3-Day Novel Contest
The 3-Day Novel Contest was an Edmonton thing. And I thought that was pretty cool. As an Edmonton writer it felt really good to be involved in the city that way.
I was walking through a parking lot just off Whyte Avenue, behind Rosie’s, and I saw this huge pink ambulance with things about books painted all over it. And I was like, “I really need to meet whoever owns that.” So I basically staked it out. Well, I was doing other stuff in the neighbourhood anyway but I kept an eye on the ambulance. And when I saw somebody heading for it, I asked if that was his vehicle. And he said yes. I asked him about it and he said that the state of writing in Canada was in a dire emergency and he needed to save it, so he’d gone across the country staging these poetry events and book writing contests, that sort of thing, and he’d painted up the ambulance himself and now he was a producer for BookTelevision. And I said okay, I’m a Canadian writer, here’s my information. And then he got in touch with me about the 3-Day Novel Contest.
It happened in the Chapters on Calgary Trail. We stayed there for the entire three days, 12 of us, and we all got to sleep in this one room with crappy bunk beds. Some of us snored. We did the best we could.
Being involved with that was so much fun. People flew in from Toronto and Vancouver for that, but for me it was my home town. The 3-Day Novel Contest was an Edmonton thing. And I thought that was pretty cool. It felt really good to be involved in the city that way.
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Gayleen Froese
Gayleen Froese is a writer, musician and former radio personality. Her first novel, Touch, was published in 2005 by Edmonton’s NeWest Press. Its sequel, Grayling Cross, is slated for release in 2010. She's also released three albums of music, the first of which, Obituary, won an Undiscovered Artist Award from CBC Radio.
