A woman in the row behind me yawned, but I didn’t quite know how to respond to the Kingston WritersFest reading that Thursday night by JM Coetzee and Paul Auster at the Grand Theatre in Kingston, Ontario. I was star-struck. And beat, having driven to Kingston for the event. The authors eschewed conversation and based their whole performance on reading their correspondence–on friendship, food, worries, language, Aristotle, Derrida and Joubert–words on the page, connecting two of the world’s most renowned writers and, that night in Kingston, several hundred speechless, star-struck, and yawning strangers.

Bruce MacDonald is a poet, reviewer, and full-time mental-health case manager at a Toronto hospital.