The Battle in Seattle and its Legacy: Sunil Yapa

I was living in Asia when the Battle for Seattle suddenly took over the news. This was 1999 and the WTO were holding their semi-regular meetings there. There had been smaller problems at past WTO meetings, in Berlin in 1989, but this protest - 40,000 young people taking over huge parts of downtown Seattle - took the media, the government, the city of Seattle, by surprise.

Today in hindsight it might not seem that revolutionary since we have been mired for years in anti-government, anti-globalization, neocapitalist arguments. But this was new in 1999. Again, I wasn't in Seattle but I had moved from Seattle to Shanghai where I was living currently and I had many friends involved in the protests. What struck me at the time was the discord between what the media reported and what my friends would actually tell me in emails they'd send about what was happening: the police brutality, the official government response, the notion that it was a bunch of stoner kids.

But these protests really set the stage in many ways for the situation we find ourselves in today: the outrage to revelations just days ago that wealthy people are hiding hundreds of billions of dollars offshore to avoid taxes is a legacy of WTO 1999. Fury at police brutality and shooting of unarmed young black men is, in part, a legacy of WTO 1999. Occupy Wall Street, the 1%, Thomas Piketty, etc., all have to varying degrees an important link to those protests.

Yet the new Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal has also been the result. Widening economic

equality has been the result. Government salesmanship has also been the result since most Western governments now realize that they have to "sell" these kinds of deals and economic realities to their subjects in ways that they never had to do previous. And they're getting good at it with media often lining right up to do the government's bidding.

American writer, Sunil Yapa, is the first writer to really look at this situation - these protests - in a fictional form. He's less interested, I think, in the legacy of the protests and more in the human story: who these protesters were, what motivated them. But oddly, the book isn't meant to be a diatribe. It also shows the "other side": WTO insiders trying to come to terms with the reality they see out of their shiny conference windows. Government hacks. And corporate America for the first time on the defensive.

The book, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, will be the topic of conversation with the writer, Sunil Yapa, at Blue Met next week on Saturday, April 16 in the evening.

Yapa was recently on Late Night with Seth Meyers and talked about writing the book, growing up with a Sri Lankan father and Montanan mother, and the kind of power that comes from being "the voice" of a generation, particular a generation that was so tied to challenging corporate and government power.

There is so much in this book that is of relevance to young people today - and not just young people - with daily stories of economic inequality, fighting to keep our environment habitable, corporate power run amok, police brutality, so many issues that surround us today.

Come check out out Sunil Yapa and hear about why he wrote the book and what he envisions for our near and long-term future. Tickets are $10 and the event is on Saturday, April 16 at 5:30pm at Hotel 10 in downtown Montreal. Get your tickets here.

On Prolific Writers: from Joyce Carol Oates to Junot Díaz, from Colm Tóibín to Heather O'Neill

An interesting piece in The Millions, reflecting on a piece by Stephen King that defends prolific writers.

There is this tendency in the literary world to look askance at writers who produce too much. A young Quebec writer I know who only published his first novel a few years ago, is already publishing his fourth book. More than one person has remarked to me that he must not be that great of a writer if he can crank out four books in less than four years. (In all fairness his books aren't terribly long).

Stephen King mentions Joyce Carol Oates (who won our Grand Prize in 2012) and the fact that no one, perhaps Oates herself even, is completely sure how much she's written and published because she's written and published so much. And that for most prolific authors, only a handful of books tend to stand out, even if they've written 30.

I recall people seeming a bit frazzled when they were talking about Oates that year, that she'd written so much, they didn't really know where to begin. Some people knew Blonde and some people knew The Falls. But people kept asking me "Where should I start?" with a slightly desperate lilt to the question. I think that people simply felt overwhelmed, that to be an Oates "expert," was a half a lifelong undertaking.

Keep in mind that at a literary Festival, there's always an implied heap of time and work beyond sitting for an hour listening to a writer. If you go to a concert, you might  return home, fire up Spotify and find the artist's album online to play while you roast your broccoli. If you see a movie, you walk out after two hours and are plunged back into the normalcy of your life. You might mention the film to a friend, you might think about it a little. But chances are, that's it. Dance, theatre are the same. But when you see a literary event, often the idea is that you will somehow find the writer's book or books and then read it (or them). So in a certain way, the literary event is simply the introduction to a whole host of time beyond the event. True, a number of people go to an event having already read a writer's work, but even then: if they were completely closed off to the possibility of re-reading or reading a new one, they probably wouldn't be there. Also, not every person attends a literary event with the plan to buy a book, but that's always the goal: of the producer, of the writer, of the publisher. An interesting event is one goal, but getting the public to buy the book is the main goal.

