Literary evening

This evening, hubby and I attended a group reading of creative non-fiction ("Sounding Off" co-presented by Victoria School of Writing and UVic's department of writing I think). Leading up to the event, I offered hubby many opportunities to back out, but he reminded me that I do this all the time, and that if I didn't want to go I wouldn't have mentioned it in the first place. Or the other eight times.

Anyway, it was better attended than I had expected -- there were maybe 40 people or more (my estimation techniques suck, so don't take my word for it). We went primarily to see/hear Ross Crockford (former and best editor of Monday Magazine -- also one of the authors of the best guide to Victoria you can purchase; the second edition comes out next year) and were pleasantly surprised by (most of) the other presenters (? readers? performers?). Hubby felt that the "quality" was split along gender lines... I knew what he meant but I countered that the humour was split along gender lines. Each of the men was funny whereas all the women were insightful or nostalgic (to be fair one woman was both nostalgic and funny). The most amusing, I think was Brian Preston reading from his serialized semi-fictional account Too Many Georges (published online in The Tyee).

The big bonus of the evening was that of all the people in the room -- we only recognized a few -- we actually managed to piss off Briony Penn (an environmental celebrity who couldn't write an entertaining sentence to save her life, despite being handed money to do so.) Apparently we did not notice Ms. Penn's bag under one of the chairs on which we chose to sit. She mumbled about it being her chair, and we didn't move. =shrug=

In the end it was enjoyable, even though we didn't stay to mingle. We did get out of the house for two hours without eating, and it felt good to use part of my brain listening to the rhythm of different people talking. Actually, there was another bonus too. It was held in the Fran Willis Gallery, so the space was full of art (the last few days of a Norman Yates retrospective) to visually stimulate my brain. Yay brain!