Writers’ 10th Annual Summer Dreams Literary Arts Festival:
Winds of Inspiration
What was it about the wind at the Summer Dreams Festival at Trout Lake Park (aka John Hendry Park) on Saturday, August 24, 2013? Was it how it stretched the cirrus into alluring fingers, or how the lake rippled and late summer leaves rustled? It blew the bride’s wedding dress and she, posing on her happiest day, was full of promise. A poem. It blew through the Trout Lake Farmers’ Market. It whirled and twirled for cyclists, picnickers, joggers, dog walkers and writers…it even blew the dogs’ hair. A steady energizing wind to inspire, refresh and renew writers, to open possibility and change…that same wind of Norse, Slavic, Aztec, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian mythologies.
Wind is sometimes referred to as breath. I attended Amanda Wardrop’s performance workshop on vocal technique. We began humming and feeling the vibrations in our facial bones, hips to toes. We took a line of text and played with it in innumerable ways. We ten stood in a circle under a small open air RE/MAX tent. We all voiced our poem lines simultaneously. We felt each other’s voices in unison: supported and juxtaposed with breath.
Amanda’s workshop…standing room only to voice our poem
We breathed down into the soles of our feet, to fill and compose ourselves. Compose…ourselves. We played with textual cadence and applied different stresses.
Amanda Wardrop, Performance Workshop Clinician
We added a gist; a nuance brimming with emotion from a child’s joy, anger, frustration to an adult’s: from zero to one-hundred-percent intensities.
Amanda suggested checking in with our audience at the beginning and end of a reading. Why not thrill them with various gists within the same poem…contrasting gist with line, such as a humorous gist with a serious line? Her performance workshop reminded us how to gift the audience a poem: a gist of words.
We took on the skin of a performer we admire and emulated them in our line of text. We did it again as a dedication. Then, with subdued body posture; with calm, comfortable ease and grace, we gave it away. We let our words take wind. Free-flying words, airborne. Born… of and on the air.
“Whenever you touch a poem that caresses your soul, breathe it gently for it might be the wind that perfects your life’s goal.”
― A. Saleh
Amanda is a theatre artist and teacher. Her performance workshop was one hour from noon til one, and by then, words were swirling all around us, gusts and gales of words in breezes, squalls and zephyrs:
Wanda Nowicki’s Quartet, featured author, Joy Kogawa, featured poet, Fiona Tinwei Lam, slammers, spoken word, Poetic Justice, Poetry Around the World, Dead Poets, Twisted Poets, World Poetry Youth, Word Whips, Naked Poets (the author didn’t see any), The Comedic Mix, theatrical performance workshop, storytelling, music and readings on the Main Stage, the Community Stage, the Children’s Stage. Panels and open mics with groups from all over the Lower Mainland, even Galiano Literary Arts Fest. The Federation of BC Writers, Writers International and the Canadian Authors’ Association. Publications of literary journals and magazines, publishers, and BC Bookworld. A hurricane of words.
Margo Lamont with Sylvia Taylor & Keith at the Grind Writers’ table
Writers gather round table to find a home for the words.
A second workshop was with Joanne M. Ursino on exploring handmade book structures. Joanne is a textile and mixed media artist skilled in bookmaking and quilting. Joanne demonstrated how books are held together and how she uses various papers, sizes, and shapes from one-inch square ‘Summer Dreams’ books to chapbooks. She’d prepared five kits with awls, scissors, glue, styluses, beads and needles…everything we’d need to make our own or where we could go get supplies, and then blow the magic wind of words onto the page. Writers sat there creating books and listening to the words float, hover and soar on the wind all around us.
Back at the Grind Writers table, founder, Margo Lamont, challenged passers-by to take and possibly blog a writing challenge. Many did.
Challenges all-around in securing grant providers, financial supporters and sponsors…all to be lauded. Something was in the wind, no doubt about it. Many thanks to the volunteers, the stage hosts, the festival committee, sound technicians and most of all, to Bonnie Nish, for letting the Summer Dreams inspirational wind whistle.
‘The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.’ –Bob Dylan
