2009 Scream Literary Festival Calendar

If you’re a fan of blunt-force trauma, you could do no better than the launch of the 17th annual Scream Literary Festival, when horror-lit luminaries Tony Burgess (Pontypool) and Derek McCormack (The Haunted Hillbilly, The Show That Smells) lead an all-singing, all-dancing musical revue like an undead Donny & Marie.

Join their alter egos Count Cormula and, um, Tony Burgess as they lead Scream Mainstage Alumni Dani Couture (Good Meat), Sean Dixon (The Girls Who Saw Everything), Carl Wilson (Let's Talk About Love) and others through a ghoulish extravaganza.

Will Cormula’s vampires prevail? Will Burgess’ zombies emerge victorious? Will the Scream alumni get to read their works amidst the singing and dancing? Will the Eye Magazine Poetry Contest winner prove an innocent onstage victim in all this madness? What does Nathaniel G. Moore have to do with any of this?

Find out in Die Scream Die! The Musical Revue.

“The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.” – Bruce Sterling. Pay your respects to the book with artists Mark Laliberte, Craig Leonard, Danny Snelson and the intonations of Spamradio as we seal it in the tomb of the Type Books basement gallery. As books shed their confines of form and structure, their remains are melted and encased in chemical caskets, squeezed into the metal sheaths of hard drives and otherwise left to decay. The show will run for the duration of the festival and provides a backdrop for the Scream’s Type Salon Series of events.

Perhaps the Information Age leaves no room for poetry. Or perhaps poetry imagined the Information Age. Choral selections from the history of catalogue poetry, including Homer, Chaucer, Sears Roebuck, Daniel Spoerri, Greg Curnoe and David Markson open poetry to threat of a surfeit of information.

Beneath Toronto’s storefronts lie the graves of our independent bookstores. Join our walking wake as we take a tour through 100 years of Canada’s literary retail history. From the recently demised David Mirvish Books to Yorkville mainstays The Book Cellar and Britnell’s, this walk along Bloor reveals a virtual graveyard of loved and lost bookstores. Short elegiac readings will occur along route by those who knew them best and you are invited to lament your favorite shuttered stores with spontaneous shrines and love notes. Out of respect for the dead, we request you wear black, come prepared with umbrellas for rain and a good, sensible pair of shoes.

The Scream invites you to take your own walking tour. We also encourage you to share your comments and memories online as we build a living memorial to the vital role of Toronto’s independent booksellers.

Behind every great book is the silent effort of an editor, the first, best reader of the work. Some hack-and-slash, others suggest and cajole, but all editors have a style that impacts the final product. What dialogues and tensions occur between authors and editors? How are works cut, sutured and stitched from manuscript to print? The Scream invites you into the surgical amphitheatre as Julie Wilson (seenreading.com) hosts an editing autopsy. Alana Wilcox (Senior Editor of Coach House Books) and Jon Paul Fiorentino (Editor of Snare Books) have individually blind-edited one poem and piece of prose by two well-known writers; now, they’ll put on their latex gloves and poke around in the guts of the work. The authors will be unveiled, the editors will discuss what it’s like to get their hands dirty, and we’ll get a good look at literature from the inside.

Sponsored by Open Book Toronto

“The books have nothing to say.”
– The Captain.

Ray Bradbury knew books were in threat of extinction long before the rest of us. Join several noted Toronto poets in the underground resistance at Toronto's classiest cult cinema, the Trash Palace, for short readings and a screening of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Behold the dystopia that awaits us all in the post-lit world. The dystopia that awaits us all in the post-lit world.

Shuffle (by Christan Marclay) is a series of photographs of musical scores – from a few notes on a door to four whole staffs of music – found in the urban wild. Selecting randomly from a deck of 72 index cards inscribed with scraps of music, Anthony Easton will create a score to be played by musician Sundar Subramanian over the course of an hour, creating an aleatory performance unlikely to be repeated.

