Auberge du Grand Fleuve, Métis-sur-Mer
This French couple declared the food they had at the Auberge du Grand fleuve (131, rue Principale, Métis-sur-Mer), the best they'd had in Quebec.
Photo: Linda Leith

In a press interview earlier this month with journalist Joseph Elfassi on my publishing house and on Blue Metropolis, I referred to the festival as the Sugar Sammy of literature.
Sugar Sammy is a Montreal comedian who has been making a splash with his show You're gonna rire, in which he mixes French and English and a couple of other languages, as well, evidently to great effect.
Well, the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival and its writers have been doing something along those lines for 14 years now, and the comparison grabbed the editor's attention so that it appears in the headline as Blue Metropolis Literary Festival the Sugar Sammy of Literature -- and not only in English but also in the French.
The 14th Festival takes place this year at the Hôtel OPUS on Sherbrooke at St. Laurent, and that's where I'll be launching the first books published by LLP as well as this online magazine, Salon .ll., in English and in French. This is the first Blue Met I have had no part in organizing, and I'm just happy there is such a great context for me to stage a literary event in both languages.
You can find details of the festival programme on the Blue Metropolis website here.
© Linda Leith 2012
This French couple declared the food they had at the Auberge du Grand fleuve (131, rue Principale, Métis-sur-Mer), the best they'd had in Quebec.
Photo: Linda Leith

Why a town becomes a gathering place of the literati is a subject for literary histories. In Rye’s case, it may well have been the seductions of the past, which certainly seduced Henry James.
Conduit Street, Rye

I had read Andrew Lang’s collections of fairy tales as a child and later as an adult. In university I also read David Hume’s philosophy, which provided a pathway out of dingles and a ladder out of wells of wishful thinking. Through fantasy or fact, the geography of dramatic basalt rock formations, covered in green, obviously came into being through the forces of eons for the sole purpose of providing dancing venues under moonlight and feeding our insatiable need for stories.
Ingrid Bejerman, former director of the renowned Julio Cortázar Latin American Chair, writes about her relationship with the recently deceased Mexican writer and some of the stories his friends remember him by.

Photo: Dulce Ma. Zuniga