First Night - four readers and one problem.

Readings at the Fort.
First up was Leilah Nadir. Born and raised in England of Iraqi parents, she started her memoir “The Orange Trees of Bagdad: In Search of My Lost Family” in 2003. When she finished four years later she could not believe the war was still going on. At first her family rejoiced at the fall of Saddam Hussein but their joy was replaced by horror as they watched the looting of Baghdad allowed by the new American overlords. Nadir’s account of the first weeks of American occupation took us into the heart of the fear and hardship experienced by the citizens.

Sheree-Lee Olson signed on as a kitchen worker on a laker setting out from Toronto harbour and wrote a novel, Sailor Girl, based on the experience. The excerpts she read zinged with metaphors: a gull “trailing a silvery cry:, Lake Ontario as “360 degrees of blue,” the water like “indigo skin,” “ a posse of gulls.” This Lake Superior denizen was enchanted.

Moira Farr also has a Superior connection. To start her stint as a volunteer at the Thunder Cape Bird observatory, she was required to hike the Sleeping Giant trail into the facility. The excerpt she read from her unpublished novel “Birch Bark” centred on an Ojibway birch bark scroll. As she stood in the Great Hall, surrounded by the souvenirs of Native life, I thought her choice was most appropriate.

Fred Stenson read from his most recent novel The Great Karoo. The selection described the sea voyage taken in 1900 by the members of the Canadian Mounted Rifles, a Canadian military unit, sent off to South Africa to fight the Boers. The men, mostly Alberta cowboys, had brought their own horses aboard and the reading took us into the hardships and difficulties transporting the animals to the tropics. Lots of sea sickness and high adventure here.

The problem -- the notoriously poor acoustics in the Great Hall. Even using a microphone, many words garbled. The people is the front row and at the far back heard fairly clearly but those in the third row missed entire phrases. I started in the third row but after a few minutes grabbed an empty chair at the front where the sound was less blurred.