The 13th annual Wild Writers Literary Festival took place at the Centre for International Governance Innovation campus from Nov. 1 to Nov. 3, 2024 by The New Quarterly.
Every year, the festival brings local and national authors to Waterloo. Pamela Mulloy, editor of The New Quarterly and creative director of the Wild Writers Festival, said the festival creates connections and raises the profiles of writers.
“We wanted to have a festival that would highlight the writers that we publish in The New Quarterly, as well as bring writers from across Canada in here, just to kind of have a more kind of public face for to the local community…as well as bring our local writers and readers together,” she said.
This year, the festival explored the theme of truth, inspired by authors Tanya Talaga and Canisia Lubrin. Talaga is the author of The Knowing, which explores Canadian history through an Indigenous lens; and Lubrin is the author of Code Noir, which is a fictional work dissecting the Black diasporic experience.
The festival started with a panel where Talaga and Lubrin sat in conversation with Vinh Nguyen, local author and associate professor of English language and literature at the University of Waterloo.
“[We’re] constantly deconstructing the stories that have been told about us and the beliefs that have been told about First Nations people, and how the story of Canada is told is not true for the large part…and we still live with the consequences of not telling the truth,” Talaga said.
“[We’re] all kind of fed those truths…but that truth is on such very fundamental levels, fiction,” Lubrin said.
“It is really in those structures where you need transformation to happen,” she said.
The following day was filled with panels and sessions, such as Truth or Lies: Subterfuge in Fiction; The Honesty of Experience in Fiction; Writer Confidential: Poetry as Memoir; and The Beaten Track: On Travel Writing.
“I like to think that we are trying to expand people’s enthusiasm for literature and to bring readers together with the writers,” Mulloy said.
“We try to bring writers in here that may not necessarily have been known to people, but they were great discoveries,” she said.
The New Quarterly is a local literary magazine with its headquarters in St. Jerome’s University College. It is one of Canada’s leading literary publications and features both established and growing writers.
For more information about the Wild Writers Literary Festival or The New Quarterly, visit tnq.ca.
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