By Jen McVeigh

SPARKS Literary Festival is appropriately named. It’s a bright spot in the dark month of January. Something that warms the heart and re-starts the brain. Reading and writing might be generally solitary pursuits, but some kind of magic happens when brilliant writers and passionate readers gather to share words and ideas. It’s the kind of event people trudge through snow to reach.

Unfortunately, weather cancelled SPARKS in 2020, when Snowmageddon hit St. John’s. Then, the festival was rescheduled just in time to be cancelled by the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A full-scale, in-person event has not happened since. So how did the organizers keep writers and audiences engaged through such a long period of isolation? How does a festival keep its spark from fizzling?

Nancy Pedri, Head of the Department of English at Memorial, and Lisa Moore, writer and Assistant Professor, filled us in on how SPARKS has become one of the most anticipated events of the year, and what we have to look forward to in 2023.

Tell me a bit about the history of Sparks. How did you both become involved?

Lisa: The SPARKS Literary Festival was founded in 2009 by Mary Dalton, the Poet Laureate for St. John’s and Professor of English at Memorial. Mary served as the director of SPARKS for six years, and was an expert at making every author feel welcome and celebrated at this festival. She ran SPARKS with tremendous care and made sure every detail was exactly right, including pleasing lighting and the bouquet of flowers on stage. 

But, most importantly, with SPARKS, Mary did what she does really well: recognize and foster emerging talent and celebrate established writers from here and elsewhere. She drew attention to the extraordinary literary culture of the province and inspired writers through her creative writing classes and criticism, but in no small part also with this wonderful celebration of words.

Mary wanted the festival to take place in January because she knew we all need some kind of spark to get through the winter. The SPARKS festival is always packed with audience members who come for the day to hear all four panels.

There’s a great deal of excitement now that SPARKS can return to its pre-COVID format. And, the amazing SPARKS committee is snapping the Rubik’s Cube of SPARKS into place with aplomb. Yay us!

Nancy: In the years following Mary’s retirement, Memorial’s Department of English, with support from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences took over the festival’s organization, with the Head of the Department serving as its director. Dr. Jennifer Lokash ran the festival in much the same way—with a profound sense of care for the writers and literature, and an innate sense of how to create something beautiful.

Of course, we were hit with Snowmageddon and the COVID-19 Pandemic and had to learn to pivot! Now, in my first year as Head, I am leading the organizational committee, which is made up of great people from inside and outside the University. Without them, life would be so much more difficult!

Although I have been involved with SPARKS from the beginning, often holding welcoming dinners for the authors and cheering from the audience, it’s from this new role that I have come to truly appreciate the beauty of SPARKS, and its importance for the members of our community.

Why is the festival important to writers and readers in Newfoundland and Labrador, and beyond? Can you share some of the feedback you’ve received about it?

Lisa: It’s a chance to gather and talk about literature, stories, poems, plays, material culture. The SPARKS Literary Festival is the only event of its kind in St. John’s. An all-day event where people get to hear the authors read their own work. Writers from here take new publications to an audience, sometimes for the first time, the ink barely dry on the page. The audience is warm and receptive. And, of course, we bring an Irish writer to the stage each year, and two writers from elsewhere in Canada. It’s a chance for practitioners of the craft to talk to each other, share ideas, to entertain questions from the audience and to sell their books.

Nancy: Oh my, where to begin. SPARKS is the event everyone looks forward to! It entails great literature from writers at different stages of their careers. It’s a place where aspiring writers get inspired, learn about the craft, and engage with established writers whose work they admire. It’s also a place to celebrate the talent that was nourished in our Department. Several of our very own creative writing students have made their debut at SPARKS or have come back to showcase their new writing. When you sit in the crowded space listening to writers read, the excitement in the air is tangible!

SPARKS reminds us just how many talented writers our city and province house. But it also reminds us that we are part of a larger Canadian and global community of writers.

What are some of the most memorable experiences you’ve had at SPARKS? Are there certain events you look forward to each year?

