Literary Readings
	5714 Medusa in Sechelt, BC 604 885 5412 July/Aug 10-4 : Tues-Sat 1-4 Sun Winter hours 11-4 : Wed-Sat 1-4 Sun

Home Gallery Shows Craft Fairs Literary Readings Artistry Newsletter Other on going Events & Projects   Life Drawing   Tuesday    Chamber Players   Jewellery Sale   Arts Update   Artesia Coffeehouse Annual Awards   Gillian Lowndes   Louise Baril Memorial   Anne and Philip Klein Banner Project & Young Artist Exhibition Art Auction 2008 Info 2008 Preview Archives 2006 2003 2002 Arts Centre Rental Link to Complete Arts & Culture Events Contact Us

A series of author readings is held throughout the year courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Literary Committee of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council. Readings are held at the Arts Centre and admission is free. Donations are gratefully accepted in support of Sunshine Coast Arts Council programs. Readings run for approximately 30 to 40 minutes, followed by a break for coffee and goodies, and then the author's retun to the podium to read a little more and/or answer questions. CURRENT SERIES ~ starting time 8:00 pm October 24 2008 ~ Mary Swan November 15 2008 ~ Patrick Lane November 21 2008 ~ Andreas Shroeder October 24 2008 MARY SWAN Guelph, Ontario writer Mary Swan, whose début novel,The Boys in the Trees, was released this past spring to critical acclaim. Called "mercurial and mesmerizing, dark but thrilling," the story is set in a fictitious late 19th-century Ontario town. Swan is the winner of the 2001 O. Henry Award for short fiction and is the author of the collection The Deep and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in several Canadian literary magazines, including The Malahat Review, the Ontario Review, and Best Canadian Stories, as well as U.S. publications such as Harper's magazine. November 15 2008 PATRICK LANE Celebrated for his poetry, novels, and memoir. His new novel is tentatively titled Red Dog Red Dog, and a new collection of poems is also expected soon. Lane has produced more than 20 books of poetry, fiction and essays since he started writing in 1961, winning most of Canada's top literary awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, and two National Magazine Awards. His 2005 book, There is a Season - A Memoir, received the inaugural British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. As a teacher and writer-in-residence, he has worked in universities across Canada. November 21 2008 ANDREAS SCHROEDER Popular Roberts Creek writer, Andreas Schroeder's new book, Renovating Heaven, a trilogy of adult novellas, is just about to be released. Schroeder's 39-year writing career has produced poetry, fiction, non-fiction, translations, journalism and literary criticism. Among his 20 titles is Shaking It Rough (non-fiction), finalist for the 1976 Governor-General's Award. Schroeder has also published three popular collections, Scams, Scandals & Skulduggery; Cheats, Charlatans & Chicanery (winner of the 1998 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Non-Fiction); and Fakes, Frauds & Flimflammery. His two works of non-fiction for young adults, Thieves! and Scams!, each won the Ontario Library Association's Red Maple Award. Schroeder holds the Maclean-Hunter Chair in Creative Non-fiction at UBC. ARCHIVES: ~ click on author's name for more info May 3 2008 ~ Sheila Munro - bookseller, reviewer and journalist April 11 2008 ~ Elizabeth Philips - lyric poet from Saskatchewan March 14 2008 ~ Thomas Wharton February 9 2008 ~ Howie White Salute Nov 9 2007 ~ Marie Clements October 19 2007 ~ John MacLachlan Gray September 28 2007 ~ Terry Glavin June 23 2007 ~ Sue Wheeler May 18 2007 ~ Timothy Taylor April 20 2007 ~ Rebecca Godfrey March 9 2007 ~ Bill New February 9 2007 ~ Keith Maillard ARCHIVES: May 3 2008 SHEILA MUNRO Sheila Munro will continue our spring series of author readings at the Arts Centre on May 3rd. Now living in Powell River, Munro has been a bookseller, reviewer and journalist, and her writing career has featured a special interest in parent-child relationships, with books including How to Enjoy Being a Parent, and, most notably, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro, which has recently come out in an American edition. Sheila will read from Lives, which offers a rare, privileged view of one of Canada's, and the world's, finest short story writers as well as insights into Munro's fiction and the ways in which her life has informed that fiction. But Lives is a memoir more than a biography. As one reviewer says, "What saves Lives of Mothers and Daughters from being of interest only to those familiar with Alice Munro's body of work are the questions it raises about being the child of an artist, a child who is seen through art, used by art." Sheila candidly explains the challenges of relating to her artist mother, her mother's art, and her own aspirations as a writer. In Lives, she finally manages to escape the shadow of her brilliant mother. The reading will be in the Crowston Gallery of the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt at 8 p.m., Saturday, 3 May (note that this is not our usual Friday evening). Admission is free, courtesy of the Canada Council. April 11 2008 ELIZABETH PHILIPS Saskatchewan lyric poet Elizabeth Philips reads from her collections of verse - Torch River (2007), and A Blue with Blood in it and Beyond My Keeping, both of which were winners of the Saskatchewan Poetry Award in their respective years. Philips, who lives in Saskatoon, edited the literary magazine Grain from 1998 to 2003. The editor of a number of poetry collections, she