For Hal Wake, the requisite nostalgia and reflection that are inevitable when changing chapters in life will have to wait.
Wake is heading up his 12th and final Vancouver International Writers Festival next week. With that comes endless phone calls and organizing, along with the necessary pomp and circumstance required to celebrate the festival’s 30th anniversary.
Is he nostalgic, sad or both?
As it turns out, none of the above.
“We’re treating this, my colleagues and I, like any other festival,” Wake said matter-of-factly. “There are all of these details that you have to manage. And as much as you want it to be smooth sailing, it isn’t — things fray at the edges and you’ve got to do some mending and patching, so mostly my concentration and focus is on making this the best festival I can.”
Wake made his decisions to step away as the festival’s artistic director last year. Since 2005, he’s helped bring countless world-renowned authors to Vancouver, and this year is no different: Margaret Atwood, Ken Dryden, Andrew O’Hagan, Jennifer Egan and dozens of others. The festival has grown to become a go-to on the North American literary circuit.
“The festival has grown considerably during that time, and I feel tremendously gratified at the state that it’s in,” Wake said. “I’m old enough that if I’m going to do something else, I better get at it or I’m just going to go to bed.”
Wake and books have been bedfellows for decades. He was a producer with the now-defunct CBC radio program Morningside, a job that allowed him first dibs on books and authors from across Canada.
After that, Wake went on to host CBC’s the Early Edition.
Wake’s tenure with the festival in particular came at a time when the written word has faced numerous challenges.
“I think what is called upon when you read, and I would suggest this is not the case with some other forms of storytelling, is the imagination,” he said. “A book requires you to bring it to life in your own mind. It doesn’t exist until your eyes hit the page and start to absorb that story. And then your brain creates pictures of it. That’s a very satisfying experience.”
Johanna Wagstaffe finds herself at the opposite end of the literary spectrum, in that her life in books is just beginning.
A meteorologist and science host for CBC Vancouver and CBC News Network, Wagstaffe’s newly released kids book Fault Lines: Understanding the Power of Earthquakes gets the debut treatment at the upcoming festival.
Aimed at kids aged nine to 13, the book features personal anecdotes, factoids and interviews with kids from around the world — Japan, Nepal, Turkey and Vancouver — who have first-hand experience with earthquakes.
“A lot of the time, I think children are more resilient than even I realized,” she said. “It’s not that they’ve forgotten the event or it hasn’t traumatized them in some way, but having them talk about it and realize that they can help other kids is beneficial for them as well.”
Wagstaffe can personally attest to that resiliency. She experienced her first earthquake at the age of four, when she was growing up in Tokyo, Japan. She’s encountered roughly half a dozen since.
“I felt the ground sway underneath me, everything that I set up fell off the shelves,” she recalled. “It was a foreign feeling at first, but I remember not being scared but being interested in what was happening.”
That interest has taken the broadcaster across the globe covering events related to weather and seismology: the Fort McMurray wildfires, the 2011 earthquake in Japan, international climate change conferences and, most recently, the unprecedented hurricane season in the southern U.S.
That she, or other broadcasters, will cover similar events in B.C. is not an if, but a when. To that end, Wagstaffe’s appearance at the festival on Oct. 19 coincides with the Great British Columbia ShakeOut, a yearly event to highlight the very real necessities around earthquake planning.
“Hopefully everyone has started to at least think about a plan, to have a kit in place and they know the basics,” she said. “In all my research, I’ve realized it’s going to take a city like Vancouver or Victoria a long time to recover. It could be a lot longer than 72 hours that we’re out of power.”
The Vancouver Writers Festival runs Oct. 16 to 22 on Granville Island. Ticket and author info is online at writersfest.bc.ca.
