Blue Metropolis celebrates 15 years
The Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, a multilingual celebration of reading and writing, is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. Concordia alumni are well-represented among the invited writers, and President Alan Shepard has been named one of the festival’s ambassadors.
“His reputation as a reader and as a teacher was something that we thought would be really useful … to promote reading and books in general,” says Blue Met Director of Programming Gregory McCormick.
In video captions on the festival’s website, the ambassadors are asked to describe one book that’s important to them. Shepard describes Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. “It’s a book that values freedom of thought and individual liberty,” he says. “That’s what university life is all about; breaking old ideas and making new ones.” (Watch a video below.)
Giller Prize winner Joanna Skibsrud, who completed her MA in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia in 2005, is returning to Montreal from her new home in Tuscon, Arizona, to take part in a poetry reading event and a short-story reading event at the festival.
“We’re very happy to have her come back,” says McCormick. “She’s been away for a while, and it’ll be exciting to hear what she’s been working on for the past 18 months.” Skibsrud’s novel, The Sentimentalists, earned her the Giller Prize in 2011, making her the youngest person ever to win Canada’s most coveted literary award.
Two other literary hotshots who studied at Concordia, Jonathan Goldstein, MA 99, and Pasha Malla, MA 05, will share the stage during an event sponsored by Walrus magazine, titled Building Bridges. Goldstein is the host of the popular CBC radio show WireTap. His third book, I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow, an autobiography, was published last year.
Malla was singled out by the Globe and Mail as “an impressive young voice that gives hope for a future generation of new Canadian writing talent.” His first novel, People Park, published in 2012, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book.
Catherine Kidd, MA 98, is presenting a poetry event titled Libre comme l’art, produced in collaboration with Grade 10 students from Lindsay Place High School in Pointe Claire.
The poetry works, presented by the students themselves, examine issues affecting young people, such as homophobia, bullying, eating disorders and suicide. Kidd says the project provides students with a positive experience of literature, and “assists in preventing the continuing decrease in literacy skills among high school graduates.”
Every year, the Blue Metropolis festival presents events organized under different themes. This year, one of the themes is gay and lesbian literature. Matthew Hays, MA 00, a part-time faculty member in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, will host a round table titled Writing Queer. The assembled writers will talk about what it means to be given the label of gay or queer writer, and whether such terms are useful.
David McGimpsey, MA 90, a part-time faculty member in the Department of English, is taking part in a round table discussion titled Baseball and Beer, during which he will discuss America’s favourite pastime with food writer Molly O’Neill and best-selling author Chad Harbach. McGimpsey’s own work examining the place of baseball in American culture, Imagining Baseball, published in 2000, was described as “illuminating” by the New York Times.
Two professors from Concordia's Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics, Catherine Vallejo and Lady Rojas Benavente, will participate in a panel discussion — to be conducted in Spanish — together with Associate Professor Fernanda Macchi from McGill's Department of Language, Literatures and Cultures – Hispanic Studies, on women's rights and feminism in Latin America.
Several other Concordia alumni are taking part in Blue Met, including: Carmine Starnino, MA 00; Katia Grubisic, MA 06; Susan Gillis, MA 02; Peter Dubé, MA 96; and Oana Avasilichioaei,MA 02.
McCormick points out that this is the biggest edition yet of the popular festival. “We really wanted to pack in as much as we could,” he says.
Watch a video of President Alan Shepard discussing his chosen volume, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller:
Related links:
• Blue Metropolis
• Concordia’s Department of English
• "Multilingual Blue Metropolis is a world-class literary festival" — Concordia Journal, April 12, 2001