Another Day, Another Reading

OCTOBR 13, 2005 BY SUSAN J

This morning I’m off to Lord Beaverbrook High School. As luck would have it, after the reading yesterday, a student from Lord Beaverbrook gave us a demo of the school song. I believe it goes something like this:

Beaver, beaver, beaver

Brook, brook, brook.

Apparently the chant used to include a noise similar to what a beaver might make. Sort of a churring, whirring prairie dog-type sound. The student said everyone was grateful that Beaverbrook had gone to something a bit more specific.

I’m thinking of starting and finishing my talk with the chant. In fact, I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do with my 40 minutes, so maybe I could get everyone to chant along with me. For oh, say, 25 or 30 minutes. We could do it like a meditation thing or a form of hypnosis that would convince all present that they’d had a great talk about literature. Or, you know, not.

What I’ve realized so far on this trip (and all literary festivals should involve a life lesson) is that instead of watching television and reading detective novels, I need to spend more time reading and perhaps writing poetry. All the most interesting people I’ve met here at Wordfest have been poets.

Case in point: Malinka Booker. She’s a poet and performance artist from London, by way of Guyana, and is utterly charming and delightful. I have never before seen multiple piercings look cute. (I know, they probably aren’t supposed to look cute, but on her they do.) During our conversation she referred to herself as “just a lovey bunny epiphany poet.” Isn’t that the greatest thing ever? Leaving aside the fact that I haven’t the foggiest what an epiphany poet is, I was immediately smitten. No novelist I’ve met would ever dream of calling themselves a “lovey bunny”, and with good reason. Malinka is working on a novel, and I hope the process doesn’t fill her with novelistic self-loathing. I’m speaking now as a deeply ambivalent bunny YA novelist. I can’t wait to see her performance tonight.

Okay, off I go.

Beaver, beaver, beaver.

Brook, brook, brook!

P.S. I wonder if, when the television show comes out, I can just play episodes on the AV system? Man, that would be the greatest!

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