During the final weekend in April, I attended three sessions during the 2026 Blue Metropolis Festival, which is dedicated to books and their authors from around the world. What’s so amazing about it is what you unexpectedly discover about the lives of these featured authors, and the stories they share about their craft.
Everyone has their own stories that they hope to evolve into a written memoir to share with the reading public. However, before putting their lives into words on paper, there are plenty of hazards and caveats to be aware of.
That was the subject of an entertaining session on that subject called “Memoir Writing — How Much To Reveal?” The session featured three local authors who have recently published — or are about to publish — their own respective memoirs: Andreas Kessaris, Charlie Foran, and Donna Nebenzahl. The trio of memoirists dished out plenty of hazards and caveats, along with helpful advice.
“Ninety-nine percent of people who read don’t know who you are,” pointed out Mr. Foran.
“People loved to be written about,” added Ms. Nebenzhal, which sparked off a lively exchange regarding how to decide what and what not to put in — or people to include or exclude — in your memoir. This prompted Mr. Kessaris to reply “I had problems with subjects after my book was published. Somehow, they don’t like it when you don’t talk about them at all.”
A 20-minute delay when a fire alarm was set off at the Hotel 10, where many of the Blue Metropolis events took place, didn’t deter a sizeable crowd from returning to an interesting Q&A session entitled “Is It Possible To Be At Peace in Nature?”, which started when that alarm went off and resulted in an immediate evacuation of the premises.
The session featured British author Wyl Menmuir and Claire Cameron, whose memoir How To Survive A Bear Attack earned her the Governor-General’s Award for Nonfiction last year. Ms. Cameron, a self-confessed wilderness guide and tree planter, focused her memoir on her adventures in Algonquin Park in Ontario, and how it helped her survive a difficult battle with skin cancer. The park, in which its size is equivalent to the state of New Jersey, was also the site of a fatal bear attack of two visitors in 1991, which became the basis for her first book, a novel called The Bear, which was published in 2014.
“One reader told me that the novel gave back her fear of bears, especially after she visited Algonquin Park with her kids,” she said.
Ms. Cameron also shared a rather quirky, but practical, bit of knowledge when it comes to understanding the animals who inhabit Canada’s wilderness: “In order to get to know a deer, you have to know its stomach.”
The festival capped off with a one-on-one conversation with Azar Nafisi, author of the critically-acclaimed bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran. The night before, she was bestowed with the Blue Metropolis Words to Change Prize and hosted a screening of the movie version of her book, which had its Montreal premiere at the festival, as well as promoted her latest book, Read Dangerously.
The topic of the Sunday afternoon talk was “The Power of Great Books”, in which she discussed her tireless work of exposing students during her years as a literature teacher in her native Iran — a country which regarded its poets as prophets — to some of the great novels of the Western World. She also credited her passionate love of books to her father, who served as Tehran’s youngest mayor.
“Books are a way of connecting to the people,” she said. “My father started to spark my curiosity about knowledge when I was three years of age. It began when I read The Little Prince, which was a story that was straight from the heart; it also taught me not only about curiosity, but also about having feelings and empathy.”
Ms. Nafisi also spoke about the worst side of the current fundamentalist regime in Iran, in which women, minorities, and culture are being brutally repressed. She also mentioned some of the absurd examples of this repression.
“They have banned the cartoon character Popeye, because they regarded his girlfriend Olive Oyl as a ‘loose woman’,” she added.
The talk was moderated by Mattea Roach, the Toronto-born mega champion of the popular TV quiz show “Jeopardy!” who currently hosts the CBC podcast Bookends. Being a past “Jeopardy!” contestant myself, I wanted to take the opportunity to briefly meet her and take a selfie for posterity. During our two-minute encounter, we discussed the differences between being a contestant in the Alex Trebek era and the Ken Jennings era, especially regarding prize winnings.
