Alma Lee, who had been the first head of the Writers’ Union of Canada, died on Friday at age 84.Allan Lee
In the aftermath of Vancouver’s wildly successful Expo 86 world’s fair, Alma Lee got the idea that the city ought to be showcasing Canadian writers in a setting where they could meet the readers who devour their words. Edinburgh, where she was born and raised, had launched its dynamic book festival in 1983.
Ms. Lee, who had been the first head of the Writers’ Union of Canada in the 1970s, was friends with Canadian literature’s big names and rising stars. So, when planning her inaugural festival in 1988, she approached the Toronto novelist Timothy Findley with an invitation. “I knew if he said yes, we were on the right track,” she told the seniors’ magazine Inspired last September. He instantly agreed to appear.
In the years that followed, the Vancouver Writers Fest grew into a literary lollapalooza, an enduring delight to the world’s writers and their fans every October. Leslie Hurtig, the festival’s current artistic director, credits the woman who got it going and ran it for 18 years. Anything Ms. Lee works on is “of high quality, so right from the very start, I think, publishers understood that if they sent authors this way… they’d be treated well and … programmed smartly,” Ms. Hurtig told the Vancouver-based alternative weekly newspaper The Georgia Straight in 2023.
Ms. Lee, who died late Friday in Vancouver, at the age of 84, was “a small, determined woman who sounded very Scottish,” her friend Lorna Crozier, the B.C.-based poet and memoirist, recalled.
Her bold vision still shines at the week-long celebration of the written word, even though she left it in 2005. Last October, its 36th iteration drew 28,000 people to hear 150 authors at more than 100 reasonably priced events. The event named for her – the Alma Lee Opening Night Event – featured Ann Cleeves, the prolific British crime writer whose books inspired the TV series Shetland and others.
Appreciation: Alma Lee, who founded Vancouver Writers Fest, dies at 84
Siting the festival on Granville Island was a masterstroke on the part of Ms. Lee and co-founder Lorenz von Fersen, a City of Vancouver cultural planner. After the Granville Island Public Market opened there in 1979, it morphed from an industrial zone into a tourist mecca. It has a friendly, comfortable vibe and the half-dozen performance spaces where writers appear can easily be reached on foot. The literary stars stay at the Granville Island Hotel and relax together in its hospitality suite.
Ms. Crozier and her late husband, writer Patrick Lane, appeared at the festival every time Ms. Lee invited them. She was “a very warm, very caring woman, and passionate about literature,” said the Saskatchewan-born author of a score of poetry collections and two memoirs. Noting that Ms. Lee enjoyed a good laugh, Ms. Crozier remembers her always being in the hospitality suite “with many of us … and almost shut it down, which meant the wee hours of the morning.”
Although the festival has become larger and more sophisticated with each passing year, even at the beginning “it had a character of its own, and star power,” Ms. Crozier said. One of Ms. Lee’s signature touches was to present creators of high art alongside crime writers and others whose popular books are sometimes described as guilty pleasures. As Denise Ryan wrote in The Vancouver Sun in 2002, a typical festival lineup includes “a bestseller like Maeve Binchy or a pop culture darling like Candace Bushnell, as well as writers like Michael Ondaatje or Salman Rushdie.”
Another of her innovations was to make sure festival events weren’t static. Rather than have writers stand at lecterns, she devised multi-author happenings garnished with music, dance, comedy and even baked goods. The Afternoon Tea, the Sunday Brunch, the Poetry Bash and the Literary Cabaret – which continue to be hot tickets – were her ideas. The Lit Cab, as it is known, is an extravaganza at which six to eight writers read while a band plays music that suits and deepens the mood of each swatch of literature. For years, that band was Poetic License, led by the percussionist Salvador (Sal) Ferreras. The tradition continues, with a modification. In 2023, a delightfully named ensemble, Benjamin Millman and the Oxymorons, became the Lit Cab’s band.
Ms. Lee also left her mark on the festival by making children’s programming a key element. Cleverly planned daytime events lure teachers to bring their classes out to meet the kids’ literary heroes – authors like Kenneth Oppel, Marie-Louise Gay and Gordon Korman. In 2004, when Ms. Lee was named a member of the Order of Canada, the citation called the festival’s youth offerings “the largest children’s literary event in Canada.”
Yet not every project she tackled took off. After passing the Writers Fest’s reins to Hal Wake, she strove to have Vancouver named a UNESCO City of Literature. That designation brings prestige while ensuring consumers of literature in the city a level of quality. Ms. Lee’s bid for the designation, submitted in 2008, pointed to Vancouver’s many writers, publishing houses, literary magazines, book prizes and, of course, its festival. But, although she gave it her all, her bid didn’t win. As for partial successes, Ms. Lee yearned to produce an annual crime fiction festival, and had a bold name for it: Cuffed. The authors Linwood Barclay and C.C. (Chris) Humphreys appeared when it debuted in March, 2016, but it didn’t come back.
Still, she is remembered for her organizational skills and persistence in lobbying and fundraising. “I’m not afraid to ask people for money. I just raised $160,000 for the Carol Shields Prize [for Fiction],” she told the reporter John Thomson in Inspired. Honours that have come her way include the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals and an honorary doctorate of letters from Simon Fraser University.
She was born on May 4, 1940. As a girl, she was Alma Stark – no middle name. She had an older brother, Graham, and a younger brother, Gordon. Their father, Allan Stark, served in both world wars. His peacetime line of work could not have been more Scottish: He made bagpipes, “which wasn’t a very lucrative profession,” Ms. Lee told me in late January. “But he made them, he played them, he taught other people to play them.” Her mother, Margaret (Peggy) Stark (née Robertson), had to help fatten the family’s finances. “She became a barmaid. She was actually the perfect person for that,” Ms. Lee said, “because she was so outgoing and funny.” For a while, Peggy Stark worked at Deacon Brodies Tavern on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. It is named for Deacon William Brodie, an 18th-century carpenter and town councillor by day and a criminal by night. Thus, he was an inspiration for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Robert Louis Stevenson novella.
Allan Stark began taking Alma to the library on Friday afternoons when she was five. They did this “ever after, for years on end,” she told the Vancouver Sun’s John Mackie in 1997. At 19, she married a young man named David Lee who was a sound mixer on feature films. Seeking new experiences, the couple immigrated to Canada in 1967, settling in Toronto. Mr. Lee, who died in 2008, reached the heights of his field. In 2003, he and two colleagues shared an Academy Award for their work on the movie Chicago.
The Lees had two sons in quick succession but divorced after 18 years together. Ms. Lee and the boys moved to Vancouver in 1984. The Lee brothers recently entered their 60s. Kenneth Lee is a retired sound mixer in Glasgow. Allan Lee, a film editor, lives in Vancouver. In fact, he has a suite in the same apartment building where Ms. Lee lived and so was able to come to her aid quickly when she had a bad fall last November. On Jan. 25 of this year, when a less serious fall had precipitated another hospital stay for her, the Lee brothers, knowing she would want to mark Burns Night, brought traditional Scottish neeps and tatties (mashed rutabagas and potatoes) along with haggis to her bedside.
She leaves her brother, Graham, her two sons and two adult granddaughters.
Ms. Lee used to bridle when people, on discovering how richly stimulating her writers’ festival was, asked what she did the rest of the year. Clearly, they didn’t get that magicking a week-long literary extravaganza into existence takes 51 gritty weeks of organizing. After trying out various responses, she settled on a good one: “I polish my wand.”
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