In spite of the NHL playoffs and a federal election forum going on in Whitehorse, more than 60 avid literary fans turned up at The Old Fire Hall on Wednesday evening for the 2011 edition of Live Words.

"Welcome to what we believe is the 26th annual Yukon Writers Festival,” master of ceremonies Al Pope said as he gathered the audience together.

The festival began as an adjunct to today's and Friday's 31st Young Authors' Conference.

It has grown to embrace and expand the original concept and now manages to send writers to a number of communities outside the city. This year, there have been, or will be, presentations in Carmacks, Pelly Crossing, Teslin, Haines Junction and Dawson City.

On Wednesday, it was Whitehorse's turn.

Brian Brett was first at the podium this year, struggling to juggle all the books and papers he wanted to read bits from.

He began with a few sections from Trauma Farm, his memoir about farming life on Salt Spring Island, B.C.

His farm is actually named Willow Pond Farm, but as it seems to be just one damn thing after another in terms of farm life, the nickname has stuck.

Brett offered some poetic prose about the morning, when he hears the song surf of the birds, and the world seems pregnant with possibilities.

He spoke about the loss of the older generation of farmers, who know so much more than those who acquire head knowledge at university. Each one who passes is "another library gone to the ground.”

Shifting to poetry, he read a piece about the travelling life of those who must sleep in cheap hotels while on book tours and another from his collection in progress, The Wind River Variations.

"Tracking Myself” is about waking up in camp along the river and thinking about all the tracks that can be found and what they might mean.

Dorris Heffron's latest book is City Wolves, a story which takes her heroine, the first lady veterinarian in Canada, from Halifax to the Klondike.

Heffron explained how she was inspired to write this book by her Malamute, Yukon Sally, and by a trip she made to the territory in 1997 in search of background for a story.

Her faithful dog died in Collingwood, Ont., just two days after she turned in the manuscript after 10 years of work on the book, so she was moved to be here again.

The portions of the book she chose to read were from the deep back story in which she wrote of Ike, the native man who, with his wife, began the process of turning wolves into working dogs. His spirit lingers behind the story of Meg Wilkinson.

Local author Claire Eamer shared some of the introductions and special interest features of two of her books, Traitor's Gate and Other Doorways into the Past and Lizards in the Sky. Her essay on doorways seemed to be a summary of her own restless quest for knowledge, and the surprises to be found along the way.

One special section was about the portal of al-Khazneh, carved into the side of a cliff in southern Jordan (best known from the third Indiana Jones movie).

Her later books, which have either won awards or been nominated for them, have tended to be about animals and other creatures.

Samples in her reading included the blind mole rats that live like ants, and the bacteria that live mostly in the clouds.

Alanna Mitchell's obsession with science often takes her far from her Toronto home.

For Sea Sick: the Global Ocean in Crisis, she made numerous journeys to places around the world and 13 field trips on the ocean, over a period of 2 1/2 years. The forays began just three weeks after her then-recent marriage.

"I'm one of those unfortunate people who has to bear witness to things before I can write about it,” Mitchell said.

It began as a book about how the oceans work, but became what one reviewer called a polemic about the effect humanity is having on the oceans.

As it is a work of literary non-fiction, Mitchell is a character in her own story, a Canadian tradition perhaps most often linked to Farley Mowat.

To balance the effect of the book, she read from passages in which her experiences had led her to despair and ended with the ray of hope at the end of the book.

Richard Van Camp, who lives in Edmonton, grew up in Fort Smith and began his presentation with a hilarious stand-up routine about life in his part of the North, where people call down the Northern Lights and get into impromptu wrestling matches.

Added to this were some interesting snippets about the mix of languages found in his hometown.

All this was in aid of allowing him to read his story without having to stop to explain things along the way.

"Show Me Yours” is about a trio of young men who start a fad of carrying their baby pictures on leather thongs under their shirts, and how it affects people in the town.

It is also a love story. This touching and funny tale is from Van Camp's latest short story collection, The Moon of Letting Go, but can also be read online in the November 2007 edition of The Walrus magazine.

The festival continues with the Young Authors' Conference at F.H. Collins Secondary School, with more book signings at Mac's Fireweed and with a lecture by Mitchell at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre.