Alissa York Effigy Launch

On Tuesday night, my RRHB and I, along with a bunch of our friends, went to the Toronto launch of Alissa York’s Effigy. For the first time in many, many months, I attended a literary event where I hadn’t had the pleasure of reading the book first. Usually, it’s Zesty and I at these kinds of things, but it was so fun, and I had such a good time that I was triple-upset that we were too late to get into the Michael Ondaatje launch on Friday night—I was looking forward to more literary-inspire good times.

There’s no getting around how lovely and friendly Alissa York is—she’s smart, charming and utterly fascinating. My favourite thing about Pages’s This is Not A Reading Series is the fact that the authors are on stage with another person, sometimes a fellow writer, and sometimes a media personality, another journalist, it all depends on the book. In this case, it was Elizabeth Ruth, and in all honestly, I think the two were perfectly matched. Ruth’s questions were smart, probing, and always on topic. It’s a hard balance to achieve especially if anyone’s been to Harbourfront lately and endured some of the “interviews” they’ve got going on at that reading series (Zesty, I’m looking at you).

Some of the conversation I pulled out and wrote down was really inspiring, especially considering I admire York’s writing (Mercy and Any Given Power, both wonderful, both moody and both delicious) but also because I’ve got quite a crush on her spirit. One of the more intriguing things that she said had to do with separating the writing mind and the everyday mind. And I think this was a lot of what Gowdy was trying to get at too, aspects of humanity, dark and desperate places, just because your imagination goes there (and bravo that it does) doesn’t necessarily mean that she’ll go out become a a taxidermist, like one of the characters in Effigy.

It’s such a common thing for people to mistake actors for the roles that they play, but people do the same with fiction: they’re always plugging through the depths to find the autobiographical elements, when as York points out, that there may be wide gaps between what a writer is thinking and feeling and what he/she is writing.

The other point she made that has stuck with me over the past few days is how when she’s writing, her goal is to make people feel things versus simply thinking about them as their passively reading. I can’t help it: I feel everything. That’s just the kind of person I am, hell, Al Gore’s slide show made me a puddle for days afterwards, and the key to a great book in my mind is its heartbreak factor. All in all, it was a bloody brilliant evening.