The pandemic deprived us of many kinds of gatherings, including literary readings, those lovely communal experiences that supplement the solitary experience of reading a book. But the pandemic also seems to have encouraged the digital dissemination of events that used to happen only in real life, which brings us to the Writers' Guild of Alberta Podcast.
This podcast shares audio recordings of the 2021 online reading series, which was sponsored by Read Alberta and University of Alberta Press. It features readings from books of all kinds — non-fiction and fiction, poetry and prose, for adults and for children — followed by Q&A sessions with a moderator and the online audience.
Among the Edmonton writers and books featured are Adriana Davies and From Sojourners to Citizens: Alberta's Italian History; Leif Gregersen and Alert and Oriented x3; Jennifer Bowering Delisle and Deriving; and Beth Sanders and Nest City. (For more on that, check out Sanders' own podcast, City Nestmaking.) The 20th and final episode in the series is to be released this week.
After that, the Writers' Guild of Alberta seems to be looking forward to the return of in-person encounters, but with the knowledge that there are benefits to the online variety, too: "After two years of trying new digital programs to adapt our literary world to the pandemic, we are now looking at how our creative lives might shift going forward — perhaps we won't return to 'normal,' but instead take the things we learned during the pandemic to create a new vision of the literary world for the future," says the description for the 2022 annual conference, slated to take place as a hybrid event from June 3 to 5.
You can find this and the rest of Taproot's podcast picks in our Listen Notes list.