In general, writers' incomes are as bad or worse than those of actors, dancers, indie band musicians, multi-media artists and anyone else labouring on the fringes of disrepute. It was with this wholesale lack of cash in mind that I began considering the International Festival of Authors now celebrating its 30th anniversary at Harbourfront.
Of course, IFOA is all about shilling books - and their authors - rather than, say, books and writing or books and reading. And it's emphatically not about the role and the place of literature in society, whether this one or any other. So, with commerce in the ascendant at IFOA, it's small wonder that admission charges for the various events are high enough to keep out some of the very people who should be running from session to session at Harbourfront: writers. Fifteen bucks for a ticket is a lot of money for a writer scraping by on something less than minimum wage, which we all know is less than ten dollars an hour in Ontario.
I've been wondering why IFOA can't devise some sort of lottery system so that real writers not pretend can get a free ticket or two. Or how about rush tickets at half off? Lots of venues do it. Why not IFOA? Failing that, the festival could put the arm on a few bazillion dollar multi-national publishers and have them make some cut-price tickets available. A last resort might be a title sponsor with the proviso that ticket prices must come down to little or nothing, at least for writers. Of course, in any profound culture IFOA's costs would be wholly or almost wholly underwritten by an arts ministry that recognizes the exceptional role literature plays in nation-making, thus making the cost of tickets moot.
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