David Macfarlane: On Sports
July 16, 2026 at 7:00pm
Words is pleased to host an evening visit with award-winning author David Macfarlane to talk about his new book, On Sports, a searching rediscovery of the spirit of sport, before online gambling and the manufactured spectacle of today’s professional sports.
David Macfarlane: On Sports
In Conversation with Words Director Josh Lambier
16 July 2026, 7PM
Zoom Webinar
Registration is free or by donation
What are sports, really? What do we love about them? And what, in our digital age, have they become?
On Sports reads like a conversation between friends at the ballpark in those golden days before the kiss cam and college co-eds with T-shirt cannons spoiled the fun; a book that feels like the sun on your forehead and the breeze in your hair, beer and laughter on your lips; a book that celebrates communion and friendship and the beauty of these games—whether it be baseball or football or soccer or tennis or cricket—that we’ve designed to distract ourselves from the end of the world.
It’s about what 7Up tastes like when drunk from the Grey Cup, how much work it takes for talent to shine, and the near impossibility of language to properly capture athletic excellence. It’s about the beauty of good sports copy, the ephemerality of even the biggest sports story, and how sport remains perpetually powered by the eleven-year-old in all of us. It’s a book about rediscovering the spirit of sport, before online gambling and the manufactured spectacle of today’s professional sports suffocates the last of it; and it’s about where that spirit today is best found.
David Macfarlane‘s family memoir, The Danger Tree, was described by Christopher Hitchens as “one of the finest and most intriguing miniature elegies that I have read in many a year.” Macfarlane’s novel, Summer Gone, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Based on The Danger Tree, “The Door You Came In,” a two-man show (co-written and performed with Douglas Cameron) has been produced, to acclaim, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Stratford, Ontario. Macfarlane lives in Toronto with his wife, the designer, Janice Lindsay.
Register HERE
