On November 10th, 2025, Madeleine Thien will deliver “What is it to Imagine?” as the annual E. J. Pratt Lecture, a series hosted by Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. In some ways I’ve spoiled the lecture’s future aliveness for myself by reading it ahead of time, so I won’t do the same here beyond marveling at the intricacy and range of the talk, of naming, of the various ways to inhabit a character when writing, of saints and paintings, and the nesting dolls of images inside texts inside memories that gives the reader an incredibly generous entry into the interiority of Thien’s writing life. 

But even though I’ve read the text multiple times, I know I will savour the being there and the voice, the performance and communal, the cross section of time come and gone and the attention it requires. The lecture is not exactly anti-algorithimic, but it does resist through its embodiment, of giver and audience, uncaptured and left on the air. 

So what to make then of a book of lectures? The E.J. Pratt Lectures 1968-2025 (Memorial University Press and Breakwater Books) collects an impressive array of thinkers that have spoken at the lecture series, named after Pratt, who born in Western Bay, Newfoundland and who was a three-time Governor General’s Award winner for his poetry; Pratt then became a leading professor at the University of Toronto for over three decades. The collection begins with one of Pratt’s former students, Northrop Frye’s “Silence in the Sea,” and includes contributions from such important thinkers as Nobel Prize winning poet and playwright Seamus Heaney, David Lodge, Linda Hutcheon, Stan Dragland, Patrick O’Flaherty, George Elliot Clarke, Anne Carson, and a previously unpublished 1990 lecture by Ursula K. Le Guin. Through the book, the reader will see the series morph from a more academic focus to a writerly one; at the beginning of this collection of lectures, the scholar led the audience into the meaning of the works; in later lectures, the writer themselves do that work.

Editor Andrew Loman, who also provides the introduction to the text, pulls at the privacy of the lecture that is maintained in its transcription, from page to reader, that keeps the intimacy of the originary event; the reader is tasked with bringing the lecture back alive, and staging it in the theatre of the reading mind. The spoken-ness of the texts stay vibrant and from that energy, the success of this book stems from the many voices it collects. This breadth and scope, wide and deep, encourages an out-of-order reading of the text, a hopping from talk to talk based on a reader’s own curiosity and the throughlines woven between the texts. One can follow one strand granting a cross-section of the making of and scholarship about Canadian Literature; another follows the localities and histories of Newfoundland and Labrador and its literature and writers; another traces the politics of the making of a Canadian Literature, the stakes and the absences in such formations. 

My path was through Thien’s talk, Carson’s “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” (2016), and Le Guin’s “Voice-Text” (1990). While another version of Carson’s lecture can be found on Youtube, and the performance is a delight to watch and listen to on the screen (despite the interruptions of ads and the sidebar promoting my next video), I preferred the text, in particular in constellation with Le Guin’s and Thien’s. The triangulation of the three lectures grounds the reader in the ephemeral, the indeterminate of speaking and listening, the cloud letters forming and blowing past on the wind, the sprouting of characters and stories from a writer’s mind. All three require the acknowledgement that a lecture straddles the performance and the script: the play of Carson’s essay, where she casts herself as the sky itself, then makes a week of multilingual autobiography, resting on Sunday; Le Guin’s framework,”a piece [that] is written, but written to be spoken, as a talk, a performance” (51), then strikes at the place that imagination and the oral generates in relation to the historical privilege and power of literacy and writing, all the while speaking to the contemporary moment of computational writing and Generative AI, worth quoting in full here:

Speech is noise. To the computer, all aspects of language other than information are noise, “noise” in the technical sense of interference, non-information. But we are not computers. We may not be very bright, but we are brighter than computers. We can make a virtue of noise (57).

The E.J. Pratt Lectures 1968-2025 makes the same virtues: its noise is cross-generational and multi-local, and is celebratory of the lectures’ tendrils into poems, prose, paintings, theatre, dance, into the many many art forms it connects to, championing the cacophony that is empowered.