Dina Del Bucchia, a Vancouver writer and poet whose first book is Coping With Emotions and Otters, reports from the Vancouver Writers' Festival, where she attended an event featuring Wayne Grady, Rachel Kushner, and Cathy Marie Buchanan. In all three writers' latest works, art is a preoccupation and serves to highlight other elements in the cultures in which the books take place. 

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The always lovely Bill Richardson charmed audience and authors as he took us through the ekphrasis of Art Begets Art, an event at the Vancouver Writers’ Festival that brought together three writers whose current novels are inspired by forms of art: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers has the New York art world of the 70s, Wayne Grady’s Emancipation Day features a musician who hides who he really is, and Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel The Painted Girls is about a young dancer who inspired Degas’ Little Dancer Aged 14.

Though art was the unifying factor, personal inspirations were significant to the creation of these novels as well. Grady’s Emancipation Day was inspired by his discovery that his father was not of Irish descent but black. Buchanan was a dancer before she was a novelist. Kushner fell in with visual artists and has been writing about art for many years.

Alongside The Flamethrowers’ art world is civil unrest in 1970s Italy and a female protagonist who is undermined by art-world men. The ballet girls in Buchanan’s novel hope their art will elevate them beyond the laundries, even if they’re selling their bodies in various ways. For her it’s art, or a harsh alternative. Grady’s novel has a black musician as its protagonist, but his musical preferences are white big bands.

The ways oppression and bigotry, misogyny, and poverty come to inspire both the characters in these novels, and the writers who’ve created them is fascinating. Art often comes from the fringes, corners people are forced into as they don’t conform.

Grady said writers should not necessarily write what they know, but write what they want to know. Buchanan sees Degas’ model and young ballerina as someone who seeks to escape the gutter. Kushner writes about the art world with reverence and relishes in the big personalities of visual artists. All of these writers show art as teacher, art as guiding force, and art as something that enriches lives.