The perfect Scream

I am a little late in posting about the Scream, but it's worth noting that it went really well. Really, really well. So well that by the end of the Mainstage, event coordinator Maggie was saying she had a overwhelming sense of existential closure, and maybe we should just scrap the Festival for next year and start from scratch. That may just have been the sleep deprivation talking, however.

These are a couple of shots from the book-length reading, which went spectacularly well. Christopher Dewdney read A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario at the Brickworks, as the light faded & swallows swooped over the pond behind him. The work and venue could not have been more perfectly matched, the dinner was lovely, Dewdney's reading was superb. The only flaw for Hilary and me was that we'd forgotten to bring sweaters, but when night fell and it grew chilly, Sharon fetched a sleeping bag from the trunk of her car & kindly loaned it to us to huddle under -- another appropriately outdoorsy touch to the evening.



I don't have photos from the nature walk, because I was busy hosting it! Jamie was there and took a few pictures. This event, too, was a roaring success. Beginning at the Coach House, Steve and I led a group of maybe 25 people through the Annex, encountering wild poets in their natural habitats along the way. Highlights included a poet lurking at the bottom of a gopher hole in the Huron/Washington parkette (William Davison recorded himself reading, then dug the hole & secreted a tape player at the bottom of it), the capturing and tagging of the migratory Hugh Thomas in Gwendolyn MacEwen Park (achieved using a quantity of garden netting and a "transmitter" made out of a flashing LED rave toy + a dog-collar purchased at Dollarama), and a poet mating ritual on the terrace of an ice-cream booth, which began suddenly and unexpectedly & visibly startled the lone patron who was there when we arrived.

And of course, at the Monday night mainstage, it did not rain! There was a slight sprinkling at one point, but our intrepid audience pulled out their umbrellas & stayed put.

Click here for all my Scream pics.