Trillium Book Award Author Readings June 16

The Kingston WritersFest Interview Series, with Alison Wearing

 
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Alison Wearing (photo credit: Geoff Robins)

It's time! The Kingston WritersFest is just around the corner, and now is the time to start planning how to fill your weekend. Open Book: Ontario will be giving you a virtual behind-the-scenes tour of the festival all month long, so that when you finally meet some of your favourite authors face-to-face, you'll know everything from what books they've got in their bags to how they're calming their nerves.

In today's Kingston WritersFest interview, we speak with Alison Wearing, author of the memoir and award-winning one-woman show, Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (Knopf Canada).

You have three opportunities to meet Alison at the Kingston WritersFest: she'll present the Teen Writers Studio session "How I Failed High School English and Became a Writer Anyway" on Thursday, September 26 at 3 p.m.; she'll perform Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter on Thursday, September 26 at 8:30 p.m.; and she'll share tips on how she created the show during the Writers Studio session "Writing the One-Person Show" on Friday, September 27 at 9:00 a.m.

For more details, please visit the Events page. You can purchase your tickets here.

Open Book:

Tell us about what you’ll be reading at this year’s festival.

Alison Wearing:

Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter. It’s my new memoir about growing up with a gay dad in the 1980s — waaaay back before having gay parents was something people did on television.

OB:

How do you manage the shift between being a solitary writer and a public reader?

AW:

I’ve always felt like a bit of a hybrid in that respect, in that I am equally comfortable in both realms. In fact, I’m vaguely uncomfortable when I only exist in one of them. I used to think it was a defect, but I’ve grown to see that being a performer as well as a writer can make for a terrifically fun life.

OB:

What is one luxury you allow yourself when you go "on tour" with a book?

AW:

Uh, what’s a luxury?

OB:

What book will you have with you in your bag while you're attending the Kingston WritersFest?

AW:

I’m one of the only people on earth not to have read Yann Martel's Life of Pi, but I’m thinking of giving it a go. And I quite like the idea of having in my bag a book that occasionally roars.

OB:

What are you most looking forward to about this year's festival?

AW:

Being back in Kingston, where my literary career first began (thanks to the Queen’s Quarterly, home of my first published story). Also, I look very forward to having a belly laugh with Shelagh Rogers!



Alison Wearing's new memoir, Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (Knopf Canada), is also a multi award-winning one-woman show. She has spent the summer on a "theatrical book tour," performing the show in Fringe Festivals across Canada. She lives in Stratford, Ontario. Alison was the feature writer for Open Book: Ontario's Focus On: Stratford. You can read her essay here.

Find out more about Alison Wearing's Kingston WritersFest appearances here.

For more information about Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter please visit the Random House Canada website.

Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at the publisher, Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.

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