Nicole Brossard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood are conferring with one of the festival organizers. It’s already past the hour and there’s a trickle of people still coming in. They are wondering about what language to use to present the duo. The presenter, it seems, is an anglophone. But Brossard shrugs it off, saying ”tout le monde parle les deux langues.” And so we do. And with that, the anglo presenter introduces a Francophone writer who in turn introduces her bilingual translator. They flip open the book and read.

It’s Fences in Breathing, Brossard’s most recent novel. She’s a Quebec institution, a lesbian icon, a maverick of experimental fiction. I’ve always found her work impenetrable and distracting. I wish there were more people here, more lesbians especially. Don’t those two tell their friends when they have events going on? But just stop right there because Fences in Breathing is the best title ever. I don’t know what it means and I don’t care. It’s one of those titles that’s lived inside some sort of protective carapace since the Mesozoic era until one day along came a brilliant translator who got fed up with the French title, La capture du sombre, and doesn’t care about the stuffy meaning either, just the music, and she conjures it up out of a hat whose bottom reaches through tens of thousands of years of bones.

There are a lot of bones down there, bones of ideas that form into words. Whether they become proper sentences or just run-on curses is a matter of evolution. We forget that everything, even our thoughts and the various shapes they take, have been winnowed through time tunnels, their gangly edges eroded and shaved off. Sometimes a new thought or word bursts through and creates a tunnel of its own, and all the little thoughts scamper after it squealing “me too! me too!”

Sunday afternoon might be an escorted trip through a new tunnel. At the 1 p.m. panel, The World Around Us, four writers will talk about the impact of evolutionary change: Tijs Goldschmidt (Darwin’s Dreampond – we killed an African lake), Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters – dying to eat), Taras Grescoe (Bottomfeeder - the fish are disappearing), Erika Ritter (The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath – the dog’s dead).

Each of these writers has gone into that pile of bones and come up with a piece of something huge: one’s got the nose, the other the tail and the others have body parts yet to be identified. Come to the panel and take a look at the elephant in the room.