Annabel Lyon and Timothy Taylor delight audience at Bowen Island festival

Annabel Lyon and Timothy Taylor at the Gallery on Bowen Island (photo: Alison Bate)

By Alison Bate

Two very thoughtful, imaginative minds kept the audience rapt on opening night at the Write on Bowen festival.

Annabel Lyon, author of The Golden Mean, started her readings discussing Ten Uses for a Philosophy Degree, one of which – naturally – led to getting an MFA in Creative Writing.

Author Annabel Lyon signs copies of her book "The Golden Mean" at Write on Bowen Festival 2011 (Photo by Julie Ferguson)

“Which is more useless, do you think, philosophy or creative writing? Hmmm?” she asked.

And, of course, her No.10 was: “Write a novel about Aristotle.”

In her award-winning book, Lyon presents Aristotle as bipolar, and one of the highlights was her reading of Aristotle’s own words about the link between melancholy and creativity.

What we now call bipolar disease, the Greek philosopher called too much “cold black bile” and “hot black bile”.

He wrote that too much cold black bile rendered a person “dull and stupid” whereas people with much hot black bile were “elated and brilliant or erotic or easily moved to anger and desire, while some become more loquacious. Many too are subject to fits of exaltation and ecstasy…”

Lyon also read from her children’s book about Edie, a teenage protagonist with a cousin with Down’s Syndrome. Lyon grew up with an elder brother with Down’s, and it’s a theme close to her heart. In The Golden Mean, Alexander’s half-brother is also mentally challenged.

Timothy Taylor read from his latest novel, The Blue Light Project, and showed how to write a gripping inner monologue when your dinner table colleague goes for a pee.

”He knew his nickname in the L:MN art department, the one they used behind his back,” muses Thom Pegg, a disgraced former journalist in the novel.

“They’d say: Pebialta. Like the name of a Mediterranean resort or an Italian scooter. He wondered about it for quite a while before learning it was an acronym. P-B-I-A-L-T-A. Pegg Briefly Important A Long Time Ago. “

As Pegg tries to flirt with his dinner companion, Chastity: “Oh my, blossom. I just went entirely screensaver there,”

And his ex-wife Jennifer “… not weeks before she went slack-tide on him and disappeared over the lip of the shining mudflats that had suddenly formed all around his person.”

Taylor is now busy on a new novel , which he started about a month ago. “I’m planning to write it fast. It’s a kind of mystery,” he said.

Compelling literary voices (Lyon and Taylor) kick off Write on Bowen

By Richard Labonté

Giller, Commonwealth, Rogers Writers Trust, Ethel Wilson, Libris, Journey, Impac Dublin, Canada Reads – and half a dozen more: the two Canadian literary luminaries kicking off Write on Bowen on Friday, July 8 have amassed a legion of honors for their writing.

That’s no surprise. Work by Annabel Lyon (Oxygen, Best Thing for You) and Timothy Taylor (Stanley Park, Story House) has garnered both critical praise and – what a writer appreciates most – loyal fan followings and great sales.

They’ll each be reading from their most recent novels, from the past and from the future. For Lyon, that’s The Golden Mean, a brilliant historical re-imagination of the teacher/student relationship between philosopher Aristotle and the boy who would grow up to be Alexander the Great—a book about ideas that encompasses earthy concerns.