The library becomes a theatre space as the Scream commandeers the stacks. Following Martha Baillie’s tale of library transgressions — The Incident Report (Pedlar Press, 2009) — readers will take their places in the Dewey Decimal System for live performances. The readings themselves become incidents to be catalogued by library patrons in their own reports. Featured readers include Martha Baillie, fiction and poetry writer Stuart Ross (Buying Cigarettes for the Dog), poet Jacob McArthur Mooney (The New Layman’s Almanac), poet Kate Eichhorn (Fond), essayist Marc Glassman (founder of Pages Bookstore), actor and script writer Mitch Smolkin (A Song is Born), new media artist Vera Frenkel, and singer Theo Heras (What Will We Do with the Baby-O?).

If book objects disappeared, what would be left? How do the books we carry in our memories relate to the books on our shelves? Come to the Type basement for a real-life experiment inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, where participants will be asked to recreate from memory a classic text (to be revealed only at the event itself). What will survive of the book if it’s all resting on us? Be prepared to play!

Bill Kennedy's Manifesto
Margaret Christakos' Manifesto
Jay MillAr's Manifesto

Five New Manifestos on the Book: Our Keynote Panel

In the 1890s, Mallarmé wrote, “to the question of books which are read in the ordinary way I raise my knife in protest, like the cook chopping off chickens’ heads.” In the 1920s, Benjamin declared the book “an outdated mediation between two different filing systems” and dreamt about poets’ renewed public role with “the founding of an international moving script.” Today, new media technologies realize these speculative visions for the future book – but is the book really dead? Caitlin Fisher (winner of the 4th International Digital Literature Award 2008 prize in poetry), Bill Kennedy (co-conspirator behind The Apostrophe Engine), Margaret Christakos (author of What Stirs),
Barbara Godard (Translation Studies in Canada: Institutions, Discourses, Practices, Texts) and Jay MillAr (publisher of BookThug) join in on the speculation and debate by presenting five new manifestos on the book.

TWB Launch of Beyond Stasis: Poetics and Feminism Today

The Summer 2009 issue of Open Letter features new writings by and about a group of avant-garde Canadian women writers born after 1960. Join contributors Angela Rawlings (Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists), Trish Salah (Wanting In Arabic), Erin Gray (noted poet and academic) and Jenny Sampirisi (Is/Was) at this reading and launch celebrating new work by and about some of Canada’s most innovative emerging and mid-career women writers.

Break your mourning and throw off the black clothes for one evening as Joyland.ca and the Scream Literary Festival peddle eleven readers, raffle prizes, and, yes, T-shirts! Claudia Dey, Rebecca Rosenblum, and Stacey May Fowles read their own work from Joyland and Maggie MacDonald will perform a dramatic reading of a script by Bruce LaBruce. Helping out with cover readings are: Zoe Whittall, Kevin Connolly, Carl Wilson, Emily Holton, and Faye Guenther. And in a very special set, editors Lynn Henry and Michael Holmes read their own writers!

Hosted by Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz, the world’s most incompetent capitalists, who will beg and plead for T-shirt sales in an entertaining fashion throughout the entire night.

Joyland.ca is an international hub for short fiction founded by well-meaning mixed citizenship couple Brian Joseph Davis (CAN) and Emily Schultz (US/CAN). To date the site has featured work by Lydia Millet, Lynn Coady, Jonathan Lethem, Ed Park, Nathan Sellyn, and many other emerging and established talents.

Just when the book seemed beyond all hope, comic artists have arrived to save the day! Our heroes Willow Dawson, Evan Munday, Claire Nobbs, Mariko Tamaki and Angela Szczepaniak swallow their proton pills and attempt to revive, rescue, revisit, and reinterpret the literary industry. Accompanying them will be host Elvira Kurt and while including projections (but not readings) of comics from a team of mighty artists, including Hope Larson, Steve Rolston, Kate Beaton, stef lenk, and Doug Wright Award recipients Dave Lapp Jeff Lemire, Jillian Tamaki and Matt Forsythe.

Sponsored by Broken Pencil.

DINNER TICKETS SOLD OUT!

