It’s been a different festival this year for me.

Last year, I attended far more of the afternoon book chats and far fewer of the Mainstages.

Mainstage #1: Bonnie Burnard’s tough frailness while reading and thinking through how to describe her book about middle-aged friends.

How she quietly and unmusically took over the stage after the more performative Gregory Scofield, despite the fact that even she didn’t think she could do it.

This year, it’s been Nooner/Mainstage every day and I haven’t hit any of the uni readings. They’re sort of like my dirty little lit secret, you know? Mostly attended by students, who get assigned to write something about the book or the author, they’re a different window into the festival, a different audience, a different attempt to connect with readers…

Afternoon Book Chat #1: Observing the unspooling of Cyril Dabydeen quick and prodigious memory. He was charmingly self-praising and even, as THIN AIR director Charlene Diehl noted, glossed his own poems for the audience. And they had a little afternoon tea-table set up, where I was able to get orange pekoe and date square.

But I will console myself collegially tomorrow with George Elliott Clarke at RRC and the Friday afternoon panel (The Future!) at UW.

That panels consitutes another of my festival traditions. No matter the subject, no matter the authors, they’re always always memorable.

Mainstage #2: The familiarity terrain – geographically and, also I think poetically - of David O’Meara’s S. Korea poems. We talked bibimbop afterwards, mostly because I was feeling nostalgic about my time in S. Korea. Also, although I only caught the tail-end of Jaqueline Larson’s reading, I greatly appreciated her storm-trooper boots but also the sass and energy of her work.

Tonight is my last Mainstage, on the theme Love Actually. I haven’t seen local Struan Sinclair read yet, or heard Margaret Sweatman’s new novel yet, and both Rhea Tregebov and Tim Wynne-Jones’s fictional work is entirely new to me.

See you there?