Readers turn to literature to enter new worlds. And to do their work, writers sometimes travel the world - until they can't. Because of fallout from Iceland's volcanic eruption, Andrea Levy couldn't catch a flight from London in time for an April 21 Authors at Harbourfront Centre reading. So, appearing in her stead was writer Rodge Glass, who likewise found himself unable to cross the Atlantic - but in the reverse direction.
Glass, 32, author of 2009 Somerset Maugham prize winner Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography, learned on April 18 he would not be able to fly out of Toronto till April 29. He was returning home to Scotland via Toronto from Pittsburgh, after a mission to set up a creative writing exchange at Carnegie Mellon University. Stranded in Toronto with "nowhere to stay and not very much money," he did what anyone of his generation would do, he says. He posted a plea for help on his Facebook page:
"Now officially stuck in Toronto. For what could be as much as eleven days. Worse places to be stranded, gorgeous city, but any ideas on how to get home / where to stay / how to make money without selling my body on the street hugely appreciated. Answers on a (virtual) postcard please..."
Within an hour a friend scored him a couch to stay on. Soon after, his close friends in Scotland, Kirstin Innes and Alan Bissett, who'd just read in October at Toronto's International Festival of Authors, recommended him to the organizers, who also stage the weekly Authors at Harbourfront Centre series. That's how Glass ended up at the April 21 reading. "Writers all over the world [are]stepping in for other writers because no one can get over the Atlantic," Glass says.
"I was fearing a riot [of]people wanting Andrea Levy," Glass said the next evening. He told the crowd he was a "volcano refugee" and "Toronto had taken me in."
Glass didn't read from his acclaimed biography but instead offered a taste of a work in progress, a story commissioned for the Edinburgh International Book Festival on the topic of "elsewhere." Perhaps the theme fit the occasion. He began his story set in Hong Kong - about "being in one country [when one is]supposed to be in another" - well before the volcanic upset, he says.
"It feels like a long time since I stood at that airport gate, boarding pass in my hand, watching my connection get smaller and smaller and disappear into a paper cut in the sky. For a while, I forgot about the costs. I was just looking, looking, looking at that paper cut, a narrow slit that let a plane through into the other side of the world, my maybe future."
(The title, "After Drink You Turn Earth Up Side Down," is a translation of a fake Chinese proverb, he says.)
Glass likes to read unfinished material and invite comments from the audience. The feedback at the April 21 event came none too soon since the story's deadline is "two days' time," said a slightly weary Glass.
The day after the reading, Glass arose for a 5 a.m. flight to Montreal, then was whisked off to a student workshop at 9 a.m. Glass is now appearing at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in lieu of his friend Jason Donald, author of Choke Chain, who was stuck in Scotland unable to make an April 24 reading.
Glass's week in limbo has been "bizarre and sometimes really frustrating." he says. "I should have been in my office marking dissertations." (He's ready to dispense with hunting for Internet cafés and phone cards and quite glad someone loaned him a laptop so he could finish his story.) Yet "random exciting things happen" - like readings.
Lindsay Gulin, who handles communications for the 30-year-old Harbourfront series, calls Glass's Toronto appearance "a chance that might not have come up otherwise."
Series organizers are trying to reschedule Levy's visit; she had planned to read from The Long Song, a tale of a 19th-century slave in Jamaica that she developed while exploring her slave ancestry on the island.
Marjorie Backman is a freelance journalist based in New York City who is currently visiting Toronto.