The Write Word

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Wordfest has become one of the country’s largest literary festivals, and it shines light not only on the book world’s stars, but also those starting their careers.

Calgary-area writers Jaspreet Singh, Marina Endicott and Samantha Warwick have a lot in common. The most obvious connection is that they all have new books coming out this year and will be featuring them — for the first time — at our city’s most famous literary event.

The least obvious might be their fixation on numbers. Eighteen seconds is the amount of time Endicott suspects she’ll have the jitters during her first reading; Warwick’s book, Sage Island, was called 22 Miles up to the 11th hour; Jaspreet’s first book of short stories is called 17 Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir.

And the most significant connection might arguably be their appreciation for events like Wordfest, which attracts 12,000 attendees each year and helps new writers — as well as experienced ones — introduce themselves to readers, promote their work, learn from other writers and gain experience like at no other venue.

“Established writers were once emerging,” says Endicott. “If we don’t feed the canon of writing with new voices, we will run out.”

And running out of new voices is not in the cards anytime soon for Anne Green. Wordfest’s director since the first festival was launched in 1996 — the event is now considered one of the top three literary festivals in the country — Green is particularly committed to nurturing the neophyte writer.

She illustrates this with a story about Todd Babiak, now a well-known and respected Alberta writer. The first time he presented at Wordfest in 2000, he was on the ticket with the late Mordecai Richler.

So, instead of just a handful people showing up — who likely would’ve come to hear Babiak, a new and emerging writer — 500 people came to hear Richler, a Canadian literary icon.  

The bonus for the audience was they heard Babiak. The bonus for Babiak was a big promotional shot in the arm.

“The festival plays a huge part in the overall ecology of Canadian literature,” says Green. “Part of our obligation is to help support our industry and to bring our young writers forward.”

Endicott will be coming forward to promote her latest book, Good to a Fault, published by Broadview Press’s new Calgary-based Freehand Books. This is her second book (her first novel, Open Arms, was nominated for 2001 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award) and one which took five long years to write.

But this wasn’t an ordinary five-year span. One of the sources for Lorraine — a key character in the book, who has late-stage lymphoma — was Endicott’s sister, who’d died of cancer on her 36th birthday a year before the book began. Little did Endicott know at the time that halfway through the first draft, she, too, would be diagnosed with fallopian cancer.

The book writing stalled out at that point, says Endicott. “It was a pause in the road.” When Endicott returned to complete the book, she says her personal experience with cancer informed and strengthened the character of Lorraine.

Endicott has since recovered and that strength will carry her through her next major project, a story about a sister trio on the second-string vaudeville circuit in the prairies during the early 20th Century.

Although the era will require in-depth research for Endicott, the content might require less.

Before starting a full-time writing career in 1992, her formative years were spent in the arts — as an actor, director and dramaturge.

Singh will need more than strength to complete his next novel, his first to be set in Canada; he’ll need some sleep. A recent jam-packed, cross-country promotional tour for his first novel, Chef, has left him tired. But lack of sleep isn’t always a bad thing.

Not sleeping while writing a book means he is getting into the lives of his characters, he says. And not sleeping while promoting books means he is forgetting them and getting back into his own life for a while.

And that life is one full of curious twists and turns.

Singh was born in India and moved to Canada in 1990. He got his doctorate in chemical engineering from McGill University (his thesis had to do with the development of a polymer gel that can be used as an insoil reservoir to help gardens bloom in semi-arid areas) and taught at Dawson College.

But he always wanted to write.

He tried doing both for a while, but he admits to being a poor multitasker, so he eventually garnered the courage to leave science and embrace writing. Singh had the good fortune of accepting a Markin-Flanagan writer’s residency here in 2006 and now calls Calgary and Banff home.

While doing the residency, his best-laid plans unravelled. He was working on a novel called The Book of Hanging Gardens — set in Kashmir — when a huge earthquake hit the area in real life. 

“It was almost like it caused an earthquake in the manuscript,” says Singh. “For a while,
I was unable to write. I thought I would never be able to write again.”

But then he saw television images of the community picking through the rubble and realized life would have to continue, and people needed to care about food to live. It was around that time that the physicist character in The Book of Hanging Gardens “transmutated” into the character of a chef.

“Chef emerged out of the ruins of that manuscript,” explains Singh. And the book then took a very different format. It became a first-person narrative account and had a sense of urgency, which was not present in the earlier book.

The book has been described as a compelling look at the India Pakistan conflict as the character of Chef has connections to women on both sides of the border.

Another gift from the Markin-Flanagan experience was the opportunity to blend the worlds of science and the humanities, without having to multitask.

Part of the residency program includes reviewing the work of other writers, and some who brought their manuscripts to Singh had backgrounds in science. And friends of his from McGill — some of whom are now teaching or working here — would come to readings and enjoy seeing a fellow scientist bridging the gap between cultures. Several have been so inspired that they are looking at their own work sites (i.e. oil rigs, laboratories) as potential venues for writing.

Singh credits festivals like Wordfest for creating dialogue between writers and readers.
Writing is so isolating an activity, he says, it allows the writer to “step out of that solitude” for a while.

And there is always an element of discovery for attendees, whether the writer is new or established.

With a new writer, the whole session will be a first-ever experience for the viewer/listener, but with an established writer, there may be a new book being launched or the writer might read a new section of the book or may read it differently (Singh admits to adapting the text of Chef when reading it for audiences).

For Singh, there is something compelling about listening to the writer’s voice, about the voice behind the words.

Warwick could’ve used a little less of her own voice (some of which was negative self-talk) when writing Sage Island. The toughest part about writing this debut book — it is a fictionalized account of a marathon swimming race across the Catalina Channel in 1927 — was “doubting my ability and letting that get the better of me,” says Warwick.

But her commitment to the actual event and her fascination with (and awe of) the swimmers who participated, especially 17-year-old George Young who hitchhiked from Toronto to take the plunge, kept her going.

“I’d always dreamt about writing a book,”
says Warwick, who’d been a competitive open-water swimmer, but thought she’d try to writing a non-fiction account of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel.

But once Warwick decided to pursue the Catalina story, she thought it “would be neat to have the flexibility of a fictional character telling her story outside of the race.”

Warwick juggles writing with 20-hour workweeks at the Calgary office of the Writers Guild of Alberta. She tries to write full tilt when she has stretches of time off; otherwise, she writes in sprints. Warwick does not follow the pattern of many writers, getting up and typing at the computer at the crack of dawn.

“I hate mornings,” she says.

Lucky for us Warwick, who was born in Montreal and raised in Sutton, Quebec, and in Vancouver, decided not to pursue earlier career aspirations, of becoming a marine biologist or a horse trainer. Lucky for us that her mentor, Keith Maillard, encouraged her to write about feelings connected to an actual experience rather than the experience itself.

And lucky for us that Warwick is now embarking on her second novel, a “complete departure from historical fiction,” she hints.

And lucky for her that she has Wordfest. She is excited to be presenting — she hopes she’ll not go beet red — and intends to practice hard before her readings. “I don’t know how people will respond [to me],” she says. “But I would like to inspire other writers.” Just the way she has been inspired by authors like Aritha van Herk and Babiak.

Developing her skills, listening to other writers, growing a community of literary enthusiasts . . .Warwick loves it all.

And when the writing flows, when she forgets to eat, when there’s a deadline looming and she is still “in the zone,” Warwick appreciates how lucky she is to be able to do this.

So do we.

Visit here for Avenue's daily update on Word Fest happenings.