Kingston Writers Festival 2024, wrapped

 

With award-winning veteran broadcaster and author Carol Off, before we took the stage on Saturday night. [Photo: Bernard Clark Photography]

Signing after our panel, with political scientist Rob Goodman, author of Not Here: Why American Democracy Is Eroding and How Canada Can Protect Itself at the Kingston Writer's Festival on the evening of September 28th. [Photo: Bernard Clark Photography]

Watching the countryside scroll past the train window as I reflect on this wonderful, whirlwind weekend. After years of not by any necessity traveling to the city of Kingston, Ontario, this has been my third trip, all related to my work. The first was in February when I spoke to jack.org at Queen's University. The second trip was my first encounter with the Kingston Writer's Festival when they invited me out upon the publication of PRIDE in June. The third trip, this one felt a bit like coming home.

I was so privileged to share a stage with Ken McGoogan, Rob Goodman, and Carol Off, and to participate in such a vibrant, occasionally passionate discussion on the future of democracy in North America, and to find similar and sympathetic perspective among intellectuals whose work I respect.

I was also very grateful to the audience, who clearly took in what we had to say, and had insights of their own.

He will likely never read this, but thanks in particular to the Indigenous Canadian gentleman on Zoom who asked about the place of Indigenous representation in the mythology of Canada.

He gave us a great deal to think about, chiefly how essential that representation is, and how if any of us believe the stories we tell ourselves about Canada, there is no way forward for us as a people without that reconciliations. Our "classic" vision of Canada needs to be able to survive that reconciliation, and it will, because it's an essential component of everything we believe about Canada at its best.

And the folks running the Kingston Writer's Festival itself have never failed to make me feel anything but entirely welcome, and their grace under pressure is one of the wonders of the world, especially the literary world.

And on a personal note, it meant to world to me to have my beloved Mary Davis Little, the matriarch of my Kingston family, following along on Zoom, and to have my godson Michael—who's been very kind about his godfather writing about him all these years, and photographing him his entire life, likely ad nauseam—in the audience, not far from my Thursday Wife™ Jenny, who made the trip up from Toronto

2024 has been an exceptional year, and a striking contrast to the years it followed. I think I'm going to keep doing exactly what I'm doing, because it all seems to be working somehow.

Clouds

 

These exquisite Ontario early-autumn clouds through the windshield of Stephen's car, on the drive home from Orillia this afternoon struck me as particularly poignant after Jordan and Clémence's lovely wedding yesterday.

This morning, I got up for breakfast at the hotel, not because I was hungry but because I needed a great deal of coffee to move "this morning" out of the realm of "last night" and into the present, as I made rather merry over the course of Saturday night.

My last view of their wedding was the intoxicating one, a dance floor filled with people I've loved for years, as well as some glorious new folks who crossed my life last night, most of whom I will likely never see again, but some of whom I'll never forget.

Not a bad look backwards on the way to my room at the Marriott and my lovely bed, all told.

The breakfast room was packed with people from one of the other two weddings who'd billeted their guests there this weekend. None of them were from "our" wedding, but the sheer joy they were experiencing in each other's company was very affecting. I felt part of it because of "our" wedding's joy (so much joy, in fact, that a number of "our" guests seemed to be sleeping it off upstairs) which, I know, mirrored theirs. I enjoyed my passive participation in their pleasure immensely.

Tomorrow I'll celebrate another trip around the sun. One of the great gifts of having so many of those trips under my belt by now has been the soul-igniting joy of watching the cycles of life open up in front of me like a sped-up stop-motion film of the life cycles of flowers.

In the photograph of me with Ben and Stephen yesterday, I was struck by a certain avuncular stolidity that seems to have set in. It's appropriate, and it feels good. It suits me, even it I can remember how jarring it might have been as recently as five years ago.

Likewise the bride and groom, and their/our younger friends—some of whom I vividly remember when they seemed as dewy and post-born as baby seals—have grown, and solidified into secure, confident, and rooted, strong, intelligent, loving adults.

We are, all of us, exactly where we should be in the panoply of events and experiences that being alive stitches together into the quilt that is life. There's so much beauty, and it's so very easy to miss if you're not watching for it.

Weddings can be a mixed bag, as I discussed with the other queer couple at yesterday's, but at their absolute best, we agreed, they can be a pageant that celebrates the very best of what makes us human—the cycles of life itself, and the joy of one naturally evolving into the next.

Between the 89-year old grandmother cutting up the dance floor, and the three and a half-year old for whom the entire floor of the banquet hall must have looked liked the most exciting runway they'd ever seen, and all of us at various mileposts between them, everything just clicked. 

And it was all...perfect.