The Symposium on Manitoba Writing, held last week in Winnipeg in celebration of 30 years of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, took as its theme a line from Robert Kroetsch, “Let the stars shine in our bones.”
The theme of place wove through the symposium’s mix of scholarly papers, readings, and panel discussions. Writer David Arnason recalled the founding of Turnstone Press, the Guild, and similar early ventures as promoting “a prairie vision of the world,” as “creating a culture.” Jared Bland (House of Anansi Press) spoke of current “yearning for universality,” of audiences moving away from place.
The significance of place, then? Perhaps both: bones and stars.
A few other bits from my notebook: “Even abandonment gives us memories” (Maurice Mierau). The contemporary city as palimpsest (André Forget). “The competing narratives of this city would be a good [literary] tour” (Rae St. Clair Bridgman, eager to grow literary tourism in Winnipeg). Kroetsch quoted often, as in a paper on waste in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg – “What is more precious in our collective biography than those very things which we elect to conceal or discard?… Discard…constitutes the materiality of trace.”
A workshop by Manuel Portela, “Reading Digital Literature,” was a highlight for me; I’ve described it here.