has taught creative writing at the Banff Wired Studio, the Banff Writing with Style program and the Sage Hill Writing Experience. Philips' publisher, Brick Books, claims that in Torch River the poet "takes us down into the swirling core of planetary energies, the central mystery of life itself," using "a language of tremendous immediateness and authority." For fellow poet George Murray, Philips is someone who is "successfully re-imagining the Canadian landscape for a new century," employing "an impressive supply of fresh imagery and perspective, as well as a fine control of pacing and rhythm." March 14 2008 Thomas Wharton Nominated by Steve MacLean as one of the contestants on this year's CBC Canada Reads, Thomas Wharton is a writer and teacher. Born in Grande Prairie, Alberta, he has lived in a string of cities across the province, including Edmonton, Peace River, Calgary and Jasper. He now resides in Edmonton. His first book, Icefields (1995), won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Best First Book Award, the Best Book at the Banff Mountain Festival and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean. Having Icefields chosen for Canada Reads is a bit like having a new book come out without having to do all the work of writing one. It’s every writer’s dream. But it’s also given me the opportunity to look back at the novel and where it came from: to realize how the writing of it shaped me while I thought I was shaping it. Hard to believe it’s been 12 years since the book was first published. That was in the last century, for heaven’s sake! February 9 2008 HOWARD WHITE Host for the evening is writer/editor Shane McCune. Other participants will include friends and colleagues who represent the many facets of Howie's life and career(s) on the Coast. The evening is a particular celebration of his 2007 elevation to the Order of Canada. It is also a fundraiser for the Arts Centre and it's literary activities. Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat (bio), The Men There Were Then (poems), Spilsbury's Coast (bio), The Accidental Airline (bio), Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens'), Writing in the Rain (anthology) and The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon. November 9 2007 MARIE CLEMENTS Evoking the traditions of her Aboriginal roots and drawing from her experience as a radio news reporter in the 1980s, Métis playwright Marie Clements has mastered a unique style of storytelling by linking the past with the present. She currently lives on Salt Spring Island and her most recent play, which premiered this past spring at the National Arts Centre, is titled Copper Thunderbird and its subject is the Ojibway artist Norval Morrisseau. October 19 2007 JOHN MACLACHLAN GRAY Novelist, composer, performer, columnist John MacLachlan Gray will bring his multiple creative personalities to the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt, Friday, October 19th for a 8 p.m. reading sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Sunshine Coast Arts Council. Admission is free. For several decades, Gray produced stage musicals, such as Billy Bishop Goes to War, Rock and Roll, 18 Wheels and Don Messer’s Jubilee; musical satire for CBC Television’s The Journal, magazine journalism, screenplays, and columns for The Globe and Mail and The Vancouver Sun. In recent years, Gray has turned his literary attention to thrillers set in 1850s Victorian London, including The Fiend In Human and A White Stone Day. His latest title, Not Quite Dead, is set in Philadelphia, where Charles Dickens and Edward Allen Poe are held hostage by an Irish gang with political ambitions. Gray was born in Ottawa and raised in Nova Scotia, where he obtained a BA at Mount Allison University. He received an MA at The University of British Columbia, and founded Tamahnous, an experimental theatre company, which is still in existence. In 1975 he joined Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, first as a composer, then a director, then a playwright-composer. Gray holds honorary doctorates from Mount Allison and Dalhousie universities, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. September 28 2007 TERRY GLAVIN According to Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress, "Terry Glavin is a wise and eloquent writer whose clear-eyed intelligence explores our conflicted relationship with nature and our fellow man. In Waiting for the Macaws he shows how we have shaped and disrupted the world we depend on. What Glavin has to tell us is urgent, important, and well said". Gavin's science and travel journalism has won Western Magazine Awards, National Magazine Awards, the Jack Webster Award for Science and Technology, and the "Science in Society" prize from the Canadian Science Writers Association. The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean, won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2000 and was short-listed for the Bill Duthie prize and the Roderick Haig-Brown prize. This Ragged Place: Travels Across the Landscape in 1996 was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for non-fiction. June 23 2007 SUE WHEELER Wheeler has published three books of poems, the latest being Habitat (Brick Books, 2005). In that collection she bends her ear toward the language of the natural world. “Consummate evesdropper, she exults in the inventive riff and range of the speech of birds, flowers, ferns, and trees—and in that strangest of all songs, the human tongue.” Her books have been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize for Poetry). She was born in Texas, immigrated