Literacy and the Literary

A year-round series of fun and innovative programmes, projects and activities that bring writers in contact with readers at all levels and from many diverse backgrounds. Highlights include:

■ Blue Metropolis Literacy Programme: Developed in collaboration with group leaders and classroom teachers, our Literacy Programme for adult learners is designed to introduce writers into the classroom and to community writing groups so that they are fired by a desire to be able to read and write. The learners - who are immigrants, members of minority groups, or marginalized - read a text by a professional writer, meet the writer, discuss the experiences described in the text - and are inspired to develop their own stories. In French and English.

■ Don't Touch my Board, Man! Our most popular Literacy Programme - and for good reason. Providing young people with an opportunity to address issues of bullying, taxing and other forms of violence - and to develop their own narratives in comic strips developed under the supervision of professional cartoonists, their teachers, and an educational psychologist. In French and English.

■ Peur bleue / Scary Stories: A unique educational activity in which children gather around terror-inspiring storytellers to discover the art of storytelling through Hallowe'en classics and original tales. Designed for 5th and 6th graders, Peur bleue / Scary Stories takes place not only in the classroom but also, for the first time last year, at the Montreal Children's Hospital. In French and English.

■ Expanding our multilingual reach, Blue Metropolis Foundation has created the Metropolis Azul programme, which features writing in Spanish - sometimes together with French or English - for Hispanic immigrants here in Montreal and at the Feria Internacional del Libro in Guadalajara, Mexico. When we bring Carlos Fuentes to town, Spanish-speaking Montrealers from every walk of life are citizens of the Blue Metropolis. In Spanish.

■ During our annual Literary Series writers from far and near present their work - prose, poetry, non-fiction, performance, etc. - in readings, in conversation and in performance for audiences of students, members of Montreal's cultural communities - such as the dozens of black anglophones who came to hear Mairuth Hodge Sarsfield and George Elliott Clarke last year at our reading space in St. Henri last fall - and other members of the general public. In French, English and other languages.

■ Last, but not least, our most ambitious public literacy project is the Blue Metropolis Literary Murals project, The City of Words, which will inscribe excerpts from works by Montreal writers on the exterior walls of buildings across the city. Watch this space for news of the fun literacy activities we are planning around the mural texts! In French and English.

You will find information on all these programmes in this section. We hope you enjoy your visit.