As part of 49th Shelf's #Fest2Fest, Julie Wilson is speaking with authors across the country (and abroad) who are appearing at literary festivals to promote their latest books.

For all our #Fest2Fest updates, bookmark www.49thshelf.com/Festivals.

Billie Livingston will appear at Calgary's WordFest October 13 and 14, 2012. For all details, go here. This year's festival runs October 9-14, 2012.

Julie (also appearing at WordFest to promote Seen Reading) chatted with Billie about her Giller Prize-longlisted novel One Good Hustle (Random House, 2012) while Billie was in Toronto this summer.

Lots of hustle talk—the act of extracting more than just cash from people but their sense of safety in the world (and, yes, a scheme or two)—constructing characters based on real people—the act of extracting just what you need to allow the characters to "shake their emotional tail feathers"—not telling the reader how to feel, and how Billie's own relationship with her hustler father might have been different if she'd been a boy.

Enjoy the chat! (And the background music. You'll hear a few jumps with edits. Try to keep the beat!)

About the book: The child of two con artists, 16-year-old Sammie Bell always prided herself on knowing the score. But now she finds herself backed into a corner. After a hustle gone dangerously wrong, her mother, Marlene, is sliding into an abyss of alcoholic depression, spending her days fantasizing aloud about death, a goal Sammie is tempted to help her accomplish. Horrified by the appeal of this, Sammie packs a bag and leaves her mother to her own devices.

With her father missing in action, she has nowhere else to go but the home of a friend with two parents who seem to actually love their daughter and who awkwardly try to extend some semblance of family to Sammie. Throughout a long summer of crisis among the normals, Sammie is torn between her longing for the approval of the con-man father she was named for and her desire for the "weird, spearmint-fresh feeling" of life in the straight world. Sammie wants to be normal but fears that where she comes from makes that beyond the realm of possibility.

One Good Hustle chronicles two months in Sammie Bell's struggle with her dread that she is somehow doomed genetically to be just another hustler.

About the author: Billie Livingston is a fiction writer, poet and sometime essayist who lives in Vancouver, B.C. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she grew up in Toronto and Vancouver, and has since lived in Tokyo, Hamburg, Munich and London, England. Her first employment was filling the dairy coolers in a Mac’s Milk. She went on to work varying lengths of time as a file clerk, receptionist, cocktail waitress, model, actor, chocolate sampler and booth host at a plumber’s convention.

One Good Hustle is Livingston's third novel. Cease to Blush was published in 2006. Her first, Going Down Swinging (2000), is told from the viewpoints of an alcoholic, downtrodden mother named Eilleen and her struggling daughter Grace. It was received as a brilliant debut, with one reviewer commenting: "Livingston succeeds gorgeously in capturing the messiness and unresolvable ambiguities of familial love. Her lovingly drawn, half-crazy characters always transcend a caseworker’s clichés." Livingston’s first book of poetry, The Chick at the Back of the Church (2001), was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award (for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman), and her award-winning short fiction has been published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.

Follow Billie Livingston: www.billielivingston.com | @BillieLiving

About WordFest: WordFest’s main event is a six-day literary festival that features upwards of 70 writers from the local, national and international stage. The Festival has approximately 60 separate events and attracts an audience of over 14,000. Some events also offer programming in multiple languages such as French and Spanish. Festival events take place across Calgary and in Banff through founding production partner, The Banff Centre.

Follow them on Twitter at @wordfesttweets.

Follow all festival happenings, and contribute your own, using the hashtag #wordfest2012.