The Writer’s Festival opened Thursday night at the Knox Presbyterian Church on Lisgar St near Elgin, as Sens fans cheered the team and eventually left disappointed.

The festival runs until Monday and is free to all Carleton University students. All talks are held in the church unless otherwise noted.

Tonight’s 8:30pm event, Truthiness or Dare (Do the Facts Matter?), with Guy Gavriel Kay and Marianne Apostolides, will be a lively dispute between fact checker and journalist. As issues of art and responsibility are discussed, will we finally have an answer as to whether non-fiction truly exists?

On Sunday, you can look forward to The Art & Science of Remembering Everything, with Joshua Foer, who published Moonwalking with Einstein and is a US Memory Champion. Foer is a freelance journalist and this is his first book. It is the result of a year of training for the memory championship he won and in which he memorized a deck of 52 cards in one minute, 40 seconds.

It seems the Foer family produced three literary brains: Joshua’s brother Franklin is the former editor of The New Republic, while Jonathan Safran Foer, the middle brother, is considered a literary genius and is the author of the much acclaimed Everything Is Illuminated.

If you’re in the mood for something a bit more spicy, check out Cocktales with Tamara Faith Berger, (former model/actor in gay pornography, Xtra columnist and current author) Daniel Allen Cox, Megan Butcher, Nerys Parry and Jasmine Aziz on Sunday at 8:30pm.

It’s a talk about sex; it’s explicit and it’s bound to arouse . . . interest. The evening will explore lust and desire and the power of intimacy to heal and to harm.