Kate Heartfield’s relationship with the Ottawa International Writers Festival (OIWF) began about 25 years ago when she was purely a spectator. It took only five years for her to begin hosting events. For a period, she was even a member of the board.
“It was a part of the year that opened up my world and my mind,” Heartfield says. “It really is a festival of ideas.”
The 2023 OIWF runs from October 25 to 29, and coming full circle, Heartfield will be on a panel speaking about her book, The Valkyrie, on October 29.
“My event is called ‘Love’s Labour’,” she says. “It’s going to be hosted by Lucy van Oldenbarneveld, who’s fabulous, and the three panelists are me, Emma Donoghue, and Eva Crocker.”
Kate Heartfield. Photo: Robert de Wit.
“Emma’s book is this wonderful novel, Learn by Heart, which is about Anne Lister and Eliza Raine, two early 19th-century women who were trailblazers in many ways, and Eva’s book is about a woman living in Montreal during lockdown. Mine is about two figures out of mythology set in the 5th century in what is now Germany, so at the crumbling of the Roman empire when Attila the Hun [was] coming into the area.”
The Valkyrie “focuses on two characters that appear in several different stories”: Brynhild and Gudrun, “a warrior woman and the queen of her kingdom,” whose rivalry was said to have fuelled a catastrophe. “It seemed strange to me that they would bring about the downfall of their kingdom based on a petty rivalry if there was not something else going on, so I set out to tell the story that might have been behind that.”
Heartfield further explains that for all three books featured on the panel, who tells the story is as important as the story itself.
“I think all three of us were quite conscious of voice and agency… What might these women’s lives have been like if they weren’t being told by men? It will be an interesting conversation in that way, that we have shared focus on the lives of women and on the loves of women, but we have three very different settings, three very different time periods.”
“Eva Crocker’s work is new to me, but I’ve been enjoying discovering it. And Emma Donoghue is actually a writer who has inspired me for decades. She’s a real hero of mine,” Heartfield says. “She has a wide oeuvre, but one of the things she comes back to a lot is asking readers to look again at the role of women and particularly queer women in history.”
Encouraging the reader to look again is something Heartfield does as well: “We both share a real curiosity about history and a desire to see the stories that are sometimes obscured. So that’s something that this conversation is going to centre on, I think.”
When I ask Heartfield about her connection to Ottawa, she says, “I can’t even really separate the writer that I am today from this city because it’s had such a huge influence on my life.”
Heartfield is excited about this year’s festival: “I’m hoping to see Waubgeshig Rice. Moon of the Crusted Snow was a landmark in Canadian fiction in a lot of ways. It recast the way that science fiction looks at post-apocalyptic literature, and it recast a lot of how Canada sees itself. [The book is] just a fabulous, thrilling, edge-of-your seat novel. So, I’m a big fan of Waub Rice and his book. I have Moon of the Turning Leaves, and I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to it.”
Kate is sure to tell me that the festival has something for everyone. “Whatever kind of storytelling you like or whatever you’re interested in from a non-fiction perspective, it’s worth checking out.”
Find out more and get tickets to Love’s Labour and other events at the Ottawa International Writers Festival website.
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