Writer: Erin Baldwin
When Roland Gulliver took on the lead role of festival director at the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) last February, the world was a very different place. It would only be a few short weeks until Canada was hit by COVID-19, Toronto was forced into lockdown and throwing a live, in-person festival became a faint possibility.
In the following months, Gulliver and his team have worked to pivot this year’s TIFA into an all-virtual festival, getting creative and taking advantage of the digital medium. They’ve organized over 200 free, virtual events taking place from October 22 to November 1, including those with powerhouse authors Margaret Atwood, Desmond Cole, Andre Alexis and Emma Donoghue, alongside a host of Critical Conversation on pressing issues like Black Lives Matter and climate change.
Recently, I chatted with Roland about his goals for this year’s festival, turning to virtual programming and the evolving literary landscape.
This is your first year with TIFA. I'm sure this isn’t exactly the year you envisioned when you first took on the role of festival director – I don’t think it’s the year any of us envisioned. What goals did you have coming in and how have those goals evolved with the onset of the global pandemic?
I arrived in February with lots of aims and ambitions to really grow the festival. Diversify it. Look at different event formats. Bring in performance, debates and discussion. Look at doing master classes. Really kind of build the festival and the sum of its parts. And, actually, look at how we engage with the digital and how we’re creating interesting digital content. I’m quite pleased that lots of the elements I wanted to bring into a live festival have kind of been translated and transformed into the digital event program. Also, I’m really excited that we have created digital content that responds to the medium: there are podcasts, there’s a map of Canadian small presses, there’s an installation of digital video leading to Union Station in Toronto. That’s been really exciting.
I attended the festival maybe two or three years ago. I thought the programming was fantastic but something I was surprised at was the attendance. You kind of touched on this already – how there may be a silver lining to the fact that the festival had to go virtual this year because it is a way of attracting younger audiences.
Yes, I think I realized a few weeks ago that there is a really great positive. We rebuilt and redesigned our website. Now it’s almost like we’re doing a really exciting marketing campaign where we’re bringing the festival to people’s rooms. Maybe people who felt the festival wasn’t for them or who thought that literary festivals were for an older demographic can actually experience the festival. And, hopefully, when we go back to being live, they will then want to come down to the Harbourfront Centre.
We’ve got the Toronto Poetry Slam and a working partnership with the Flup Festival in Rio de Janeiro – they’ve got a Black, queer slam competition and we’re going to present the semi-finals and final of that. We’re also launching our TIFA Kids! program so there will lots of events for young people, families and adults.
Do you have any plans right now to continue a virtual element of the festival, even next year when hopefully social gathering bans are lifted?
I think there are lots of things from the projects that we’ve done – we did a podcast called “Write in the Neighbourhood” where we talked to writers and asked them to create a virtual walking tour of their neighbourhoods to explore Toronto and see how much people were connected with, and passionate about, their neighbourhoods. We created the series exploring Thorndale, Parkdale, Scarborough, the downtown area. That for me is a really exciting element in terms of how a digital project will continue. I also think the installation at Union Station. Again, looking at different ways of telling stories and connecting with audiences. And, connecting with audiences outside of a venue or outside of traditional spaces.
I think for me the festival really needs to go out and connect. Meet the city and different communities: we go out and meet people and that allows people to come back to us. Having festivals create digital content will be something that we keep doing. I think there will be a new kind of relationship between both the live event and it being streamed. We’ve broken that barrier so it’ll present opportunities. For example, an international author who can’t travel, or isn’t available to travel, or for environmental reasons doesn’t want to travel — the possibility of them doing a digital event is more accessible because we’ve experienced it already. It’ll be less of a hurdle for the future.
Toronto is considered one of the most multicultural cities in the world. Obviously, this is a year where events have really shone a spotlight on inequity, social injustices and the need for greater diversity in many spaces. I think this kind of speaks to what you’re talking about with digital programming – getting into spaces and attracting audiences that might not be as familiar with a festival like TIFA. How has the programming been a response to events this year?
