Monday night brings the annual Scream in High Park, my favourite literary event in Toronto, which takes brilliant advantage of the existence of a stage, lighting and sound system in our underappreciated equivalent of Central Park (it’s all there for the annual Shakespeare production in the park), to bring innovative writing and performance to a broad audience.
This year it’s particularly special to me, because I was asked to help program it with festival director Bill Kennedy and poet-critic Kate Eichorn, and we’re very proud of the group of performers we’ve recruited: Novelist Gil Adamson, Montreal poet Angela Carr, Toronto art-prank-sound-writer Brian Joseph Davis, British Columbia steam-brained poet and essayist Jeff Derksen, Vietnamese-American poetry provocateur Linh Dinh, Toronto vocal-improvisation army The Element Choir, Montreal science-minded poet Michael Lista, the hilarious local performance-comedian Kathleen Phillips, poet-critic Damian Rogers, iconoclastic fiction writer Ken Sparling and Montreal poet/graphic-artist/event-impresario Sherwin Tjia.
It all happens beginning at 7 pm, in three sets, with things getting weirder and wilder as darkness falls. Bring your picnic gear to the park, camp out and drink it all in. I’d love to see you there.
