well-stocked merchandise counter (care of Words Worth Books), and ample chatter amid strobe lights and mood music. Feature writers sat in wait throughout the audience, availing themselves to eavesdroppers as they expounded on the trials and tribulations of the publishing world, speculation over current literary prize lists, and the balancing act of managing book tours, family obligations, and of course, further writing. These stolen details, alongside a well-spring of positive commentary towards fellow writers, made up only in part for the all-too-efficient pace of the readings themselves, as most writers took to the stage, read from their latest work, and exited in swift and wanting fashion.
After a warm introduction by Coach House Press’s Evan Munday, the publicist central to Monday’s gathering, Natalee Caple started the readings off with excerpts from her latest collection, The Semiconducting Dictionary. Though the work’s subject matter, the controversial life and opinions of modern dramatist August Strindberg, was briefly described at the outset of her reading (and the persona poetry she read, diverse in form and voice), Caple gave no explanation of what first brought her to the unusual topic. This proved a puzzling omission to an otherwise robust performance.
Less ambiguous was the impetus behind the next speaker’s first novel, When Fenelon Falls, as Munday first outlined the resonance between events in author Dorothy Ellen Palmer’s personal life, and notable times and places in her work, oriented around an adolescent identity crisis in Ontario cottage country. After describing a fiction part bildungsroman, part self-conscious meta-myth, Palmer went on to elicit the crowd’s first chuckles of the evening by reading from an early section of the novel, which involved a car trip game steeped in Canadiana.
George Murray, published poet and creator of the literary news blog Bookninja.com, sustained that good humour with a more animated reading from his latest collection, Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms, which he said was written after a bout of anxiety about artifice in verse. With selections like “the body is what happens when the mind wanders,” Murray easily explained what he meant by getting at the essence of the poem in this work, though zingers like “she looks like a million bucks, but it’s all in fives” yielded more immediate audience response.
After a generous intermission, the readings took an even more prominent note with Cordelia Strube, long-listed Scotiabank Giller Prize nominee for Lemon, a novel following a tough sixteen-year-old girl whose world gets a whole lot tougher. Strube, an actress by training, applied herself charismatically to the stage, starting off her reading with the sole warm-up anecdote of the evening, and in the process providing frank, wry commentary about her own investment in the project. “I really wanted to write from the point of view of someone who knows everything,” Strube said of her choice of young protagonist. “When you’re forty you know shit.”
The next reader, Gary Barwin, was quick to note “I think I’m the poetic baloney between the two fiction breads in this set” before launching into an evasive series of short poems from his latest work, The Porcupinity of the Stars. From these sparing selections and his intermittent emphasis on the volume’s cover art, of a deer wearing socks, Barwin’s poetic focus on lost and estranged objects, living or otherwise, resounded in his short but well-received reading.
Sheila Heti then rounded off the evening’s events with a unique balance between the presentation of self and her latest work, How Should A Person Be?, in which the novel’s protagonist could not be at all distinguished from Heti’s soft-spoken, arresting performance on stage. A quiet build to unexpected vulgarity marked the whole of her reading, with pleasing moments of epiphany laced throughout, though Heti perhaps let the excerpt run too long, leaving the audience slightly underwhelmed after passing up a series of excellent potential cliffhangers.
Despite this slight drag near the end, the whole of the event culminated tidily, with organizers inviting the audience to continue to mingle, drink, and await Starlight’s impending return to a space where music, more than the music of good words, might awaken a lover of the arts. At least until next year, when the small presses return to Waterloo again.
