For the first two months of this year, city residents have had the chance to meet and eat with local authors every week at the Main branch of the Ottawa Public Library.
The library has been hosting a lunch literary reading series since the beginning of January.
No registration is required and admission e is free, but books are sold at the door for tthe more enthusiastic bookworms.
Michael Murphy, one of the organizers of the program, hopes that it will attract both regular library users as well as “draw someone in that perhaps didn’t think of the library as a destination to come to.”
So far, the lunch hour program has mostly attracted the fans of the featured authors.
Mary Jane Maffini is the author of three mystery series each with an amateur female sleuth as their protagonist.
At the reading on Feb. 13, Maffini read excerpts from her writing and signed copies of her many books.
Maffini admits that writing is a solitary activity so she enjoyed the chance to meet her audience and test her jokes.
The readings take place in the library’s 200-person auditorium, but the underground venue seems small when people are scattered about eating their lunch.
At the end of the reading, some of the audience got books signed and stayed to chat with the author while other participants rushed to get back to work.
Maffini says that the time and place make it more convenient for people who are downtown to come to the library, letting people truly take advantage of their lunch hour.
“I enjoyed meeting the other people, we all have something in common,” said Lesley Jane Proctor, an audience member.
Proctor is a loyal Maffini fan and admits she would only attend a reading series that features a fiction writer.
The reading series has already hosted writers such as Elizabeth Hay and Charles de Lint.
The last two readings will feature John Metcalfe with Shut Up, He Explained: A Literary Memoir and Barbara Fradkin with her novel Dream Chasers.
The reading series and others like it offer readers the chance to discover new Canadian writers which Maffini says is important in order to compete with popular British and American writers.
“We have our stories to tell too,” says Maffini.
As a Canadian writer, she has to gear her books towards an American audience to sell in the U.S. but at the same time wants to include Canadian settings and culture.
Unlike some other Canadian writers, Maffini has successfully managed to balance these two interests, building a strong fan base on both sides of the border.
She has received the Derrick Murdoch award from Crime Writers of Canada along with many other nominations and wins for other awards.
Murphy admits that it is has been hard for them to attract good crowds to similar events in the past, they found that they need popular authors to get a large audience.
Maffini says she loves libraries and was happy for the chance to give back to the community by coming to talk about mystery writing.
She says she would have liked to attend every session. “It’s wonderful for readers, and wonderful for writers.”
Murphy says the library is entertaining the possibility of doing another series like the current one in the fall. Information about the lunch reading series and other events at the library can be found in the library’s in-house publication, Preview.