The young Hindi couple love deeply. They are unaware of me and wouldn’t care in any case; even, I suppose, if I stood and mocked their impetuous infatuation or their daylight groping.

They share one chair. They are alone in this universe. The dark girl glances furtively around, she feels the hand of her lover under her sweater and knows she should be embarrassed but she can’t think to be.

The table changes occupants.

An older couple take the place of the lovers. They talk quickly and awkwardly about their house keeping habits. She has a voice on the doorsill of shrill. They are getting to know one another and I wish they would have done this some other place. Now they talk of fabric and car interiors.

He wonders about the years ahead as he listens to this nervous nasal voice prattle on about how bad she is at curling. He weighs his loneliness against this future and stays on. And now he finds himself encouraging a conversation about the length of shirt sleeves. She listens with the side of her face and questions her own investment.

The whole thing rises in volume and inanity and I prepare to leave. Yet…I know these two have a story, have felt passion, have cried during a sunrise and a birth, have felt the human predicament of death and loss. They too long for happiness. And they know something the young lovers don’t–they know about a heart in conflict with itself.

Writers write…still believing–to paraphrase Elie Wiesel–in the dream that a word rightly written takes on the power of a deed.

This past weekend, at my first Canadian Authors Association conference, I was brought into contact with these dreamers. To a person, from seers to pop-pundits, these writers still believe that that “thousand-words-worth” a picture may elicit, will still always take you to the heart of what a picture cannot help but conceal. And today, in a world gone media-graphic, the counter weight of this faith is culturally imperative. Why? So we can imagine in contour and save ourselves from the great flattening.

Hats off to these hope-ers. And next time you’re in, say, Audreys Books, pick up a book by a national or local author.

A highlight, among the many highlights, was listening to the winning CAA authors read from their work. The Literary Award winners were: poet Asa Boxer  for The Mechanical Bird, dramatist Colleen Murphy – for The December Man, Mark Haroun won the Emerging Writer Award, history writer Robert Wright for Three Nights in Havana, and fiction writer Paulette Giles for Stormy Weather.