The schmoozing was great, as it had been in Montreal. But more than that, we gloried in finding one another. Most of us had been working in silos, with no peers or mentors. Imagine the thrill of finding ourselves among “our peeps” for the first time, with hours and hours for in-depth discussion of what we do and how we do it. Imagine the relief of finally getting answers to those pesky questions we’d carried around for years; the pleasure of providing helpful suggestions to our less experienced colleagues. Every item on the agenda was apt. Every contact made promised concrete mutual benefits.

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Some people maintain that writing is a lonely business. In my experience, that’s not necessarily true. When I sit down to write, I am joined by a crowd of internal negative voices: the infernal censor, the cranky critic, and the whiner who keeps reminding me of all the other things I could or should be doing.

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No list about audio storytelling would be legit without This American Life. These are the masters and I can’t imagine a person who could listen and not be enchanted. I might not be able to be friends with that person. Ira Glass, an early adopter of hipster eyeglasses makes vocal ticks like hesitating feel sexy. Early contributors like Sarah Vowell and Starlee Kine set the tone for the smart, introspective, funny tone of the show and really changed the way we think of radio with their atypical radio voices.

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Language pulls us along and we swim with the current or against it or diagonally. It's bigger than any of us and has a lot to do with how we think of ourselves, how the young women in Elizabeth House think of themselves and their children. Think of the words in the mouths of powerful people in your own life that have changed you, maybe a little, maybe for a lifetime: Good, Bad, Lazy, Yes, Stupid, Pretty, Fat, Brilliant, Lovely, Never, No, Wonderful.

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Sorry, everyone else, but when Canadians apologize to you it’s not an expression of deference. Unlike “eh”, which means to Canadians what it means to everyone else—it’s an invitation to polite disagreement, the opposite of the British “don’t they?” or “aren’t they?”—the Canadian “sorry” means something more like “Ah jeez, I’ve got to deal with this idiot?” (Say it in a Fargo accent to get the full effect.)

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I was at a friend’s house and we were talking about death and the statistical probability of heaven, all that deep stuff you talk about over tea on a cold winter’s day. I was thinking about all those viewings I had been to in my lifetime, how the faces of people in their coffins never quite look like they are just asleep. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what it would be like to not exist.

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I met up with St. Hilaire to talk about the relationship between writers and their readers. We spoke broadly on the subject: authors in relation to the general public, to friends, to publishers, and even to reviewers. We also discussed the relationship specific to her own situation as a writer of erotic fiction.

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This year I didn't buy myself a Christmas tree. Instead I bought one for a friend who had a hard year and two kids and not a lot of time to get her own. She appreciated the thought, but time and circumstances conspired against her and the tree stayed wrapped up on the front porch until it was almost time for the trek to her family's home out of town.

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Michael Winter tells the story of an unorthodox wood cabin, an accidental forest fire, and sharing a moment with a girl in a bikini. He told his story live at This Really Happened at WordFest in Calgary on October 16, 2013.

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Todd Babiak finds himself about to commit a criminal act in the Army & Navy, fueled by alcohol, grief, and envy of Jim Morrison's glamorous lifestyle. He told his story live at This Really Happened at WordFest in Calgary on October 16, 2013.

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Finally, I had the temerity to ask what weaknesses he had as a poet. He responded that his mentor Bernard MacLaverty had told him an anecdote about W. Somerset Maugham. When asked the same question at an interview in Paris the English writer had stated: “My books don’t have lyrical quality.” Whenever any critic reviewed any book by Maugham subsequently, after bouts of praise they would always end with “of course, his writing has no lyrical quality.” We spoke no more of weaknesses.

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Lisa Moore tells the story of how a dorm room showdown turns into an opportunity for catharsis. She told her story live at This Really Happened at WordFest in Calgary on October 16, 2013.

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Craig Davidson tells the story of how he learned that theft was in the eye of the beholder. He told his story live at This Really Happened at WordFest in Calgary on October 16, 2013.

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There was no murder, but there was illicit sex, suicide, a trial. It was a big story and so difficult to research that I gave up working on it several times. Too much of the source material derived from smudged editions of newspapers on microfilm. Too much of it was couched in nineteenth-century legalese. But even as I contorted my back over the microfilm reader and strained my eyes trying to decipher poorly reproduced pages of ancient newsprint, the story would not let go of me.

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This Really Happened, the popular nonfiction storytelling series, is coming back to Calgary's WordFest on October 16th! With Todd Babiak, Craig Davidson, Ophira Eisenberg, Lisa Moore, and Michael Winter.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about story, about the patterns that stories take. When I begin to write a book, I rarely know where it’s going. But go it does, on and on, through a trajectory that is both consciously and unconsciously created. It mainly follows the Western story arc–conflict, rising action, climax, denouement. Even though that seems formulaic, when I write that arc stretches above me, like a preordained path that I, willy-nilly, must follow.

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