One of the exciting elements for me coming to Toronto is the fact that it is so diverse. There are so many languages, nationalities, neighbourhoods. We have done a program of events in different languages. Again, using that digital space to do that. You don’t have to think about flying the author in — there’s theoretically a lesser challenge in getting audiences down to a venue. We have events in Bengali, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Japanese. I think that linguistic diversity of the program is really important for the festival so that it reflects the city better. Also, we will have our program of Critical Conversations where each night there will be an hour discussion, both for the panel but also inviting online questions, around things like the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, universal basic income and protesting political change. We’re at a point where we had those months of unrest and protest. How can we make that into some sort of real change? I think that is a huge challenge.
For me, it’s been really interesting coming from the U.K. to Canada and seeing how these debates are reflected, discussed and engaged with here. It’s quite dynamic and for me, quite inspiring – how people are trying to hold on to the issues that came up over the summer and take them forward to make some kind of progress. I think the combination of those months of protest and the pandemic – the fact that we have all gone through this fundamental shift – means as a literary festival we have to respond to that, and we have to reflect that. Be a bit more dynamic and proactive in engaging with it. It is a very small project but we’ve commissioned 11 writers to write on the theme of “skin hunger” – a Chilean writer reading in Spanish, a Japanese and Italian writer, a selection of Canadian writers. Engaging and developing new work and developing different kinds of works is really important.
One thing I noticed as well that speaks to accessibility – and maybe this was a decision that was based on the fact TIFA was going virtual this year – but I noticed that all of the events are free. From what I recall, they weren’t before. I think that’s also something that makes it more accessible, particularly at this point in time.
There’s a very pragmatic element in the fact that we’re used to getting things online for free. It’s not the live festival I dreamed of, but it has given me the opportunity to make a new website, to make events and a program that can be experienced across Canada and, hopefully, across the world. Offering it for free is really exciting. We’re asking people — if they can — to make a donation to enable us to keep doing our work but, most importantly, we hope that people will be inspired by the events to go out and buy the books. We’ve worked with the University of Toronto Book Store to create our own webpage on their site so people can go and buy the books and support the authors that way. For us, being a literary festival, they are a fundamental part of the ecology. We are there to make a festival, to make performances and celebration and discussion and debate, but also to help publishers and writers get their books to readers. That’s an integral part of it.
It’s always a topic of conversation: is the book dead? Is this the end of the book? Is the book over? These were big conversations more in the early 2000s but, of course, the book seems to be enduring. In a bit of a different format, of course – audiobooks have really taken off recently. What are your thoughts on the book and how the book is continuing in what is an increasingly technologically-advanced society?
It’s interesting because we have gone through that phase when e-books arrived and Kindles. When I was working at the book festival in Edinburgh, we had lots of conversations. How do we talk about the book? What is going to happen? What is this challenge going to be? It’s interesting that that phase has kind of gone through. Talking to publishers, it’s interesting because e-books and physical books now live alongside each other and people have different habits depending on what format it’s in. I think also, because of the technological advances, books have become even more beautiful things. For me – obviously, I’m hugely biased – the physical book can’t be beat in terms of its physicality, the human touch, the smell, the way you can navigate in terms of reading, flipping backwards and forwards. I think there is something about reading on paper – it’s a very different neurological experience.
At the same time, I think it’s also important that literary festivals explore all different kinds of storytelling, whether its comics, graphic novels, digital storytelling, visual storytelling, street art, hip-hop, spoken word. I think it’s not just about the physical book. Storytelling can be everywhere. Just opening that out to people to show that you may not like books but you may like hip-hop. They are all equal in their power in terms of storytelling ability.
Are there any particular events you’re excited about for this year’s festival or any particular authors you’re excited to have?
Well, obviously all of them! I guess in terms of the headliners – I’m really thrilled and excited that Margaret Atwood will be opening the festival and that Richard Ford will be in the program. Having come from Edinburgh, it’s nice that Ian Rankin and Val McDermid will be part of the festival. Then, I think also there is a great poetry lineup, we have people like Tyler Pennock reading his work. The fiction list, people like Ayad Akhtar. I think just the whole range of the fiction writers. For me, bringing in that kind of wealth and diversity of writers has been really important. On top of that, we have so many amazing nonfiction writers. John Troyer has written a book on death and society which maybe sounds off-putting but, given what we’ve gone through in the past few months, how we talk about death and how we deal with that as a society has become really challenging.