One of Canada’s foremost literary talents revisits his classic, Governor General’s Award-winning Civil Elegies, alongside the recent, visionary poetry of Un and yesno. The City of Toronto Archives provides the setting for this year’s prestigious Book-Length Dinner Reading, as Dennis Lee looks to his storied past and plots a course for poetry’s future. Civil Elegies (1968) is widely regarded as a seminal work of Canadian literature, a mix of trenchant politics, everyday civic life and the joy of language. Un (2003) and yesno (2007) are scathing political commentaries told in dissolving and dissolute language, avant-garde treatises that mark a daring departure from his earlier works while reinvesting in his consummate musicality.

Tickets are available online here, or any Type Books. A three-course dinner will be provided by Juniper Catering, with vegetarian options available.

The book-length dinner is one of The Scream Literary Festival’s most prized annual traditions, having featured such luminary authors as Christian Bök, Dionne Brand, Christopher Dewdney, Sheila Heti, Lisa Robertson and Gerry Shikatani.

Sponsored by Open Book Toronto

Cut loose for an evening of raucous music and cathartic dancing with the BidiniBand, the latest project of musician, author, raconteur, agent provocateur, hoser and former Rheostatic Dave Bidini. Come for the songs about “dead hockey players, cannibalism and lesbian school teachers” and stay for the awesome prizes and a chance to meet your favourite authors in an evening of celebration in the name of the book.

ABOUT THE BAND and THE ALBUM

Bidiniband
The Land Is Wild
The Bidiniband’s “Land is Wild” features writer and former Rheostatic Dave Bidini, which is a good thing considering his name is part of the band’s. It’s the debut solo release from the author, playwright, film-maker– but in this case, rhythm guitarist–possessing more songs about dead hockey players, cannibalism and lesbian school teachers. Besides its avowed leader, the Bidiniband features former ‘Stat Don Kerr, who produced and mixed the ‘mutha, on drums and tenor guitar; guitarist Paul Linklater of Justice, Manitoba, with whom Bidini penpalled when Link was but a prairie teen; and Doug Friesen, also of Manitoba, on bass. The record was originally conceived in three parts, with initial recording done at Chris Stringer’s studio in Toronto, subequent colour-splashing courtesy of Ottawa’s Dave Merritt (Golden Seals), and finally, sessions at Don’s Rooster Studios in Toronto, where the group was joined by Ford Pier on keyboards. All told, it was a yearlong process that yielded the very sparkling disc that you now hold in your hopeful and forgiving hands.

“The Land is Wild” follows the tradition of records like “Ogden Nut’s Gone Flake” by The Small Faces and “Wheatfield Soul” by The Guess Who: broad, dynamic rock and roll formed over a bedrock of acoustic guitar set to epic tales of adventure and the tapestry of political (“Terrorize Me Now” and “Pornography”) and emotional (“Land is Wild” and “Memorial Day”) life, not forgetting the odd song about smoking (“Last Good Cigarette”) and music itself (“Song Ain’t Any Good”). The track “Take a Wild Ride” is from a teenage animation series currently in development and written by Bidini, while “Why Zeke Roberts Died” evolved from the guitarist’s experience at the Buduburam refugee camp in Accra, Ghana, which comprises the last third of the author’s most recent book, “Around the World in 57.5 Gigs.” “The Land is Wild” also forwards the Rheos’ legendary artistic tradition of songs about Canada and its people, another tile in Bidini’s efforts of articulating life in the place he knows best.

What’s old is new again — narrative hip hop music is a dynamic occurrence of a thriving oral literary tradition. Led by hip hop artist Paul Sackichand and professional storyteller Rico Rodriguez, this year’s youth event provides an opportunity to learn how to add suspense to your rhymes and rhythm to your stories.

This Ain’t The Rosedale Library is the setting for an extended meditation on the relationship between music and print. Join a series of surprise guests as they comb through the world of librettos and lyric sheets, ballads and concrete poems in a search for the musica universalis in the pages of a book. Long may it live.