QWF Awards

Went to the QWF Awards last night and was happy to see two of my favourite books from 2007 win awards – Heather O’Neill’s “Lullabies for Little Criminals” and Neil Smith’s “Bang Crunch”. The book nominees read excerpts from their novels while Sherwin Tija quickly sketched accompanying drawings on Illustrator (projected on a screen onstage). It worked well and one of the nicer moments was when Heather O’Neill read a very short excerpt from her book. The passage was about first kisses – the adult kind of first kiss – where she compares the feeling to a game of Russian Roulette, and from a series of scribbles the image that came together was the barrel of a gun loaded with heart shaped bullets.

But oof, while $3 wine may seem like a good idea at the time, it’s definitely not. A sobering walk home in the beginnings of the first snowstorm of the year wasn’t much help either.