Author: Erin Baldwin
Toronto is a hub of publishing houses, poetry readings and even literary-themed cocktail bars, but it is also — perhaps most importantly for the literary landscape — the home of some major book-related festivals, including Canada’s largest annual book and magazine festival, The Word on the Street.
A non-profit organization that champions reading, literature and books of all kinds across Canada, WOTS runs their Toronto festival each year in September. Although they now welcome more than 200 000 visitors each year, they remain committed to their original mandate: to foster an appreciation of the written world in our culture, to promote local artists, to bring people together in a celebration of reading, and to champion literacy as an integral part of a thriving community.
Earlier this week I got a chance to ask WOTS Toronto Festival Director David Alexander some questions about going virtual this year, the current literary climate and how recent spotlights on racial inequities are influencing the festival going forward.
This will be your third year as the Festival Director of WOTS. Why don’t you start by discussing some of your goals coming in, the direction you envisioned for the festival and how that’s coming along?
My first year with the organization was mostly about building a team, familiarizing myself with the nuts and bolts of the event, and executing a successful Word On The Street festival. Expanding the scope of the festival—breaking out of our long standing one-day-only format—was a priority for the organization when I was hired, and we were able to add new programming in the week leading up to our marketplace day in 2018.
Last year, we went a bit further and hosted a “City Imagines” keynote on urbanism and the arts. This year we transformed The City Imagines into an event series at the intersection of books and cities. Since July, we’ve hosted a handful of discussions on how cities are managing the COVID-19 pandemic, urban design, public transit, and Black creativity and placemaking. This month, we’ll be hosting City Imagines events on narratives of resistance, food systems in public institutions and more topics to be announced.
An important step in expanding our programming was defining what makes WOTS unique. Earlier this year, we broadened our mission to incorporate not just reading and writing, but also some key undercurrents of literary creativity—namely storytelling, ideas, and imagination. Armed with a better understanding of our distinctive mandate, we’re entering an exciting period of innovation and expansion around that mission. The City Imagines, for example, is a continuation of the festival’s long standing engagement with ideas about Toronto in particular, and cities, in general.
There is always a lot of apocalyptic talk regarding the end of the book, the death of the publishing industry, declining reading rates, etc. But at the same time, it’s 2020 and the book seems to be enduring. What are your thoughts on the current literary culture in Canada and Toronto? What role do you think festivals like WOTS play in promoting reading?
Since our founding in 1990, WOTS has championed reading and writing in Toronto and across the country. The initial impetus for the first WOTS was to help readers connect directly with Canadian book and magazine publishers. Literacy and the promotion of new Canadian and Indigenous writing were established as core features of the festival from its beginning. Once the festival took root here, our founders set out to establish partner festivals across the country. We’re actually rekindling some of those national partnerships this year with our Words Across Canada series.
A lot has changed since the first WOTS was held on Queen Street West in 1990. For one thing, Queen Street West is no longer a bohemian neighbourhood full of cafés, bars, and bookstores. Publishing has changed quite a lot, too. But it’s been several years since there have been any major disruptions to the industry. 2020 notwithstanding, a lot has stabilized within publishing. In my view, the key challenges facing the industry revolve around diversifying its workforce, publishing more work by marginalized writers across all genres, and developing better income supports for working writers. In terms of literary culture, there’s definitely a steady flow of engrossing and varied writing to celebrate in Toronto and across Canada.
Obviously, the global pandemic this year has brought on unprecedented hurdles for festivals and live events across North America. How have the past few months been for WOTS and what has the transition to virtual programming been like?
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a series of revelations about the world we live in, the vulnerabilities of institutions and whole societies, and possible futures. In early July, we hosted a discussion about the pandemic and one of our panelists was Thea Lim, whose novel, An Ocean of Minutes, imagines a virus so potent that people are willing to enter indentured servitude for the opportunity to jump ahead to a post-pandemic future. Lim noted that in researching her novel she came to understand that the most precarious members of our society would face the biggest impacts. Unfortunately, that has proven to be true.
In difficult times, we turn to stories: to entertain, to heal, to sustain, and to inspire. Whatever challenges we’ve faced planning this year’s festival, we are grateful to be employed in work that can be done safely from home. And for the resources and flexibility to bring people together for a virtual WOTS festival.
