[PHOTO] Naked Heart 2018 report (@nakedheartfest, #nakedheart)

[rfmcdonald]

I spent most of this weekend just past attending the latest iteration of the Naked Heart literary festival, organized by Glad Day Bookshop and run out of several venues in Church and Wellesley including the 562 Church Street event space and the Buddies in Bad Times theatre.



The sessions I picked this year tended more towards an exploration of the mechanics of writing for publication, with a few readings.

• My first session Saturday morning was The Writer's Hustle, a panel discussion with three other writers exploring how they make writing work for them as a chosen career despite its dismal economics. (Day jobs, among other things, are necessary.)


• Unruly Vision: Writing Unruly Bodies in Fiction was a very enjoying workshop led by Sanchari Sur, who led several dozen writers towards useful strategies for creating and envisioning characters.


• Queer est un mot français! was a very enjoyable reading by three Francophone Ontarian authors, Amélie Dumoulin, Pierre-Luc Landry, and Sylvie Bérard, at Glad Day. This was the first time such a French-language session had been organized for Naked Heart; I hope for more in the future.
  
• Terrence Abrahams led an informative session, Subject Line: Submission, on looking for potential publishing magazines, on strategies to adopt.
  
• Spectrums of Sanity: Mental Health and the Writer was another panel discussion at Buddies in Bad Times, with five authors talking about how they took care of themselves as they wrote.


• What's Love Got To Do With It? was an enjoyable panel discussion at 562 Church, with four different authors talking about the way love has been represented in literature in relationship to queer lives. Why not have happy endings?


• Grit Lit was an excellent late-evening series of readings by ten authors at Glad Day, reading passages from their works. These were always direct and raw, never crude.


• Sunday morning, my first session was The Author Foundry: The Un-Artistic Aspects of Your Submission Package at Buddies. Author Sheryl Wright did an incredible job explaining the mechanics of hunting for publishers and the finer details of the literary genre of the submission, details which need to be paid attention to if a work is to have a chance of success.


• Policing the Body - Resistance and Renewal was a great panel discussion looking at the ways in which queer bodies are targeted by a hostile world. How can people fight back?


• Celebrating Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto was a launch session for two books put out by the Marvellous Grounds collective. I enjoyed the readings of some of the different contributing authors, telling stories about the past and present of Toronto from an angles that I needed to see.


• My final session was First Person - Ethics & Experience, a panel of five writers held at Glad Day. These five all talked about the ways in which they balanced their commitment as writers to the exploration of their truths with their responsibilities to their communities to fairly represent them.