Out of the blue

What you will (and won’t) find at
Blue Metropolis 2009

by JULIET WATERS

It’s hard to imagine a writer better suited to the Blue Metropolis international festival than Charlotte Roche. The Berlin VJ was one of the top selling international writers of 2008. She’s a controversial rising star whose recently translated first novel Wetlands has been described as both an important work of literature, and repellent, self-indulgent trash. She’s like a cross between J.K. Rowling and Chuck Palahniuk. So, yes, I was excited about interviewing her for Blue Met, and disappointed when she cancelled her North American tour for “personal” reasons. (I’m still working on getting an interview for the Mirror, but she stood me up last week, so it’s a good thing Blue Met didn’t base their entire festival around her.)

Fortunately, this year’s Blue Met does have one reliable international star, A.S. Byatt. Best known for the Booker-Prize-winning literary whodunit, Possession, Byatt’s latest, The Children’s Book, hasn’t even been released yet in the U.K. But this novel about the ambivalent world of Victorian children’s literature will be available here for the festival. Byatt will be interviewed on stage by Eleanor Wachtel on Saturday, the 25th.

Though there does seem to be a bit of a void in the rising star section of the festival, hopefully this will mean more attention for deserving mid-career writers. The Mirror’s own Rupert Bottenberg will be interviewing Nikahang Kowsar, the exiled Iranian cartoonist and blogger who now lives in Toronto. CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi will be interviewing Jonathan Goldstein, whose recent Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! has appeared in various forms on Goldstein’s show Wiretap and This American Life.

I’m disappointed that the festival hasn’t given more of an event to NYC writer Donald Antrim. While not as well known as his contemporaries, the Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, Antrim is one of those writers who deserves more recognition. He’ll be taking part in the CBC Blue Met panel discussion Why I Write, and I’m officially jealous of anyone who has the money and wit to sign up for the creative writing workshop he’ll be hosting on Saturday morning. On Saturday night, Antrim will be reading with Heather O’Neill and Josip Novakovich, one of my favourites from last year’s Blue Met. Also worth looking out for is an interview on the opening day of the festival with crime writer Giles Blunt reading from a new novel set in 1980s El Salvador. And, of course, there is the great Israeli writer, A.B. Yehoshua interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on Thursday night.

There will be some former rising stars, like Taras Grescoe and Adam Leith Gollner, who, along with evolutionary biologist Tijs Goldschmidt and writer/broadcaster Erica Ritter, will be talking about one of those typically vague Blue Metropolis topics, The World Around Us. What can I say, other than these are reliably interesting writers who will no doubt find something erudite to say about the world. Unfortunately, there’s some crossover between that event and another intriguing panel discussion on India and Pakistan, with renowned essayist Tariq Ali, Montreal Giller winner M.G. Vassanji and one of my favourite young Montreal writers of last year, Saleema Nawaz. If you can’t make that event, Ali will be interviewed one on one by Paul Kennedy on Saturday.

One of my favourite recurring events is the panel discussion Becoming a Writer. I’ve ended up discovering up and comers (like Rawi Hage) there long before they’ve gone on to bigger things. I’m enjoying Alice Zorn’s first collection of short stories, so I recommend looking for her at that event on Saturday afternoon with Miguel Syjuco, winner of the Man Asia literary prize.

For foreign journalism junkies, I also recommend, on the same day, Writers in Peril, a panel discussion with the aforementioned exiled cartoonist Kowsar, war expert Margaret MacMillan, and Nicaraguan intellectual Sergio Ramirez.

BLUE METROPOLIS RUNS APRIL 22–26
AT THE DELTA HOTEL
(777 UNIVERSITY). FESTIVAL
SCHEDULE CAN BE FOUND AT
WWW.BLUEMETROPOLIS.ORG.