EDEN MILLS – Artificial intelligence, democracy, loneliness, environmentalism and ethics were among the topics of conversations spun by this year’s Eden Mills Writers’ Festival.
Executive director Jasper Smith said in a relentless world, “books give us something different,” inviting readers to pause, reflect and imagine new ways of being.
The writers’ festival takes that a step further and shares it in community, he added.
“The stories that need to be told are being told by the authors that are here,” Smith said, and he invited attendees to allow themselves to be moved, to change and to belong.
Artistic director Kali Pearson echoed this sentiment, encouraging people to “slow down, listen and be together in community.”
Sharon Blom, Brian Skerrett and Alberta Nye volunteered at the information booth, and all three said they’ve volunteered with the festival since they first moved to the area.
For Blom and Skerett that’s about a decade, and for Nye it’s 25 years.
The festival is in its 37th year.
Nye said the festival hasn’t changed much in the quarter-century she’s been volunteering, though there used to be more authors selling books on “Publishers Way.”
York Street is known as Publishers Way during the festival and authors, publishers and community groups set up tents and connect with attendees.
One thing that’s remained the same, Nye said, is that “people are really interested – dashing from speaker to speaker.”
For many people, the festival is all they know of the “beautiful little place Eden Mills,” Nye noted.
“It puts Eden Mills on the map,” Blom added.
“Even if you go to Toronto or other bigger cities in Ontario, they know about this if they’re interested in books,” Skerrett said.
He called it “a fundamental part of living in Eden Mills,” and said while it seems less people now volunteer, for many the writers’ festival is one event they make sure not to miss.
Blom said once newcomers to the area experience the festival it quickly becomes a “source of pride.”
The Eden Mills Writers’ Festival pre-festival programming began on Aug. 26 and continued into the days before the Sept. 7 street festival.
There was a show-and-tell book club; a guided journaling session; a community circle about artificial intelligence; workshops on writing “romantacy,” poetry, picture books and debut novels; a creative arts activity; and a festival launch party.
During the street festival people wandered throughout Eden Mills to listen to authors talk about their books and tackle hard topics.
Karen Houle invited readers to reflect on books they have complicated feelings about with her “Art of Soil Campaign.”
Though the thought may make some book lovers recoil, books are compostable, and sometimes the best place for a book might be for it to return to the soil, she said.
Participants leave anonymous notes explaining why they feel a particular book should be fed to the worms, and Houle, also known as the “Compost Queen” works it into her composting system.
Notes about the composted books can be read at artofsoil.ca.
Challenging questions were asked throughout the festival such as “in a world where crises seem to collide and multiply, how do we keep our hearts open?
“How do we hold space to care – for the planet, for each other, for ourselves?”
“Where does the human end and the machine begin?”
“In a nation long mythologized as orderly and fair, what happens when our democratic assumptions and institutions begin to wobble?”
These questions and more were explored by AI ethicist Christopher DiCarlo, Indigenous organizer David A. Robertson, CBC journalist Antonio Michael Downing, award-winning authors Michael Redhill and Thomas King, and dozens more writers and experts featured at the festival.
