This Is Not a Reading Series founder, film critic, and all-purpose Renaissance Man Marc Glassman enters the spring festival fray with Pages Festival + Conference, a cross-disciplinary, mixed media celebration of the adaptability of the written word in an era when bookstores like Glassman’s own beloved Pages have closed their doors. As if that’s not enough, the festival at the Randolph Theatre will have a more theory-oriented companion in an all-day conference—taking place Friday at the Tranzac Club—on technology’s role in the new wave of publishing.
One might have expected a former bookseller to sound wistful when speaking of the digital turn, but Glassman has opted to look forward for the festival’s inaugural edition, which takes as its theme “exploring the evolving word.” Speaking to us by phone, Glassman acknowledged the wide technological changes that have affected the creation and distribution of print media from newspapers to fiction in recent years—but indicated he prefers to think of e-books and websites as new hybrid forms rather than as gloomy harbingers of the end of publishing. “It’s not a matter of feeling nostalgic,” he told us, “but looking at where we are now as creative people, to harness new energy and new ideas, and move forward and hopefully create something even more interesting in the future.” To that end, Friday’s conference will be devoted to a clear-eyed look at the future of the book, without the requisite hair-pulling that usually attends such state-of-the-industry addresses.
Marc Glassman. Photo by Andrew Louis/Torontoist.
Those seeking something less heady would do well to take in some of the eclectic offerings on the festival side, which span a wide swath of contemporary Canadian writers, artists, and digital media workers. We’re especially curious about Saturday afternoon’s panel “Urban Narratives,” a mixed-media tour through the neighbourhoods of Toronto, hosted by York University’s Amy Lavender Harris, author of the acclaimed Imagining Toronto, which sought to map the city through a surprising mix of literary representations. Harris will be joined by luminaries like Track Toronto member Chloe Doesburg, the National Film Board’s Gerry Flahive—producer of The New York Times’ interactive documentary A Short History of the Highrise—and Spacing editor Shawn Micallef, author or the recent book Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto.
CanLit aficionados from Pages’ heyday might prefer to take in one of two panels devoted to diverging streams of our national literary heritage. Saturday evening brings a conversation entitled “The Many Tales of Susanna Moodie,” a multi-media presentation on the British-born, backwoods-settled writer’s literary afterlives, hosted by NOW Magazine’s books and entertainment editor Susan G. Cole. Painter Alex Pachter will be on hand to discuss his gorgeous illustrations for a limited edition of Margaret Atwood’s poetry collection The Journals of Susanna Moodie, published in 1980, while illustrator Willow Dawson will join members of cross-platform production company Xenophile Media in showing a sneak preview of an upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Moodie’s famous (and, at least for Canadian literature students, oft-read) Roughing It In the Bush.
A self-portrait of cartoonist Seth.
Unless Atwood’s characterization of her as a wispy ghost proves true, the long-dead Moodie won’t be there in the flesh, sadly, but Pages Festival has scored a coup in the much-loved, always-dapper cartoonist and graphic novelist Seth, who will be on hand for a panel devoted to the graphic novel. The conversation will be hosted by journalist and respected comics writer Jeet Heer. Seth will also be joined by fellow cartoonists Fiona Smyth and Michael DeForge.
Atom Egoyan.
Glassman’s own work as a film critic will come to the fore in his onstage conversation with Toronto filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Focused on the work of adaptation—which Egoyan is no stranger to, having famously converted Russell Banks’s novel The Sweet Hereafter into a Cannes and Oscar-feted film by the same title—the conversation might also span Egoyan’s recent turn as an opera director: he’s steered productions of Così fan tutte for the Canadian Opera Company and the Chinese opera Feng Yi Ting for Luminato.
Apart from the stacked lineup, Glassman admits that what he’s most looking forward to from the festival is the sense of community it will bring. “One of the things I’ve missed about Pages,” he tells us, “and one of the things people have missed with the decline of so many independent bookstores around the city and around the world is a place to hang out and meet people who are of a like mind.” One of his hopes for the festival, then, is that it will help recapture that spirit of the friendly cultural salon in a communal space, at least once a year.