Literary Festivals

Canada's literary festivals have always privileged books over writing. Recently published books. While these festivals receive public monies, they have become reliant on the marketing budgets of big house publishers to put on their shows. That's why they look the way they do, with inclusion determined as much by the publishing houses who supply them with their writers authors as the festival directors who invite these authors to read, sit on panels and sign books.

When Alicia Elliott tweets that a nearby festival (Hamilton's gritLIT Festival) is using the title of her published essay ("Is Canlit a Raging Dumpster Fire?" September, 2017) to banner a panel on Canada's literary culture ("industry" is Elliott's word), a panel that includes neither her nor anyone from the communities affected by this culture, she is right to complain.

I wonder if this situation would have been different had Elliott published a book within the festival year cycle? My guess is that the festival organizers would not have thought twice about inviting her. The case of a knee-jerk bureaucratic structure -- the shape of things -- determining the content? (See Hannah Arendt on the topic of bureaucracies.) Here is an apology from the gritLIT Festival's artistic director:

Like the Music and Film industries, the Publishing industry is relatively late to extinction. But it is dying, and with it will come the death of festivals driven by recently published trade books, particularly now that the big houses are spending less on author appearances and more on the means by which Elliott's complaint has reached us -- that Tolkienian ring known as social media.