Oddly, I find that the writers who often do very well for us (sell out events, get lots of media attention) tend to be writers who've written 2-3 books maximum: Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Heather O'Neill, or who might only have a small number of books in translation (Carlo Lucarelli, Bernard Schlink, Olga Grjasnowa, etc.).  And I think it's partly due to the fact that this is what we often do at Blue Met: introduce new writers to our public. But I think it's often due to the fact that there is simply less of a time commitment implied.

That said, there are writers who have written many books that do well: Richard Ford, Colm Tóibín, Russell Banks, and others, but it's not exponential: if we can fill a room with 100 people who've written one book, it doesn't meant the author who's written 8 books will attract 800. Quite the contrary. And I can think of several authors who've written many books who can only attract a few dozen people maximum.

For any literary Festival, an author like Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch) would be a major draw: not only has she only written just a few books (three, to be exact), she doesn't do many public events. Win-win.

Highlights of the 2015 Festival

So everything we've been working for since May, 2014, finally came together and we did this whole Festival-thing.

Whew. I don't ever remember feeling so exhausted at the end of a Festival as I did at the end of this one. At our closing cocktail on Sunday, I literally couldn't follow any more conversations and I couldn't speak French at all. I was done. When I got home, I laid down at 8:30 and was out for the next 10 hours!

Gene Luen Yang at Drawn & Quarterly

Every Festival has moments which stay with us and for me, these are the standouts:

Junot Díaz at the Rialto: great conversation, packed hall, wonderful energy in the air. This was the largest show we ever put on and it was an all around success.

The Film Series wasn't as well attended as I'd hoped but since it's our first year of doing it, we weren't expecting major turn out (we find that these things take a few years to get going). Sitting in Living Stars on Sunday and hearing people laughing out loud throughout was very gratifying since I had such a personal connection to this film.

Performigrations events and their fascinating suitcase installation. Those people constantly impress
me: they were up late the night before installation, putting the finishing touches on those displays and they were absolutely fascinating.

Gene Luen Yang was such a cool dude and I love his writing even more (and I loved it before).

Oonya Kempadoo was as amazing in real life as her novels. I can't say enough good about her.

Enpuku-ji Zen Centre poetry events were packed and there was such a nice vibe in there.

Oonya

Yes, every year there are a few snafus, forgotten photocopies, missed calls, etc., but we managed to handle all these issues without much trouble. The snotty authors are easily forgotten (and, yes, every Festival there are a handful of those).

We love our public: they are so supportive, kind, offering constructive ideas and criticism and being honest about confusing descriptions, hotel facilities, organization of events, and more. This is vital. And we feel so lucky that our audiences are so loyal and devoted. Each year the familiar faces is very rewarding. We love all the new faces, too!



Thanks, everyone, for making the 2015 such a raging success!

Shoes at the entrance of the Enpuku-ji Zen Centre during a poetry event

Junot Díaz at Blue Met

Winner of our 3rd Premio Metropolis Azul, Junot Díaz will be at the Festival this year to talk about his popular works, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as well as his other book This is How You Lose Her.

Díaz is one of contemporary fiction's best-known practitioners and a recent BBC critics poll ranked Oscar Wao as the best book of the 21st century.

Díaz's books reflect a changing demographic in US and North American society: his works detail the immigrant experience, the difficulties of assimilation and, in particular, of language-learning. His works are full of memorable and unique protagonists who struggle to fit in but stand out with humour and incredibly colorful language.

A prolific Facebook user, Díaz is also preoccupied with racism and injustice in America today and his Facebook posts reflect his social conscience (and, indeed, much of what interests him as a fiction writer).

"We live in a society where default whiteness goes unremarked - no one ever asks it for its passport - but God forbid a person of color should raise her voice against this smug occult system of oppression, points out whiteness, its operations and consequences - well, in two seconds flat that person is the one accused of being obsessed with race."

It's very interesting to me how our writers reflect our societies and we can learn so much about what is happening in any given society by considering that society's writers (and artists in general) and what interest them. Yet this is also a very delicate line to walk because writers who are overtly political often fall out of fashion very quickly. So there has to be some kind of broad appeal that both reflects the culture but also which stands independent of it.

Díaz will do two events at Blue Met 2015: his main event at the Rialto Theater, in association with, Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, will see Díaz on stage with Montreal writer Heather O'Neill (The Girl Who Was Saturday Night). This is on Thursday, April 23 in the evening. Tickets are $10 or $8.50 if you buy them before April 8.  Tickets available online here (service fees may apply) or you can also buy them at the shop: Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, 211 Bernard Ouest, in Mile End.

His other event will be on Friday, April 24 at Librairie Las Américas (2075 St-Laurent). This event is in Spanish and will be an onstage discussion between Díaz and journalist Hector Tobar (author of Deep Down Dark: the Untold Story of 33 Men Buried in the Chilean Mine). Tickets here.