THIS WEEK'S TRIBUNE  THIS WEEK'S TRIBUNE Jewish authors know The Word on the Street
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Jewish authors know The Word on the Street |
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Written by Shlomo Kapustin
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Wednesday, 23 September 2009 |
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TORONTO – In advance of this year’s Word on the Street festival, the Jewish Tribune caught up with four of the Jewish authors participating in the Toronto offering.
The free literary shindig will take place on Sept. 27, with Toronto, Halifax, Kitchener and Vancouver each hosting myriad events. Toronto, the longest running franchise of the bunch, is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Charles Pachter, artist of classic Canadiana, has achieved additional success in recent years, with the publication of M is for Moose, which fuses Pachter’s nationalism and distinctive pop art, on the one hand, with the ABCs, on the other. The next few weeks will see the release of Canada Counts, where he will do for numbers what he did for letters.
Pachter has come full circle with the festival. In his salad days, he served on the organizing committee of the inaugural event; this year, he was asked to design the official poster, which features a prominent Canadian mammal nimbly climbing oversized books. Here’s a hint which mammal he chose: it starts with the letter M.
Cary Fagan, another veteran of the Canadian publishing scene, recently published Jacob Two-Two on the High Seas, and if that title sounds familiar, it should: the book is the latest instalment in Mordechai Richler’s classic series.
“He had always been planning to write a fourth book,” said Fagan.
Richler’s family followed through by contacting McClelland & Stewart (M&S), which had published Richler, to find a writer, and they settled on Fagan, who is published by Tundra, part of M&S.
“I didn’t think of it in that way,” Fagan said, when asked about the prospect of taking on a classic penned by one of Canada’s most respected novelists. “That could be paralyzing…I thought of it as characters that I could get inside.”
Two newer writers will also appear at next Sunday’s event.
Adrienne Kress, writer, actress and director, has written two books that combine adventure and fantasy. In the first, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, the eponymous heroine charges after adventure. In the second, Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate, Timothy, said Kress, “has no desire to go on an adventure.” No matter – he finds one, and Alex even joins him halfway through the book.
Neither Timothy – nor, alas, the dragon – can boast any Jewish lineage, but when pressed, Kress suggested that Judaism’s cultural emphasis on tight-knit families finds expression in her stories. Laughing, she also pointed to her humourous – self-deprecating, even – writing style as a telltale sign of her inner Jew.
Lauren Kirshner, whose debut novel, Where We Have to Go, was recently published to rave reviews, bounced her ideas off Margaret Atwood, who mentored the Torontonian while she attended the University of Toronto’s Masters of English program in the field of creative writing.
“I was the one who was freaked out,” said Kirshner, recalling the first time she met Canada’s grand dame of fiction. “[She] was incredibly generous.”
While Kirshner admits that some people have noticed a certain Jewish je ne sais quoi in her writing, she’s not so quick to label herself a tribe scribe. She does allow that a number of the characters are Jewish, but writers write what they know, after all. A Jewish sensibility, though? She’ll leave that for others to critique. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 30 September 2009 )
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