It would be hard for any fan of books and literature to take a look at the lineup of Wordfest’s 2024 lineup for their Imaginarium Festival, and not see a list of the who’s-who of the international publishing world.
From best-selling authors both prolific and legendary, to local celebrities that reach across the page into the silver screen.
That’s entirely due to the work that Wordfest has done over the past decade to build the festival into a year-round and much-in-demand destination for authors.
“It’s our 29th festival, which is kind of astonishing. We now program year round—we do 100 shows a year—and what this has done now is to let us really focus the festival in a way that really highlights what I call the tastiest writers in the world,” said Wordfest CEO Shelley Youngblut.
“They’re exceptional writers, they’re really amazing human beings, and they’re all very eager to connect with you in person. They’re the perfect spark plugs to bring that exclamation point between the book being written and the book being read together.”
Examples of those international superstars of publishing include Booker Prize winners Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright; Booker Prize longlisted author Rachel Kushner; author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer, which became a cult classic film and a favourite of President Barack Obama; author Lev Grossman who authored The Magicians which became a hit Syfi television series; and prolific and Bram Stoker Award winning horror writer Stephen Graham Jones.
“It’s a really big deal that Steven [Graham Jones] is coming to Calgary, and to the best of my knowledge, we’re the only Canadian literary festival that’s presenting him this year,” said Youngblut.
“We first met Steven during the pandemic. We did an online show with Stephen, Billy-Ray Belcourt and Joshua Whitehead. Stephen was like, oh my god, he was he was so articulate and so mesmerizing… he’s so accessible. There’s so much that you can take away about society, about racism, about misogyny, but it’s so entertaining. He walks that fine line so well, and we’ve been trying to get him here in person for four years.”
Calgary is the highlight of tours for many authors
She said that Calgary has shed the pre-conceived notions of being just an oil and gas town. Instead, authors now flock to Wordfest because Calgarians are passionate book readers; they buy a lot of books, and they tend to be very appreciative audiences.
“That word travels. So often the Calgary show will be the best show on an author’s North American tour. That’s been the case now for the past four years, and so we actually don’t have problems anymore enticing big names to Calgary. Our biggest challenge that we don’t have enough slots to put them in, which is a great position to be in.”
Celebrated Canadian author and book editor Nita Pronovost, aka Nita Prose, and guest of the 2022 edition of Wordfest praised the festival.
“The Imaginairium scores an 11 out of 10 when it comes to creativity. There is nothing quite like it.”
Prose is returning to the festival this year with a pair of her books, The Mystery Guest and The Mistletoe Mystery.
Among the authors closer to home, and closer to the heart of Calgarians, include Tegan and Sara with their newest graphic novel Crush (and whose previous book High School was turned into an Amazon Freevee streaming show), and celebrated photojournalist Leah Hennel with her work documenting the Covid-19 pandemic in Alberta.
Big ideas and big discussions are also set to be a major part of the festival experience, with Wordfest’s How to series of salons being held at the Memorial Park Library.
“We’re trying to make our How-tos cheeky, and so that’s how to bookstore, how to glow up a book. Glowing up a book means just how do you market a book today? How do you get people to pay attention when mainstream media is broken, social media is broken? How do you get people to pay attention?” said Youngblut.
“So there’s a lot of really interesting, creative things going on within the publishing community that we’re going to talk about in that show.”
Other topics include how to write about war, how to conquer young adult writing, and how to get mad.
“But the other big ideas, we’ve got Diana Bereford-Kroeger, who is the Jane Goodall of trees. She’s in her 80s, and she’s an internationally renowned speaker on trees,” Youngblut said.
“Especially right now in Calgary, there’s all this talk about the tree canopy and about how we’re losing our urban forests. There’s a lot of ecological reasons why trees are even more important. Well, we get to hear from the person who knows more about trees than anyone else in the world.”
Variety to be had, especially in the Imaginarium’s variety shows
Calgary’s own Deborah Willis and Kris Demeanor, alongside Arizona and Heather O’Neill, will be hosting a pair of variety shows for guests looking for a little less debate and a little more entertainment.
“This is not your grandmother’s Wordfest, even though your grandmother is absolutely welcomed, and we have people of all ages. This is not an author sitting on a chair reading their book for people. These are packed theatres with 200 to 300 people in them. They are participatory, they are shows, they’re real,” said Youngblut.
“We certainly don’t call them readings.”
Willis and Demeanor are hosting the Demeanor and Willis Variety Show featuring music, poetry, and a lot of fun.
“The idea there is, Chris was our first poet laureate, he’s an incredible musician, incredible storyteller and Debbie has been nominated for the Giller Prize, the Leacock Medal for humor. They’re a couple, and we thought, what if we gave them their own talk show?” Youngblut said.
“We’ve got Leah Hennel, who is probably the best news photographer in North America, and she just happens to live in Calgary. Clem Martini, an incredible playwright, he just happens to live in Calgary. Then we’ve added Sig Burwash, who’s a comic book artist from Nova Scotia, and Carleigh Baker, who’s a short story writer and novelist from Vancouver.”
“We love the eclecticism of it and the mix of it.”
Youth literacy a focus for Wordfest
Even though, as Youghblut puts it, the festival is for every age group, special attention is being put on youth and the rising rates of illiteracy among teens.
Some 3,500 teens from junior highs and high schools will get to take part in special Wordfest programming with authors Tanya Talaga, Lev Grossman, David A. Robertson, Niigaan Sinclair, Alice Kuipers, Tessa Walls, Anne Fleming, and Sarah Everett—who herself won the 2023 Governor General’s Award.
“We’ve got these youth events going, and this is all because Calgarians have this way of looking at a problem, which is, in our case, teens aren’t reading and figuring out a way to help solve it that is creative and unique,” said Youngblut.
“Teen literacy is a huge problem, not just in Calgary, but all over. There’s obvious reasons why kids are reading less and less. Some of it is socioeconomic, but most of it is cultural, which is that we as a society stop encouraging kids to read after they gain their basic literacy in about grade three. After that, it’s not necessarily emphasized in school.”
She said having access to people like Grossman means kids aren’t having to read books that are 30, 40, sometimes even 50 years old in their school libraries—which have been more and more turned into learning commons instead of centres for literacy.
“We have access to the world’s best writers. They also want to talk to teens. So it’s an Ask-Me-Anything format where 330 kids leave their schools come to Central Library and get to ask these incredibly generous, smart people questions, whatever they want to ask them, and then we provide class sets of their books to the schools,” Youngblut said.
“This is all free – and you should see the kids afterward. They probably haven’t read a book since their parents read to them, and now, all they can do is, ‘I want to read Waub Rice. I want to read David Robertson.” They treat them like they’re rock stars.”
Although Imaginarium runs from Oct. 16 through 21, Calgarians are being encouraged to get their tickets early, and get them fast.
Every year, tickets sell out far in advance of the festival itself.
“It’s the first day back to school and it’s very hard to be thinking about October, but for some of these shows, I would absolutely encourage you to go get your tickets now,” said Youngblut.
The other option, she said, was to get a festival pass and take in so much more than just a single event at a single venue.
“Because we treat the festival as kind of like a menu of big ideas and great authors, you can take your in favourites and make sure you’re going to those shows. Then you can take a chance on a few people you don’t know, and then you can take a chance on some of these other kinds of variety shows or the talk shows.”
“You get the best of all possible things. It’s like this great tasting menu of ideas that you’re building for yourself.”
For the complete lineup, and to purchase tickets, see wordfest.com.
