Sunday's Word On The Street festival In Toronto was the best I've attended in recent years, despite the cold and intermittently drizzly weather. Toronto Star columnist Joe Fiorito nearly made my cry reading from Union Station, his nonfiction book of stories about the city other Canadians love to hate. Then it was off to a panel discussion called Film Hour: From Page To Screen with the fantastic Barbara Gowdy and a fun reading and Q & A from Leah McLaren (Continuity Girl).

I almost missed Albert Schultz in the PEN tent by showing up at the wrong place and had to dart frantically across Queen's Park searching for the correct tent (and of course they all look identical!). But I made it and The artistic director of The Soulpepper Theatre performed a killer reading of Lynn Coady's essay, On Behaving Badly, (a writerly rebellion) which had me doubled over with laughter. The Writing Life anthology also includes essays by Margart Atwood, Alistair MacLeod, Rohinton Mistry (and too many writers to name). Proceeds from the volume go to PEN Canada.

With so many overlapping readings and dicussions I was only able to catch a fraction of the events I was interested in in but it was surprisingly cool to see Margaret Atwood's LongPen in action as she spoke live from Waterstones bookstore in Edinburgh. With chewing gum that prevents tooth decay and the possibility of an invisibility cloak on the horizon I'm beginning to suspect that I might be living inside a sci-fi novel.