Being the ridiculously huge nerd that I am, the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival is always a highlight of my autumn. Maybe it's something about the smell of fall, which I equate simultaneously with wet foliage and new books. Something about going back to school, sharpened pencils, ringing in a whole new year of academia. The 20-year-old Writers & Readers Fest is something like the knee socks to my plaid kilt and sweater vest. Committed to supporting literacy and exposing Canadian authors, the Fest is held on Granville Island from the 16th to the 21st of October.

Continue reading for the highlights I've already cursived into my shiny red agenda...

October is a wonderful time for theatre in Vancouver (if there is such a thing as a 'wonderful time for theatre in Vancouver'). Our mega-theatres roll out their seasons, and new companies crawl out of the woodwork. The latest to join the pack is PikeFly Theatre, a "new live performance group" whose mandate is risky, unconventional theatre. They embrace that fully with their inaugural production of Alan Bowne's Beirut, currently playing at Studio 16.

Beirut , Bowne's love-letter to New York and apocalyptic vision of a world split by AIDS (Bowne himself succumbed to the disease in 1989), is a very risky play. Risky because of the physical and emotional demands it puts on its two leads - Torch (Adam Lolacher), an exiled "positive," and Blue (Mylene Dinh-Robic), his "negative" girlfriend - and risky because it is very much a time-capsule piece, accurately but distantly portraying the 80's AIDS hysteria. This is war-zone New York, a place where "positives" are quarantined in tenement-like squalor, subject to daily inspections for lesions and forbidden from contact with "negatives". Into this hell slips Blue, a "negative" who is willing to trade her empty, static existence for a life - and probable death - with Torch.

As Simon has duitifully reported, this year's Vancouver International Fringe Festival has officially come to a close. If you didn't manage to make it to any shows, you should feel both theatrically deprived and horribly guilty.

However, you're lucky: rather than wallowing in that guilt, you can head over to the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island and check out the Pick of the Fringe shows - highlights of this year's Fringe selected by a commitee of theatre professionals from Vancouver. Tickets are still cheap (only $15 a pop) and for those of you intimidated by the guesswork involved in navigating the original 70+ shows, they've made it into a sort of "shooting the theatrical fish in a barrel" situation. Basically, you can't lose.

This year's Pick shows are all original solo pieces, touching on wildly different subject matter. Continue reading for brief snapshots of what you'll see...

As the Vancouver International Fringe Festival trucks on into its fifth day, bogged down with ominous adjectives like "controversy-plauged" and "scandal-ridden," it's about time we focused on what the Fringe is all about: the performers.

So, without further ado, here are some brief snippets of the shows I've been able to catch so far, and those that are on my radar for future viewing:

Chicago singer-songwriter Andrew Bird has been making lush, brilliant music for far too long to still be languishing in partial obscurity. In a career as varied as it is lengthy (including a stint with 90's swing revival band Squirrel Nut Zippers), he has produced 8 full-length EP's and 3 live albums, free-wheeling through musical genres from stomping zydeco to Civil War-era folk to settle somewhat uncomfortably with other indie-rock fairy-tailing linguists such as The Decemberists. Unlike the standard awkward-boy rockers of our day, however, he's mastered the violin and glockenspiel and mixes these with his breath-taking whistling skills and warbly vocals, which he records and loops all together during his live shows to create a modern version of the one-man band. When I saw him on my tiny college stage last November, he was jet-lagged and spent most of the performance looking completely bewildered. Absent was the witty banter of many live performers, but he compensated with startling musicality and sprawling lyrics that went straight to my heartstrings. We invited him to an after-party later; he graciously accepted and spent the entirety of the night standing wide-eyed and silent in a corner. I fell deeply in love.

Bird plays at Richards on Richards this Saturday, September 1st at 8:00pm in support of his latest album, Armchair Apocrypha (listen to "Scythian Empires" off this record and just try telling me you don't want to see him - I dare you). Presented by Sealed With A Kiss.

Photo coutesy of Kyle Dean Reinford on Flickr.

Vancouver-based Headlines Theatre has been creating powerful socially-conscious theatre for 26 years. Based on the principals of Theatre of the Oppressed, a form of theatre/protest/therapy that is the brainchild of Brazilian politician-cum-director Augusto Boal, Headlines uses theatre as way to help struggling communities gain a greater understanding of the issues plaguing them and, in that understanding, to find an inner empowerment. Their most recent project, Meth, examined the roots of addiction and the effect addiction has on communities. They're currently preparing for 2 Degrees of Adaptation, taking on that hot button issue of global warming.

David Diamond has been heading up Headlines since its inception in 1981. He is also the author of "Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue," which he will be debuting at a free lecture tonight, Thursday at 8:30pm at the Westin Bayshore as part of the annual American Alliance for Theatre and Education conference.