Once in a Blue Metropolis
The Experience of the 2025 Literary Festival
The Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival took place this year from April 24th to 27th. As the largest multilingual literary event in North America, the annual festival is a place of forging inter-cultural connections, social inclusion, and exposure to new ideas. This year, the theme was “Time, the Tree, the Page,” and the events explored ideas of time, climate change, witnessing, memory, human-nature relations, and diversity. The festival welcomed over 160 guests at over 120 events in eight languages, including panels, podcasts, readings, signings, roundtables, and master classes. I had the pleasure of attending several of the events, including a Queer storytelling night, a poetry performance, an interview with Salman Rushdie, and a panel exploring borders and place in fiction.
The first event I attended was Queer Dating Horror Stories, hosted by Christopher DiRaddo and “The Queen of Verdun,” drag queen Misty Waterfalls. Waterfalls, who you can see weekly at Bar Social Verdun for her “Drop Drag Gorgeous” and “Le brunch aux folles” events, opened the event with an incredible lip sync to Carly Rae Jepsen. The participants at the French/English event were writer Lukas Rowland; writer, burlesque performer and comic Jennifer June Chapman; actor Thomas Mundinger; stand-up comedian John Cotrocois; sex educator and comedian Kadi Diop; and storyteller Johanne Pelletier.
The evening consisted of these queer storytellers discussing their worst (and best) dating experiences. Heart problems, ardent craft beer hatred, heartbreak smiles, saunas, Greek doctors, litter boxes, Top Chef, massages, and an all-lesbian cruise were all topics they explored. I, for one, never thought I would hear the phrase “Lesbian Republican dentists” in my life (many thanks to Johanne Pelletier), nor did I think I would have the absolute pleasure of being called a peasant by Misty Waterfalls, but the experience was beautifully healing for all. As Pelletier aptly described it on social media, the event was “heartwarming, fun, horrible, joyful, ridiculous, life changing.” The room was filled with laughter; this was a night of queer joy as much as queer horror.
I also attended the Not Your Mother’s Poetry Reading: A Spoken Web Sonic Poetry Performance with the musician, producer and sound artist Andrew Whiteman. He was interviewed by Concordia University professor and Spoken Web director Jason Camlot, in which Whiteman discussed his performance as a form of archival work. Spoken Web is a SSHRC-funded partnership interested in the discovery and preservation of sonic archives, and Whiteman is the creative director of a Spoken Web partner, Siren Recordings, which functions as a sonic poetry label.
At the event, Whiteman performed a program using a sound system—with a “set” of sound recordings of select lines from various poets, as well as melodic elements and beats—and visuals made by partner Ariel Engle. Wearing an orange tracksuit and a mask with eyes painted on, Whiteman explored how music ties together poetry, house music, and the body. His performance at the event centered possibilities of social revolution and imagination by bringing a revolutionary spin to poetry.
The Blue Metropolis Grand Prix 2025 event was opened by Concordia University provost Anne Whitelaw introducing author Salman Rushdie, who was presented with the illustrious award for lifetime achievement. Rushdie then sat down to be interviewed by literary journalist and radio broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel. The conversation was centered around Rushdie’s near-death stabbing in 2022, and the book that came from it, aptly titled Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
In discussing the memoir Knife, Rushdie discussed how the work was meant to work through a single question he had after the attack: how do I get my life back? He detailed how the text explores the knife as a metaphor and language as a weapon. He explained that the work followed both his relationship with his would-be murderer and his relationship with his wife—the poet, novelist, photographer and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who he calls Eliza. The attacker (who Rushdie refused to name in his book, simply referring to the man as “A”) was tried and found guilty earlier this year, a verdict which Rushdie said quite succinctly “felt good.” Rushdie took the narrative back in his book, insisting on his role as author rather than victim which he sees as cathartic.
Wachtel brought up some of Rushdie’s most famous works. He described his experience writing Midnight’s Children from the character’s perspectives as holding onto his coattails and going along for the ride, as “he told the story, I just wrote it down.” Rushdie explained that, at least until August 2022, the novel The Satanic Verses had at last acquired a readership not tainted by history. Until the stabbing, a younger generation was largely unaware of the story of Rushdie and the fatwa. He contrasted this perspective with the many critics who denigrated his work without so much as cracking the spine. Rushdie’s attacker similarly had only read a few pages of his work prior to stabbing him. Rushdie teased an upcoming collection of fictional works, including three novellas and two short stories. The quintet, called The Eleventh Hour, comes out November 4th, 2025.
Photo by Michael Abril
Wachtel questioned Rushdie on the miraculous, with the author insisting that he doesn’t believe in miracles, but his books do. He explains that “realism is a recent invention, and it may have outlived its usefulness—like a Tesla.” Rushdie discussed dreams as “too easy” of a literary device, and joked that his own dreams are usually boring as he used up all his imagination while awake. The discussion ranged from which books made him who he is—A Thousand and One Nights or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, if you’re curious—and why we should call the city Bombay rather than Mumbai to how Rushdie likes his father more dead than alive and kissing both Bob Ray and Leonard Cohen. Then, Wachtel and Rushie explored the concept of home in a life full of movement and complications. Rushdie also left his audience with some sound advice, as he reminisced about playing croquet with E. M. Forster: “If you’re going to steal stuff, steal the good stuff.”
The final event I had the opportunity to attend was entitled Algiers, Jerusalem, Mexico — When Fiction Comes to the Rescue of Reality. Hosted by Ian Thomas Shaw, the panel included
Canadian writer Sivan Slapak, American novelist Claire Messud, and Mexican author Mateo García Elizondo. The three storytellers discussed themes of borders, history and memory within their respective works.
García Elizondo’s work Last Date in El Zapotal (Original Spanish: Una cita con la Lady) is a haunting story of a heroin addict and a ghost town in Mexico. He described the character’s journey as a descent into hell or a descent into himself. The author explained how the work explores questions of identity, inverse migration, belonging versus erasure, and death as beautiful. The story also follows an internal journey through a borderline space between reality and dream, or between life and death.
Messud follows three generations of a pieds-noirs family during the second half of the twentieth century in This Strange Eventful History. The work is largely inspired by her paternal family’s stories and begins in French-ruled Algeria; she explained some of the ideas come from her grandfather’s family memoirs. Messud discussed how national identities become increasingly ambiguous and fractured in her work. The family moves from place to place, and the ideas of home and homeland are repeatedly questioned.
Slapak’s collection of short stories, Here is Still There, follows the character of Isabel, who negotiates her identity as part of a family of post-war Jewish immigrants in Canada. Travelling between Montreal and Jerusalem, Isabel is left to navigate ideas of home, exile, borders, and loss. Slapak said the text explores how language can be a bridge or a barrier, as she uses other languages in her mostly-English text—in particular, she leaves her Yiddish untranslated.
After a short reading from each of the authors, there was also time for questions from the audience. After a rather contentious question was raised by an attendee—which some other audience members loudly objected to—Messud delivered a stunning reply which soothed the tension in the room. The panel ended pleasantly with laughter, leading smoothly into a lovely book signing with all three authors.
My experience at this year’s Blue Metropolis was insightful, striking, and compelling. Outside of the structured events themselves, in the halls I struck up conversations with various writers, academics, comedians, artists, and other enthusiastic readers. I met lovely and interesting people, and couldn’t help but purchase several books from the Paragraphe Books pop-up store for myself, including Rushdie’s Knife and García Elizondo’s Last Date in El Zapotal. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the lively atmosphere of the so-called “city of the imagination,” and I am already clearing my schedule for the 2026 iteration of the Blue Met.
