Will Ferguson brings 30 years of travel writing to LitFest as industry reckons with changing forms

Will Ferguson has spent three decades dispatching from around the world — filing stories to ELLE Canada, Alberta Views, the CBC — but the career that once sustained writers through books and magazine work has largely collapsed. At LitFest next week, Ferguson will talk about that collapse and what travel writing has become.

The festival runs October 14–18 at various downtown spots, anchoring Edmonton's literary calendar for 20 years. Ferguson's new collection, "Meanwhile, Back in Nokomis: Tales from Canada and Elsewhere", gathers his travel writing, Canadian reflections, and pieces from abroad. He'll discuss it with local author Natasha Deen.

"You know, it used to be a very viable career as a writer," Ferguson said of travel writing. "You could make a good living just travelling to places, writing about it. From a writer's point of view it's kind of collapsed." He attributes the shift to internet content, social media, and YouTube — outlets that produce vast quantities of travel footage but rarely the deep dives that authors like Paul Theroux or Eric Newby once brought to the form.

What Ferguson wants to preserve is the subjective eye: the impression of a place filtered through one person's sensibility. "If you and I both went to Rosebud, Alberta, on the same day, went to the same place, we would write totally different essays about it," he said. "That's what I like about travel memoir — it's a place seen through someone's point of view."

LitFest opens with Trina Moyles discussing "Black Bear", her memoir of loss and time in Alberta's boreal forest. The festival brings together nearly 30 events, including Vivek Shraya and Kai Cheng Thom discussing their new books, "The Hystericals" and "The Shapeshifter's Guide to Gym Class". Poet Alice Major, Edmonton's first poet laureate, will present "Triangularity", exploring how ideas and things fit together.

Two book launches run back-to-back: Kathryn Lennon's "Duckweed", examining roots and wayfinding, and Nisha Patel's "For the Record", a book-length poem with one word for each Albertan who died from COVID-19 — more than 7,000 as of January.

LitFest Executive Director Ellen Kartz noticed a strong thematic thread across the programming: identity. "I noticed that there was a lot of work that was being done around the idea of identity and what it is that, the ways that we create our own individual identities, whether it's me as a writer, as a festival director, as an Edmontonian, Albertan, Canadian," Kartz said. "When you look at Nisha's book, it's so interesting because it's reflective of what it was like in Alberta through COVID."