to Canada in 1972, and lives and works on a seaside farm on Lasqueti Island. May 18 2007 TIMOTHY TAYLOR You may have noticed that Stanley Park, the celebrated first novel that brought Taylor to our attention—and to the 2005 Festival of the Written Arts—was one of the five books chosen this year for CBC’s “Canada Reads” debate. What Taylor did in that novel for foodies and the restaurant business, he does for the world of architecture in his second novel, Story House, where two brothers literally fight for their legitimacy and their claims on the legacy of their famous architect father. Again, Taylor takes us into the heart of Vancouver with a narrative that is urban and hip as well as intelligent and stylistically precise and compelling. In addition to the novels and the brilliant short story collection, Silent Cruise, Taylor may also be willing to discuss his unfinished next novel, about which he has said almost nothing publicly. Don’t miss this opportunity at the Centre at 8pm Friday, 18 May. Admission is free, courtesy of the Canada Council and the Sunshine Coast Arts Council. April 20 2007 REBECCA GODFREY Rebecca Godfrey's Toronto home 'harboured Ghanian jazz musicians, radical nationalists, draft dodgers and an undercover FBI agent.' At age nine she moved to Victoria with her father, House of Anansi founder Dave Godfrey, and her mother, mystery writer Ellen Godfrey. She attended Mount Douglas High in Saanich, before moving to attend the University of Toronto. She received a Creative Writing MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first novel The Torn Skirt (HarperFlamingo, 2001) is about a sheltered teenager, exposed to the Victoria underworld. In the late 1990s Godfrey moved to New York City where has been a freelance journalist, and has worked in film and publishing. She investigated the beating death of 14-year-old Reena Virk of Victoria for Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk (HarperCollins, 2005), a non-fiction investigation of the various characters involved in the story. It received the second annual $25,000 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in 2006, among the largest non-fiction prizes in Canada, and the only national prize to originate in British Columbia. March 9 2007 BILL NEW Born in Vancouver on March 28, 1938, William Herbert (Bill) New is one of the most prolific and versatile literary critics in Canada, having written and edited more than 40 books. He enrolled at the University of British Columbia in 1956 and received degrees from UBC in English and Geography (B.Ed. 1961, M.A. 1963), followed by a doctorate from the University of Leeds in 1966. His dissertation was on the modern Bildungsroman as a social paradigm. He taught English course at UBC from 1965 to 2003, specializing in the English literatures of the Commonwealth. In 1966, Bill New became assistant editor of Canadian Literature, working with George Woodcock and Donald Stephens. Quietly remarkable, New edited the review publication Canadian Literature, from 1977 to 1995--for 17 years--almost as long as his predecessor and friend, George Woodcock-—18 years. (He was replaced in the position by Eva-Marie Kroller, who was succeeded by Laurie Ricou in 2003.) In 2004, New renewed his affiliation with Canadian Literature by becoming Editor Emeritus on the masthead. Bill New has been as prolific as he has been enduring. In one year New, as editor, published the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, released his fourth poetry collection, as well as his second collection of rhyming verse for children, Llamas in the Laundry, plus a book-length essay on irony in Commonwealth literature, Grandchild of Empire. New has also been influential as editor for the New Canadian Library series. He has lectured and taught in Australia, India, Italy, China, France and the United States, and held the Brenda & David MacLean Chair in Canadian Studies at UBC. He has increasingly turned his hand to poetry and children's books. According to Oolichan Books, his seventh collection of poetry, Touching Ecuador, is "a long poem in four voices, following the interconnected observations of a modern-day tourist-traveller, a struggling castaway, a disillusioned preacher, and an Everyman weaver who tries to come to terms with mountain histories and a mountain home. Everywhere these four observers find a landscape rich in words: guidebooks and notebooks, calendars and woven letters, alphabets and beaded rituals, children's verses and the stories that populate place." February 9 2007 KEITH MAILLARD The first of the spring series of Canada Council supported readings will be held at the Arts Centre in Sechelt on Friday, February 9, 2007 at 8 pm. Keith Maillard, professor and co-chair of Creative Writing in the Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing at UBC will read from his four-volume work, Difficulty at the Beginning, comprising four separate but linked novels, which he has released between September 2005 and September 2006. Born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1942, Maillard became a Canadian citizen in 1976. He has published numerous novels to considerable acclaim, among them, Motet, which won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 1990; Hazard Zones was short listed for the Commonwealth Literary Prize in 1996 and Gloria for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, 1999. Maillard's one volume of poetry, Dementia Americana, won the Gerald Lampert Award for poetry in 1995. Keith Maillard read from the award winning The Clarinet Polka when he read for us last at the Sechelt Arts Centre.