Fraser Valley Literary Festival’s virtual event took place Nov. 20 and 21
On Nov. 20 and 21, UFV hosted the Fraser Valley Literary Festival in a virtual format. The free event was open for all UFV students and community members. The festival began on Friday with keynote speakers Amanda Leduc and Andrea Warner.
Leduc’s keynote presentation, “Reading and Writing Disability,” addressed common tropes when creating disabled characters. Commonalities included using a disabled character as a “teachable moment” or using them symbolically, which takes away from treating them as a complex and unique individual. Instead, she gave suggestions for how writers can bring representation to the disabled community — create disabled characters with agency, make sure the characters are unique and have complexities, avoid ableist language, and even ask if you are the right person to tell that story. She also strongly recommended employing a “sensitivity reader,” someone who has the same disability as the character, to read over the draft and provide feedback on their portrayal.
Warner presented a keynote speech entitled “Literature is a lie; writing is not.” She talked through her journey in pursuing creative writing and journalism, becoming an author and associate producer at CBC, and navigating feminism, pop culture, and art. She said: “All of my choices have roots in this strange garden I call a body. These roots bloom as many questions as they do answers. Writing attempts to make sense of it all.”
The festival continued on Saturday with three panel discussions, each introduced by the festival’s artistic director Andrea MacPherson. The first panel, “Landscapes of Horror,” featured writers Tin Lorica, Juliane Okot Bitek, Selina Boan, and Sam Wiebe, and it was moderated by David A. Robertson. They spoke about what it means to write in the horror genre. Bitek, who is Simon Fraser University’s current writer-in-residence, addressed how writing horror can affect the writer. It is important to consider what the horror genre means for people who have been marginalized or oppressed. “It was never a horror that ended when you closed the page,” Bitek said. “Horror can be enjoyed when it is contained, not when it is a lived experience … Writing [horror] demanded I engage in self-care.”
The second panel was called “Unsaid: Silence, Language, and the Unspoken.” Moderated by Warner, it featured writers Cicely Belle Blain, Casey Plett, and Waubgeshig Rice. What is the relationship between language and silence? In Plett’s literary piece, which addressed the concept that words are not always necessary to bring support or understanding, she said, “Silence is not the same thing as the absence of language.” Later in the panel discussion, Rice explained that it can be liberating and empowering to read literature from people of minority, which breaks the silence that oppression often brings.
In the final panel, “Unrequited Love and All Its Forms,” Leduc led a discussion around unrequited love with writers Jillian Christmas, David Ly, and Mallory Tater. Leduc asked each writer how their literary piece connected to the theme, and they also discussed how mainstream media portrays both the giving and receiving of unrequited love. As the panel progressed, Leduc opened the discussion for attendees to ask questions for the panelists. One attendee asked what other kinds of love, besides romantic or unrequited love, the panelists would like to see more in literature. Tater said she would like to see platonic love represented more in literature, while Christmas felt a need for intergenerational love and respect for elders.
Compared to previous years of the Fraser Valley Literary Festival, the festival was an entirely virtual event. Although it had all the same qualities of the festival’s previous years, it lacked community and audience. The virtual experience lost the interaction between speakers and the audience — the performance of literature and the immediate reactions from the audience. However, this year’s festival retained its literary wisdom.
FVLF Logo. (Fraser Valley Literary Festival)
Danaye studies English and procrastination at UFV and is very passionate about the Oxford comma. She spends her days walking to campus from the free parking zones, writing novels she'll never finish, and pretending to know how to pronounce abominable. Once she graduates, she plans to adopt a cat.
