Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives

It’s easy to forget when one sees how ubiquitous the “author reading” has become that there was a time when this custom was practically unheard of. Writers are, after all, often introverted, timid - even misanthropic - and generally tasked with sitting alone in a room, mired in their own thoughts and pulling words out of thin air which they clack down onto screens and then woops no that won’t do...erase that erase erase. Do it again. Writers, at least in our often romantic notion of them, are watchers, not do-ers. They linger in the backgrounds and take notes. They brood. Maybe, though, this very notion is one that is fast becoming anachronistic. For in today’s market-driven go-go-go warp speed world, authors are expected to write a book a year, Tweet witty quips regularly to their tens of thousands of followers, snap brilliant Instagram pics with their lattes and labradors, do the talk show circuit, serve on prize juries, write newspaper columns (“The Death of the Novel”), fly on planes from festival to library to festival and perform their own work on stages to thunderous applause, sign books for hours, listen patiently as readers gush, talk with authority on TV or a podcast episode about the state of this or that or the other- and then innovate, advocate, pontificate. It’s a wonder writers write at all. This long and windy diatribe to simply point out one brief and lovely moment when Doris Lessing announces from the stage that this reading, this moment from a Harbourfront event in Toronto in 1984, is her first reading. Ever. And when you, the listener, realize that Doris Lessing, though far from being at the end of her career (she was already in her mid-60s by this point), for just a moment you get a glimpse into that other former world of the writer as loner, as someone charged with quietly finding the words and writing them out, not broadcasting them to the world. There is a sweetness to imagining her there on that stage, wondering how she got there, blinking into the lights, dry-throated, looking out into that room of eager faces waiting for her to speak, to be more than a mere writer. And it’s that world, that old world where writers wrote quietly in rooms (and drank and scrapped and raged - some things never change) and you can hear hints of that old world in her voice when she reads these two beautiful stories about young girls on the cusp of adulthood. That’s the Doris Lessing we hear as we “look” into that world from before, a world she is about to leave behind, stepping up to that microphone for the first time, clearing her throat and letting go of the past. *** This audio recording of Doris Lessing, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1984, is used with the kind permission of The Doris Lessing Literary Will Trust as well as the Toronto International Festival of Authors. And, as always, thanks to TIFA, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, for allowing us access to their archives. Find out more at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.

Salman Rushdie tells a story about a reading he was asked to do for a UK book festival early in his career. On the ticket with Rushdie was another young British writer, Angela Carter who, when taking the stage, looked out into a sparsely attended event and spontaneously invited the entire group of attendees to continue the event across the road at the Pub. That sense of Carter -- inventive, flexible but ever practical -- comes out in this reading, recorded in Toronto in 1986, and demonstrates her powerful voice, complex use of language, and her unique humour and creativity. Her early death at age 51 was a major loss for English-language writing. The audio recording used in this episode from Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter is published by Chatto & Windus, 1984. Copyright © The Estate of Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of the Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Additionally, the audio is used with permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors.

This recording, made in Toronto in 1996, was the first public reading Richard Wagamese ever did. Done on the publication of his 2nd novel, A Quality of Light, Wagamese references in his opening comments the struggles he faced as an Indigenous artist in a world often hostile to these voices. From his early life and early displacement as a boy to his early writing career at the Calgary Herald, among other publications, Wagamese's journey eventually led him to become one of Canada’s most popular and beloved Indigenous writers. This reading from his 1997 novel presents a moving and painful story that demonstrates the vital force that friendship and compassion have on the very arc of a life lived. Wagamese’s reading was recorded as part of Toronto’s International Readings at Harbourfront Series (now called TIFA) and is used with the kind permission of the Estate of Richard Wagamese. A Quality of Light was published by Doubleday Canada in 1997. This episode content is also made possible with the permission of Toronto International Festival of Authors.

Recorded in Toronto in 1986, this reading from Bruce Chatwin’s bestselling book, The Songlines, shows us the mastery that Chatwin developed as he both remains in the background of his scenes but also takes charge of the narrative via a colourful, all-knowing character, Arkady the Russian, and his travels into the Australian bush and the territories of Aboriginals. This ability for Chatwin to be a silent observer by allowing characters who were experts to take the lead (purportedly based on real people Chatwin met in his travels) was what made Chatwin such a unique writer and his style (and this rhetorical construction) has been so widely influential and used by so many writers hence that it may not always be apparent how incredibly talented he was as a storyteller. What is apparent, though, is what a great reader he is of his own work and how he takes us on this journey where, by the end, real life kicking in again seems stark and far less comical than the world we inhabited alongside him, the characters in our own lives far less colourful than the author’s. This audio is used with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the Estate of Bruce Chatwin; the recording is also used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors.

When he appeared for this recording on a stage in 1985 at Harbourfront, Austin Clarke was already a well-known writer in Toronto, having published seven novels, three story collections, and a best-selling memoir, in addition to his work as a freelance journalist for the CBC and the dated, clichéd, “angriest Black man in Canada” label that critics used to characterize his activism. This story, “Doing Right” (from his 1986 collection, Nine Men Who Laughed) shows Clarke’s humour and light-heartedness, bringing the signature cadence and rhythms of his West Indian-inflected English to the voice and characters that inhabit this Toronto. Clarke shows how some members of a community respond as a “Wessindian” migrant tries his best to do what he feels is the right thing. Through the lens of time and place, we’re offered a glimpse of how stories of newcomers were pivotal in transforming “Toronto the Good,” from the staid and quiet collection of villages whose sidewalks rolled up at 6pm, to the colourful, vibrant and cosmopolitan city of today.

In this monologue performed on stage in 1991, American poet, Nikki Giovanni, shows us her associative mind in action, flitting around from current affair to current affair: the shameful way American society treats young Black men, the challenges and struggles of a young rapper called Tupac Shakur (several years before his untimely death), her dream of traveling to space even if only to open a beer and smoke a cigarette - and she’s just getting started. This series of soliloquies leads us everywhere and nowhere, but certain thoughts she expresses may linger in your mind: the fear that she feels for an instant when pulled over by a police officer during a long road trip with a friend - you think you know where the story is going and then she surprises you.

With her incomparable style and humour, in riff-inspired digressions that are both funny and moving, Nikki Giovanni shows us an associative poet’s mind at work as she blends details of a domestic life with touchstones on the culture that has influenced her. In between long dives into, among other subjects, the commissioning of a poem for Mother’s Day and her attempt at not writing anything “tacky,” to what happens when Black men are made into an enemy in the culture, Giovanni performs three pieces: “A Poem for Langston Hughes,” “Hands for Mother's Day,” and “Ego-Tripping.” This episode shows us why Nikki Giovanni is truly an original talent.