Atwood Event: The Feast of Serpent Wisdom

Dear Festival Members:

Sometimes, everything comes together perfectly. This Fall is one of those times. You've seen a few of the highlights. We'll be announcing all the details on the 2009 Fall Edition on September 2nd and I can't wait for you to see all the great talent we've confirmed. It's going to be a great Festival.

No only that, but we've got a world-class line-up of Pre-Festival events with Nick Cave, Margaret Atwood, Cory Doctorow, Karen Armstrong and Tim Flannery.

Today, it's my great pleasure to announce an added attraction to our pre-Festival offerings:

As you know our Margaret Atwood event on September 22nd is a totally unique multi-disciplinary event designed to immerse the audience in the world of her new novel, Year of the Flood. Not content to simply read from the new book, Ms. Atwood has written a short play and had her Hymns set to music.

So the mainstage event - directed by Janet Irwin and featuring the iconic author as narrator, Mary Ellis as Toby, Todd Duckworth as Adam One and Kate Smith as Ren, with the Songs of the Gardeners performed by the Calixa Lavallee Ensenble and conducted by Mark Wilkinson - promises to be an unforgettable evening.

We're taking it one step further with a pre-event fundraising dinner featuring local, organic food inspired by the book and prepared by Thyme and Again.

In our ongoing efforts to 'green' the Festival, we've earmarked funds raised to purchase permanent bicycle parking for our venue. And I can't imagine a more interesting way to celebrate the launch of her new novel than an evening of food, song and ideas, so I hope you will join us!

The main event is, of course, free for Members, so the Feast is only $100 for Members ($125 for everyone else).

The full menu is online: http://www.writersfestival.org/atwoodmenu.pdf

I'm getting hungry just thinking about it!

Seating at the Feast is limited, so call us at 613.562.1243 to reserve your spot at the table!

All the best,
Sean

Fund for Zimbabwean Journalism Student - Mbonisi Zikhali

Mbonisi Zikhali is a 27-year-old journalism student from a township outside of Bulawayo city in Zimbabwe. He has experienced intimidation from lecturers when trying to express opinions in his academic work and from state authorities when writing for an independent newspaper, as well as multiple interruptions to his studies over the past several years due to the political situation in the country.

Recently, Mbonisi was accepted into the highly competitive and well-respected Masters in Journalism program at Carleton University in Ottawa, starting in September 2009. However, Mbonisi comes from a very poor background and has no financial base in Zimbabwe; his uncle, who lives and works in the Diaspora, currently supports 16 members of the family on his salary alone.

Emily Wilson, a Canadian activist who met Mbonisi in October 2008 in Bulawayo, was inspired by his story and his determination. She set herself the challenge of raising $20,000 to help Mbonisi pay for his living costs during his two years at Carleton, and has collaborated with the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) to set up an official fund.

To donate and for more information about Mbonisi and the situation in Zimbabwe, please visit the CJFE website at www.cjfe.org, or copy and paste the following URL into your browser: http://cjfe.org/releases/2009/05082009mbonisi.html

Please help out this fundraising effort by circulating the information to anyone you know who may be interested in Mbonisi's story. Thank you!

Click here for Amnesty International's news feed on Zimbabwe.

M&S Announces Special Dramatic Performances for Year of the Flood

McLelland & Stewart has just announced the creation of a dramatic performance, with actors and choir and an original score, to accompany her eagerly awaited novel, The Year of the Flood, a companion novel to Oryx and Crake.

In an effort to break away from the traditional book tour, Atwood has penned a semi-dramatic theatrical performance based on her new novel The Year of the Flood. Complete with three actors, and a choir which will perform the original score by Los Angeles composer, Orville Stoeber, this one-hour innovative performance promises to be highly entertaining and unlike anything done before. Commissioned by Atwood to create a score for the original hymns that appear in her novel, Stoeber has produced rich, melodic and stirring interpretation, and the resulting CD is destined to become popular in its own right.

In order to reduce the carbon footprint of a traveling cast, will utilize local actors and choirs. In Ottawa, director Janet Irwin will lead Atwood and the cast, and Laurence Ewashko and the Calixa Lavallee Ensenble, conducted by Mark Wilkinson, will perform the music. Atwood will act as narrator in each city. This will be a fundraiser for Nature Canada.

Atwood has also created a stunning interactive website for the novel, here: http://www.yearoftheflood.com/

Silent Auction - Donations Wanted

The Ottawa International Writers Festival is a force for literacy, and not only through its festival programming. Its Step into Stories festival brings the world’s best writers and illustrators into contact with young readers, many from disadvantaged schools. The festival, with its literacy partners, is working to create opportunities for readers and writers who have been pushed to the margins for too long.

And you can help.

This year’s spring edition of the festival featured a silent auction to raise funds for the festival’s literacy programming. It was a lot of fun and bidding was intense on items such as the leather-bound Pauline Johnson donated by Charlotte Gray, and the train trip to Toronto to have lunch with seven Canadian writers.

So for this year’s fall festival, we’re doing it again. We need friends of the Festival to donate signed books, early editions, advanced reading copies, photographs, artwork, CDs or tickets to local performances and museums. Ideally, the item for sale should have some connection to the festival, or at the very least to the writing life, but that connection can be … creative.

Let’s see if we can beat our own record and raise even more for literacy this time around.

Please contact Kate Heartfield at kheartfield@thecitizen.canwest.com before Sept. 17. 2009, and let her know what you have to donate.

Daily Planet's Jay Ingram to host Tim Flannery

We're pleased to announce that we've confirmed Jay Ingram to host our event with Australia's Tim Flannery on October 14th!

Jay Ingram is the co-host of Daily Planet, the hour-long prime-time science program on Discovery Channel, which he helped to design and launch 10 years ago. He has worked in almost every mass medium. He is best known for having hosted CBC’s Quirks and Quarks for 12 years, but he also freelanced for CBC’s Morningside and hosted two CBC documentary series. He was contributing editor to Owl magazine for five years, his weekly science column in The Toronto Star is now in its 13th year, and for several years he has had a web-based program called Jay’s Journal. He has written nine books, and received numerous accolades and awards for his outstanding contributions to the popularization of science.

Tim Flannery is an internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer, and conservationist. His books include the definitive ecological histories of Australia, The Future Eaters, and North America, The Eternal Frontier, as well as A Gap in Nature and Astonishing Animals. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. Flannery spent a year as professor of Australian studies at Harvard, where he taught in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He lives in Adelaide, Australia, where he is director of the South Australian Museum and professor at the University of Adelaide. His latest publication is the international bestseller, The Weather Makers: How We Are Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth.