Wordfest SHOW FORMATS
The Way We… (Storytelling Format)
After you tell your story, the show host will ask you a question about your story and a question about your book. (Listen to the audio samples below from 2024’s The Way We… Wear.) This showcase is followed by book signing, and it’s our biggest selling event of the festival.
We recognize that telling a story can be daunting. You were chosen for this format because we believe in you and know you’re ready to share something special. The audience is firmly in your corner: they are ready to support you, both on stage and then afterward in the signing line. We create a theatrical backdrop but can also show high-res visuals if they’ll add to your story. We’ll just need them in advance.
Please reach out to Shelley Youngblut (syoungblut@wordfest.com) if you’d like to talk through how best to approach this opportunity.
The Way We… is Wordfest’s most popular original format, in which each writer has 7 minutes to share a story on a theme (which you are encouraged to interpret laterally and not literally). The best stories are anecdotal (and NOT a reading from your book). Think of it as our version of The Moth. As you will discover through the sample audio clips below, the power of this showcase lies in the authenticity, variation in tone, and unpredictability of how each author chooses to approach the theme.
After you tell your story, the show host will ask you a question about your story and a question about your book. (Listen to the audio samples below from 2024’s The Way We… Wear.) This showcase is followed by book signing, and it’s our biggest selling event of the festival.
We recognize that telling a story can be daunting. You were chosen for this format because we believe in you and know you’re ready to share something special. The audience is firmly in your corner: they are ready to support you, both on stage and then afterward in the signing line. We create a theatrical backdrop but can also show high-res visuals if they’ll add to your story. We’ll just need them by Oct. 1 so that everything runs smoothly during the show.
Audio samples from The Way We… Wear
Sample Show Themes
The Way We… Wear
The Way We… Talk About Nature
The Way We… Talk About Animals
The Way We… Hex the Patriarchy
The Way We… Unnerve Ourselves
The Way We… Talk About Monsters
The Way We… Navigate
The Way We… Talk About Place
The Way We… Calgary’d
Big Generous Brains (multi-media)
Wordfest is known for the theatricality of our shows, which plays a big part in attracting younger audiences and full houses. If you’re invited to take part in our Big Generous Brains format, we’re hoping you can share any music, visuals, films, people or TV shows that inspire you and your work. We will then find the visuals, music or short video clips to show during your event. It makes for a very lively experience.
Examples:
- Emma Donoghue: a Sinead O’Connor song, the film I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing, and the landscape that inspired her novel Haven.
- E. Jean Carroll: the outfits she wore to court, her famous magazine articles
- Patrick Radden Keefe: The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins.
- Nita Prose: the Mexican telenovela that she starred in and how Margaret Laurence inspired her new book.
- Stephen Graham Jones: how seeing Scream turned him into a writer and his love of Bob Seger’s Night Moves
- David A. Robertson: the influence of John Samson and Reservation Dogs.
After you tell your story, the show host will ask you a question about your story and a question about your book. (Listen to the audio samples below from 2024’s The Way We… Wear.) This showcase is followed by book signing, and it’s our biggest selling event of the festival.
We recognize that telling a story can be daunting. You were chosen for this format because we believe in you and know you’re ready to share something special. The audience is firmly in your corner: they are ready to support you, both on stage and then afterward in the signing line. We create a theatrical backdrop but can also show high-res visuals if they’ll add to your story. We’ll just need them in advance.
Please reach out to Shelley Youngblut (syoungblut@wordfest.com) if you’d like to talk through how best to approach this opportunity.
Literary Death Match
Literary Death Match, co-created by Adrian Todd Zuniga, marries the literary and performative aspects of Def Poetry Jam, rapier-witted quips of American Idol’s judging (without any meanness), and the hilarity of Double Dare.
Each episode of this competitive, humour-centric reading series features a thrilling mix of four authors who perform their most electric writing in five minutes or less before a lively audience and a panel of three all-star judges. After each pair of readings, the judges—focused on literary merit, performance and intangibles—take turns spouting hilarious, off-the-wall commentary about each story, then select their favorite to advance to the finals.
The two finalists then compete in the Literary Death Match finale, which trades in the show’s literary sensibility for an absurd and comical climax to determine who takes home the Literary Death Match crown.
It may sound like a circus—and that’s half the point. Literary Death Match is passionate about inspecting new and innovative ways to present text off the page, and the most fascinating part about the LDM is how seriously attentive the audience is during each reading. We’ve called this the great literary ruse: an audacious and inviting title, a harebrained finale, but in-between the judging creates a relationship with the viewer as a judge themselves.
Literary Death Match has been performed all over the world, with some of Adrian’s favourite shows taking place on Wordfest’s stages in Calgary. Click here to learn more.
Past Shows
2025: After a masterpiece in 2024, Literary Death Match returned to Calgary even stronger, once again teaming up with the wonder of Wordfest for a sell-out night that saw Gabrielle Drolet narrowly topple co-finalist Jon Hickey in a down-to-the-wire Author Spelling Bee finale.
2024: Starring Shashi Bhat, JD Derbyshire, Catherine Hernandez & Alice Winn, with judges Roddy Doyle, Alice Kuipers, Heather O’Neill & Nita Prose.
2019: Youth authors who were either professional “couples” (Cale Atkinson and Ashley Spires) or professional and actual couples (Morgan Baden and Barry Lyga) performed their most electrifying seven-minute sets in front of an all-star judging panel: Alice Kuipers, Anakana Schofield, and Joshua Whitehead
2018: Dave Bidini, Ali Bryan, Benjamin Hertwig, and Joshua Whitehead performed their most electric passages before an expert judging panel made up of Patrick Weekes, Jordan Tannahill, and Alice Kuipers, 2017’s “take no prisoners” champ.
2017: Starring Ben Clanton, Susan Juby, Wesley King, Alice Kuipers, Bill Richardson & Esta Spalding.
2016: Starring Jillian Christmas, C.c. Humphreys, Mark Leiren-Young, Kenneth Oppel, Aaron Paquette, Alissa York, and Andi Zeisler.