En Vino Novellus – In wine there are stories – is set to return for its fifth year and it promises to be an evening of good words and good wine.
It’s a unique event that pairs six wines with the words of six mountain writers in a spontaneous and intimate setting where surprise is the name of the game and expectations are checked at the Rose and Crown dining room door, Thursday (March 20).
To accomplish that, En Vino Novellus organizer Jerry Auld refuses to charge an entry fee, instead relying on the goodwill and generosity of his partners at Canmore Wine Merchants, Café Books and the Rose and Crown.
“I want people to come without an expectation,” said Auld recently. “If you pay for a ticket you come with an expectation, ‘OK, entertain me.’ I don’t want anybody to have expectations and then they’ll be open to whatever these books are going to give them, whether it is surprise or humour, whatever range of emotion.
“I don’t think you can be open when you put money down. I’d rather you get a surprise and buy a book, maybe one they didn’t come for. That’s even better because I know I surprised them with the range we’ve offered them.”
The goal of En Vino Novellus is to celebrate books, writers and words, and to have fun doing it – hence the wine.
For this year’s event, Auld has brought together a group of writers from Canmore, Golden, Rossland, Calgary and Anchorage, Alaska presenting both fiction and non-fiction stories in long and short form.
In that mix are Jennifer Ellis (Rossland) with A Pair of Docks, a sci-fi fantasy that explores physics, time and witchcraft; Karsten Heuer (Canmore) and his essay Finding Farley from The Banff Centre Press anthology Rock, Paper, Fire; Lynn Martel (Canmore/Golden), Tales and Trails: Adventures for Everyone in the Canadian Rockies; Kim McCullough (Calgary with ties to Fernie) whose novel Clearwater explores the struggles of youth and Jeremy Kroeker (Canmore) with his motorcycle travelogue Through Dust and Darkness.
“We’ve got representation from a lot of mountain communities and a lot of mountain voices. Some of the books aren’t directly about mountains, but I’ve always been a believer that mountain people have a unique voice even if they are not writing about the mountains,” Auld said.
“I honestly think writers living in the mountains tend to look up and outward more and not so introspectively, whereas people in big cities tend to write about the dysfunctional urban families. They’re (city writers) really about this tight community, families, affairs, sicknesses and close relationships, whereas I think people who live in the mountains tend to think in broader strokes in terms of time and history and in terms of taking long view and taking on bigger questions.”
En Vino Novellus is also the launch for Letters from Chamonix, published by Imaginary Mountain Surveyors and written by David Stevenson, a climber, writer and director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts program at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Letters from Chamonix pulls together a collection of Stevenson’s best short stories written over the past 20 years.
All of the stories in the collection are steeped in the mountains, but present varied voices in a variety of times.
“The sense of what he (Stevenson) is talking about is very, very clear. It is not a fantasy of climbing, he’s done most of this stuff. What he’s doing is using it for a stage for drama. You don’t question the stage, which makes the drama a lot more compelling,” Auld said.
En Vino Novellus begins at 7 p.m. sharp and seating is limited. Auld recommends those who would like to sit during the event to come early.
Auld prefers to only put a few chairs out for the event as he’s trying to encourage everyone, attendees and authors alike, to rub shoulders with one another.
“This is (the author’s chance) to really talk to an audience they wouldn’t normally get. As soon as you put readers and listeners in a situation like that you get a spectator sport and while reading is a spectator sport, I can hopefully change that by making people walk through the crowd to get their wine and come back and not have a set seating or tables where the authors are,” he said.
Go to www.vino-novellus.com for more information.
