The first Wild Writers Literary Festival will take place in November 2012. But this isn’t the first time TNQ has gathered Wild Writers in the region.

In September of 2000, TNQ hosted a “Wild Writers We have Known” Syposium in Stratford, Ontario to celebrate the Canadian short story. We wanted to do something different, to forget the academics and hear from the writers themselves. We wanted to get writers talking about how they use language, about style and narrative structure and the rhythm of a sentence, and about how they adapt the devices of the filmmaker, the composer, or the painter in the art of telling stories.

We also wanted to direct some attention to the new generation of writers who were beginning to make their mark on the short story form. So we found 10 mid-career writers to speak to the work of 10 talented new writers. Among the rising stars we identified were Michael Winter, Michael Crummey, and Caroline Adderson (who each went on to win the Writers Trust Notable Author Award), and Annabel Lyon (who wrote the only book nominated for all three of Canada’s major fiction prizes in 2009).

The Wild Writers Festival will introduce a new generation of talented writers working in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and give attendees the opportunity to say “I knew them when…”