Highlights of Blue Metropolis:

• Seeing Francesca LoDico win the Accenti Magazine award for non fiction for her beautiful piece “The Disappearing Sicily.”
• Late night Chinese at VIPs with a lot of lovely folks, some old friends, some new. Seeing David McGimpsey, Jason Camlot, Donavan, and my lovely editor, Jon Paul Fiorentino (who was the best editor — thanks Jon).
• Dinner with Robbie Dillon and friends at a posh Sushi restaurant hidden away behind a non-descript metal door.
• Listening in on Suhayl Saadi’s interview at CBC; the man speaks like he writes, in beautifully articulate pages, ready for print. Sunday night, he joined a big and bawdy table of us for dinner.
• Seeing Nigel Thomas & Sherry Simon on a panel on writing about writers. When the panel was discussing respect for writers, Thomas said something about how a real sign of respect for writing might look something like a living wage…
• I’m in the midst of reading Claire Latremouille’s Desmond Road Book of the Dead and Catherine Kidd’s Missing the Ark (and also reading a brilliant masters thesis) and at Blue Met, I picked up a few more, among them: Language Acts (edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift) and At the Bottom of the Sky by Peter Dubé (who’ll be here in Vancouver to launch the book later this month).