Poison-tipped poetry, sonic intepretations ... and a haunting

From November 3 to 5, Concordia’s Off the Page literary festival offered up an eclectic lineup of panel discussions and readings by a selection of veteran and up-and-coming authors, including Concordia alumni Johanna Skibsrud, Suzanne Buffam, Trish Salah and Sarah Burgoyne.

Missed the fest? Here’s a recap of three days of literary diversity.

Day 1

The festival kicked off with an undergraduate reading presented in collaboration with The Void Magazine. A crowd gathered in the Department of English lounge to listen to five of Concordia’s most promising young writers recite poems that will be published in the upcoming issue of The Void, to be released later this term.

After a short wine and cheese, the crowd made its way to a headline reading presented by Writers Read, featuring Sarah Burgoyne, Damian Rogers and Suzanne Buffam.

Burgoyne (MA 14) is a Montreal-based writer originally from Canada’s west coast. Her most recent collection, Saint Twin, is currently nominated for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry.

Burgoyne read new work: “I pretended I was Anne Sexton once, and read my poison to a cult.”

Damian Rogers is the poetry editor of The Walrus and House of Anansi Press. Rogers read from her most recent collection, Dear Leader, and new material: “I flowed through my crises / beautiful as a bruise / and alone.”

The final reader of the night was Suzanne Buffam (MA 03), whose poetry collection A Pillow Book was edited by fellow headliner Damian Rogers. Buffam read from its beginning, oscillating between prose pieces and lists: “Do opposites attract? Unresolved patterns attract.”
 

Day 2

“A Haunting” was a performance and decolonial ghost tour presented in collaboration with Yiara Magazine. Jordan Brown led the audience around the sixth floor of the J.W. McConnell Building (LB), which was filled with art that questions what it means to occupy an already occupied space.

Featured performers and visual artists Kama La Mackerel, Raïssa Simone, Tiffany Ashoona, Alisha Mascarenhas, Eli Lynch, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Nam Chi Nguyen, and Cedar-Eve Peters — all of whom are black, Indigenous, of colour, and many of whom are queer — haunted the university’s institutional space with their art of resistance.
 

The “Haunting” was followed by a reading by Trish Salah (BA 92) and Evie Shockley. Both authors investigate racial identity, politics and decolonial poetics in their writing practices.

Salah, who won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction in 2013, is an Arab-Canadian writer whose work also explores gender, race and sexuality, with a focus on transgender issues. Salah read from her collection, Lyric Sexology: “Without land and your fear you are not you.”

Shockley read from her verse collection on blackness, The New Black, which examines how our racial past shapes the present. She engaged with the rhetoric of race in America: “Those who cannot forget the past / are destined to remix it.”

Day 3

The final day of panels, readings and performances took place in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood.

It started off with a panel on the fictional exploration of shame, in the beautiful co-op space of Temps Libre, featuring readings by Anna Leventhal (Sweet Affliction), Jowita Bydlowska (Guy) and Fawn Parker (Looking Good and Having A Good Time). The authors touched on experiences of shame through their work in often-comedic prose. Leventhal: “How did I come to deserve a wife as terrible as you?”

This was followed by the launch of Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud’s (MA 05) new poetry collection The Description of the World.

Erin Wunker was also there to read a chapter on female friendship from her new book Notes From a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life. The two authors mirrored each other’s work beautifully and called for a more careful listening. Skibsrud: "I want to be a good person/ I want to live my life/ I want to be reasonable/ make compromises."
 

"The Kitchen Table or We Need To Talk About Lionel Shriver" wrapped up our time at Temps Libre. The panel invited local performing artists Madelyne Beckles and Kai Cheng Thom, local writer Fariha Roisin, and Canadian literature heavyweights Wunker and Salah. 

Guests took a seat at the table with the panelists to raise various concerns and questions about being mixed-race, class structures and cultural appropriation. The panelists were served an elegant three-course meal by chef Ella Webber. The guests were enthusiastic: the panel went 45 minutes over time, illustrating the need for these discussions to continue.  

For the closing event, “What Remains: A Literary Wake,” musicians were given poems by local authors and had several hours to interpret them sonically. The interpretations were performed in front of an audience at an off-campus jam space that supports feminist and gender-queer musicians and artists.

What an appropriate closing to the festival: an exploration of an author’s loss of authority over their own work.

Find out more about Concordia’s Department of English.