Saturday at THIN AIR…

Today is the last day of THIN AIR 2011 – where has the time gone?!

If you’re a writer who wants to know how to improve your work, make sure you take our Writing Craft seminar from 10:00 a.m. – noon at Millennium Library. Writer and poet Steven Ross Smith will guide us through the various ways writers can enrich their work, from taking seminars, to participating in workshops and visiting retreats and conferences.

If you want to get a little scared in the afternoon, visit Park Theatre for A Pint of Bitter Murder with Alison Preston and David Annandale (3:00 – 4:30 p.m.).

Our final Mainstage presentation at Manitoba Theatre for Young People will feature the first-ever Manitoba Reads debate. Four ardent readers will defend the title they have chosen, and at the end, one book will emerge as the winner.

To make things even more exciting, two of the authors featured at THIN AIR 2011 – Wayne Tefs and David Alexander Robertson – have made the final four!

Celebrate our wildly wordy week – and our fifteenth year of great words – at the After Words Jazz Club at Aqua Books. Master jazzers, Steve Kirby & Kristopher Ulrich, join forces with this community’s poets to create an absolutely unique Birthday Party. Bring a poem!

For all the details, visit thinairwinnipeg.ca. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter at @WPGTHINAIR, because we’ll be live-tweeting from most events!

Wednesday Night Poetry Bash

When I arrived at MTYP at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday night to attend the Poetry Bash, I immediately took notice of the dress code for the evening. I felt like I was in Wolseley (my old neighbourhood). People were dressed in their best hippie garments, and even a few quirky hats (which I think was the perfect attire for an evening of poetry reading).

What surprised me most about the writers was the total and complete difference between each style, performance and voice. I remember the THIN AIR festival two years ago when I heard George Elliott Clarke read from his book, George and Rue. I was taken by the pure performance artist that GEC is.

On Wednesday night I was waiting for another moment like it... and I got it, from Sandra Ridley. When she got up on stage, her body language spoke louder than anything. She was open and willing to share her art with the audience. Her style, she told the audience, was to read through a bunch of her poems and not stop for a break except to quickly tell us the title of the new poem.

If Ridley was nervous, I didn't know it. She paused for effect, she was breathy, yet totally clear. Her words were crisp and her tone went from a higher pitch to a lower breath in one sentence. Certain syllables were extra pronounced like the importance hung heavy on those last few letters of a particular word. I met Sandra after, and told her if she ever records her poetry to email me so I can download it and listen to it on a nice long fall walk.

The other poets were great too. Glen Downie, Gabe Foreman, Jacob McArthur Mooney and Jennifer Still read their poetry from the bottom of their hearts, and I listened intently to the stories of their lives. There were over 100 people in attendance, and the stage was modernly furnished with EQ3 furniture.

I had a blast and loved being surrounded by people who truly believed in their art form. I will definitely be in attendance for next year's Poetry Bash.

-Jasmine Tara

Tuesday Mainstage: finding ourselves in unlikely places

It's both exhilarating and terrifying--the vast spectrum of interpretation any piece of literature (and most expressions of art) can elicit in its audience.

As I grow as a writer and reader, I’m learning to focus less on ‘what it’s supposed to mean,’ and more on experiencing the emotional reactions evoked by wonderful writing.

When it’s a theme as profound and potentially broad as that of Tuesday’s Thin Air Mainstage show (an exploration of ‘who we are’ based on where we come from and where we are headed), these experiences are not hard to find.

There was Manitoba short story writer Sheila McClarty’s heart-wrenching description of an elephant handler leading his animal to her death, and Lebanon-born writer Dimitri Nasrallah’s raw and haunting account of an amnesiac rejoicing at [what may be] his first child’s birth, while dealing with the stillborn death of her unexpected twin brother.

Then there was WD Valgardson’s tale of the trolls whose presence brings hardship to an already struggling Icelandic community and one woman’s difficult choice to escape to faraway New Iceland, Manitoba’s own Interlake region.

There were poems by Ron Charach illustrating childhood memories of a blonde, green-eyed Jewish boy searching for his identity, and excerpts from a musical by Marty Chan about a father leaving his son behind to search out prosperity for his family in an unknown land.

These stories span continents, genres, decades and a breadth of human emotion, yet they can all speak to how identity is delicately entwined with our past, present and future. Some thoughts inspired by last night’s reading, no doubt not an exhaustive list of what 'we are':

We are what we remember, whether real or imagined.

We are the things we haven’t done, our fears, regrets. We are what we’ve lost.

We are the suffering and heart-wrenching choices of our ancestors. We are the stories and superstitions our communities were built upon. We are the people and places we’ve left behind, and the expectations we have of the places we're going.

We are our parents and our children. We are the pieces of ourselves we send out into the world. We are the people we have touched and who have touched us.

We are reflections of ourselves glimpsed on unlikely surfaces.

-- Sandy Klowak