Lisa: I enjoyed interviewing the Irish writer Claire Keegan. She was formidable and gave me a hard eye, but her reading was electric, masterful. And she jousted with me on stage, which I very much enjoyed. She is perhaps one of the best short story writers going—anywhere. We were lucky to have her on our stage. She was just short listed the Booker Prize for her new work Small Things like These. It’s a staggeringly beautiful novella.

Nancy: There are so many memorable SPARKS experiences. Just the other day, I found a 2015 SPARKS bookmark in one of my purses (oh, how Mary would chuckle at that!). I always enjoy hearing how authors answer the questions audience members ask. I learned so much about the process of writing, the personal quirks of writers whose work touches me, and about the ‘back story’ of the stories and characters I love.

Tell me about the new partnerships you’ve developed. With the Coastlines Book Club, for instance. How does this help Sparks create more opportunities for people to engage with literature?

Lisa: We have recently partnered with the Writer’s Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, and they’ve been tremendous. They are like the Wizard of Oz when it comes to promotion – everything on all the platforms. During the COIVID-19 pandemic, we broke SPARKS down into a series of four events that we called Sparkles. There was even a mid-summer poetry event that was blocked to the gills. The Writer’s Alliance gave us a terrific boost in terms of promotion. They are also contributing financially to SPARKS.

The SPARKS opening reception generously hosted by the President of MUN is a longstanding tradition and one where much laughter is had. This year, the Coastlines: Memorial University Book Club is taking the lead in organizing a first SPARKS/Coastlines event during the SPARKS reception, and it’s going to be outrageously fun. They have grown a whole new audience for books with their book club, and we’re grateful to have them on board.

And there’s Rogers Cable, who hosted a Sparkles event during the pandemic when it still seemed unsafe to bring people together. This event was on cable television, and YouTube, and of course that opened up a whole other audience.

Nancy: There are also several awards that are announced at SPARKS. Cox & Palmer is a longstanding patron as is Browne Fitzgerald Morgan Avis & Wadden, The Landfall Trust, and the Irish Newfoundland Association. Their continued support not only ups the celebratory volume, but also grants writers some amazing opportunities to continue producing fabulous work!

As you can tell, SPARKS is growing in leaps and bounds.

You are planning the first in-person festival since 2019. How did you keep audiences engaged throughout the pandemic, and what lessons did you learn from the experience?

Nancy: It’s not hard to gather people for SPARKS. Our only obstacle in the past has been weather. People look forward to the festival and put it into their January calendars even before we announce the line-up of writers. They just know that SPARKS will be worth their time!

In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we thought, “That’s enough! People need SPARKS.” And we were right. We organized what we thought would be smaller events that ran from January to July and covered several literary genres. Some were streamed and others were live; all were super well attended. They weren’t so very small. It was here that I began understanding the importance of SPARKS for the province, for our own creative writing students, for our writers.

People actually ask to be involved in SPARKS. This, I can say with confidence, is not always the case when putting together committees and events!

Lisa: I think what will bring people to the live SPARKS event is a tremendous hunger for SPARKS, started with Mary Dalton, a hunger that just gets more and more, well, hungry. People want to hear stories and poems and plays and discussions about literature. They want to hear about the province’s literature, and the writers who come here to share their work from other places. People want to ask questions, like: How did you make that beautiful thing? How did you move me so much? How did you make me laugh so hard, and how did you create suspense? People want to gather and get a chance to meet writers and talk about this very special thing, the culture of stories.  

What will it mean for everyone to meet face-to-face again in 2023? What are you most excited for?

Nancy: What am I not excited about? I look forward to meeting some of the artists that I don’t know personally. I look forward to walking away with a head full of ideas and warmth, laughter and excitement, and arms full of books signed by people who so generously shared their time and experience and talent with us. I look forward to hearing writers read from such a wide range of genres and across so many different topics. I am especially looking forward to the excitement on the faces of those writers who win awards and start dreaming of all they can do in the near future.

Lisa: I am most excited for the texture in the air, the electrical tension you feel on your skin, of people listening, of an audience listening, all at once. The tension of people acting as if in a single body—bursting into laughter or holding their breath, or letting their hearts beat in chests like gongs. That quality in the air, that atmosphere of a whole group of people just listening—and the knowledge that we have a line-up of authors who will deliver beautiful works. That’s what I am looking forward to most!