That said, planning this year’s festival has been a bit like sailing through a rough storm. First, we noticed dark skies in the distance. So we started contingency planning. Checked in with funders. Researched online presentation tools. Tuned in to online programming. The Festival of Literary Diversity, who went virtual with their May festival on very short notice, generously hosted an info session for other literary festivals which was extremely useful. As in-person event cancellations began to be announced through the summer, it became clear we would also be caught in the storm. At that point, we took stock of the resources committed to our festival, announced our decision to go virtual, and initiated the plan we’d been building.
We’re still figuring things out—volunteers, marketing strategies, book sales—that in a normal year would have been settled by now. But we think we’re through the storm. Or, if not, at least everything’s tied down and we’re holding steady.
Have you found there have been any silver linings to going virtual? What are you most excited about for the WOTS festival this month?
After announcing our virtual pivot, one of the first things we decided was to test our capacity to execute online programming. That decision gave us an opportunity to launch The City Imagines as a standalone, online series. We also wanted to test our ability to engage kids and teens, so we launched a two-week Summer Spectacular series of online readings, activities and workshops.
We’ve been pleased with the results. Our City Imagines discussions found a strong audience. And our Summer Spectacular was filled with imaginative workshops and readings, capped off by our partnership with Inspire Teen Reads who hosted a book pitch competition, a cover design challenge and led a fascinating discussion of what they’re reading this summer. Another thing we’ve realized is that there is an appetite for our virtual programming, not just from across Canada, but from as far away as New Zealand and Australia. The revelation that people can tune in from anywhere led to the conception of Words Across Canada, a series of virtual author events with partner festivals across the country. This series kicks off on September 10th and we have high hopes that this programming will reach new audiences across the country.
We’re also excited for this year’s festival week. Our virtual marketplace opens September 21st at the WOTS shop. On festival weekend, September 26-27, we’re hosting three distinct streams of weekend-long programming—two for adults and one for kids and teens—plus workshops for aspiring writers. We’ll also be using Discord as a virtual meeting place for attendees to hang out, chat with exhibitors and discuss the festival. I’m excited to see how people engage with WOTS this year.
In terms of personal silver linings, I’ve been involved in festivals for over a dozen years and it’s nice not to worry about tents or signage or sitemaps. In fact, our team is usually so busy with logistics during festival weekend that we don’t get a chance to see much of the programming we’ve organized. It’s been a nice perk so far this year to actually watch some of the fascinating discussions we’ve organized. And it’s great for audiences that our City Imagines events remain accessible for those who missed them live on the WOTS YouTube channel.
We’re also fortunate to have an amazing team working on the festival this year. Our staff group chats have diverged into “work” and the “water cooler” – it’s nice that we’ve been able to foster a close connection through Zoom meetings and google chats. That really matters for a small organization like WOTS.
Along with COVID-19, events in the past few months have really shone a spotlight on racial inequities in our society and the lack of diversity and representation in many spaces. WOTS certainly made a point to showcase diverse authors and content before this year, but how are these larger conversations influencing your programming and organization going forward?
There certainly seems to be new energy focused on long-standing problems of systemic racism, especially in policing. These are not new issues and they have been the subject or subtext of countless books by Black, Indigenous, and racialized authors in Canada. Any list of authors whose work challenges racism and/or colonialism is bound to be reductive, but in recent years WOTS has featured acclaimed work by David Chariandy, Eternity Martis, Téa Mutonji, Amanda Parris, Alicia Elliott, Tanya Talaga, Billy Ray Belcourt, Waubgeshig Rice, Cherie Dimaline, Kerri Sakamoto, Sharon Bala, Carrianne Leung, Catherine Hernandez, and others.
Our team has reflected on, and continues to examine, the role we play in the publishing process. There’s a whole series of things that happen before a writer is typically invited to read at a festival, from believing their perspective is worth sharing to finding writing time to accessing educational resources to connecting with fellow writers, etc. Then there’s the matter of convincing a publisher to invest in the work, or else securing the resources and knowledge required to publish independently. Only after all of that does a new book get to folks like us, book-lovers who help authors reach audiences and help readers discover new books. It’s not hard to see that people from marginalized backgrounds face additional barriers moving through this publishing process. So we think carefully about how we amplify new writing and what kinds of conversations we encourage through our programming.
We also have a few new ideas to support aspiring writers to develop a career that might lead them to one day headline festivals like WOTS. Our team has a lockbox for ‘promising ideas to be pursued post-festival’: that’s where these live for now. Along with unexpected challenges, the pandemic has brought unique opportunities for festivals to try out new programming formats. What we've learned in 2020 will inform the future of WOTS as we continue to grow and diversify what we do in the coming years.