While most literary festivals bring in authors from elsewhere, the three-day Calgary BlowOut! focuses exclusively on Calgary writing, featuring writers either based in the city or with strong ties to it.

Laurie Fuhr, the new managing editor of fillingStation magazine — the local literary mag that organizes the event each year — goes back to the beginnings of the magazine itself to explain the event’s genesis and its Calgary focus. “FillingStation is a nationally distributed literary and arts magazine, but it’s locally created,” she says. “From what I’ve heard, it first came together out of a tight-knit community of writers and friends who were literature students at the University of Calgary some 40 issues ago. Most of the faces have changed as people have gone on to focus on their own work or have moved away, but the community behind fillingStation remains a close and supportive one.”

Despite the event’s ties to the magazine, Fuhr explains that the focus of the festival is “Calgary, pure and simple,” rather than the genres of writing that fillingStation features. “A community this close can appear microcosmic,” Fuhr acknowledges, “but we also want BlowOut! to be a big, wide-open invitation to other Calgary writing communities and individuals to come see what we’re all about and to show us what they’re up to.” Not only is this year’s lineup studded with big names, it also boasts a huge variety of writers. “We’ve got every kind of writer on the bill this year from fiction writers to poets to those lovable freaks known as sound poets.”

The fourth edition of this annual festival is not only remarkable for its variety of artists but also for its new additions to the traditional gala readings: a small press fair; an arts fair featuring performances by local visual, media and performance artists; and a flywheel throw-down prelude reading. A cash bar will be available for the Friday and Saturday night events at the Arrata Opera Centre (1315 7 St. S.W.).

The flywheel reading series, fillingStation’s regular monthly reading series, warms things up, kicking off the festival on Thursday evening with readings by Jonathan Ball, Christopher Blais, Emily Carr and Jocelyn Grossé. The event takes place at Pages Books on Kensington (1135 Kensington Rd. N.W.) on Thursday, July 31 at 7:30 p.m.

The first gala reading, Big Fat Opera Takeover, is appropriately titled, featuring some very big voices in CanLit. Aritha Van Herk reads alongside burgeoning voices Carmen Derksen, Glen Dresser and Julia Williams while Christian Bök collaborates with Ian Sampson and Jordan Scott for 30 minutes of jointly created sound poetry. The evening will end with tunes spun by DJ Geosphere. The readings begin at 8 p.m. at the Arrata Opera Centre on Friday, August 1.

After the Friday night party, Saturday starts with the Small Press Book and Art Fair. Local small presses, magazines, artists and bands showcase and sell their work from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., while performances by local artists Travis Murphy and Anne Koizumi, Samuel Garrigó Meza and The Arbour Lake Sghool begin at 3 p.m. The fairs are held at the Arrata Opera Centre on Saturday, August 2.

The festival finishes with a bang Saturday night with the final gala reading, The Pantoum of the Opera (8 p.m., Arrata Opera Centre). Craig Boyko, Jason Christie, Chris Ewart, Melanie Little, Clem Martini, Andrew Wedderburn and Sheri-D Wilson may not read pantoums (an obscure poetic form), but their work will certainly sing.