EVENT: Imaginez Montréal

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Imagine Montréal – Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival

Friday, April 29, 8pm

Holiday Inn Centreville, Dahlia Room

Metro Place d’Armes

Tickets: 514.790.1245 or visit:  HYPERLINK "http://bluemetropolis.org/2011_prog2.php?act=programme1&section=festival&event=44" http://bluemetropolis.org/2011_prog2.php?act=programme1&section=festival&event=44

Ten Montréal actors and the band Sweet Mother Logic present a staged reading of passages from novels and stories by 24 Montréal writers, published since 2000, as part of this year’s  HYPERLINK "http://bluemetropolis.org/Festival" Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival.

Created and directed by Marianne Ackerman, Imagine Montreal offers a portrait of our city reborn. A young Hassidic mother comes to terms with her lot. Children play in the streets. A man steps out to buy a newspaper and discovers “erotic logic” in the landscape. 

The secret of our success, according to Montreal’s fiction writers, lies in the multitude of connections between strangers. Our common life now is a perpetual dance, an ongoing discovery of how the other lives, and how our private selves connect around a strong sense of place. 

Taking off from the Referendum of 1995, Imagine Montreal follows the evolution of Montreal from a downtrodden, conflict-weary city to a lively meeting place of cultures, ages, attitudes. A grim time, the late Nineties. John Brooke’s Last Days of Montreal presents a gritty portrait of a city on its knees, desperate to ignore decline but without alternatives. 

With the Ice Storm of ’98, we turn a corner. This is the Ice Age and A Fine Ending capture the crazy days of our downtown apocalypse, in retrospect, a darn good party. New people arrive in The Skin Beneath. Everybody’s writing a novel in Walkups. Eventually the town enjoys a break-out, in Midway, Desert Lake and The Obituary. 

“Passion needs a rooted place. Carry it too far from home, and it can only ever be a ghost.”

- Last Days of Montreal

Readings from novels and stories by :

Ami Sands Brodoff, Ann Charney, Beverly Akerman, Claire Holden Rothman, Claude Lalumière, Colleen Curran, David Homel, Doug Harris, Edward O. Phillips, Elise Moser, Gail Scott, Gina Roitman, Glen Rotchin, John Brooke, J.R. Carpenter, Lance Blomgren, Linda Leith, Louis Rastelli, Marianne Ackerman, Mary Soderstrom, Matthew Fox, Nairne Holtz, Peter Dubé, Rawi Hage, Zoe Whittall

“There is something almost comforting about being so intimately part of the place where she lives. About belonging somewhere, on the cellular level. This concrete, she thinks, this mental lamppost, this traffic light, this car might be my distant family.” 

- Because I Have Loved and Hidden It