Literary Readings
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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 return to the podium to read a little more and/or answer questions. CURRENT SERIES ~ starting time 8:00 pm Saturday, March 13, 2010 ~ Daphne Marlatt Saturday, March 27, 2010 ~ Lorna Crozier Saturday, April 10, 2010 ~ Annabel Lyon Saturday, April 24, 2010 ~ Theresa Kishkan March 13, 2010 DAPHNE MARLATT This stellar program begins with Vancouver writer Daphne Marlatt, winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for her “haunting and multilayered” long poem, The Given, Marlatt is the author of two acclaimed novels, Ana Historic and Taken. She is perhaps better known for her formally innovative books of poetry, including Steveston, Touch to My Tongue, Salvage, and This Tremor Love Is and can be regarded as a major figure in the feminist movement in Canada. She was awarded the Order of Canada in 2006. March 27, 2010 LORNA CROZIER Two-time winner of the Pat Lowther Award and a Governor General’s Award recipient, Lorna Crozier has written sixteen volumes of poetry, including two others nominated for GG’s. Summer 2009 marked the release by Greystone Books of her prose volume, Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir. Among Crozier’s disparate admirers are Ursula K. LeGuin, calling her “this marvelous Canadian poet, storyteller, truth-teller, visionary,” and Alberto Manguel, who confessed himself captivated by the “astonishing coherence and beauty” of her poetry. Lorna Crozier lives with her husband Patrick Lane near Victoria, where she teaches and serves as chair of the writing department at the university. April 10, 2010 ANNABEL LYON The author of the much-acclaimed The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon, will read for us on Saturday, April 10. Winner of the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, Lyon was also a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award. Here’s what the Rogers Writers’ Trust jury had to say of the book: “In this alarmingly confident and transporting debut novel, Lyon offers us that rarest of treats: a book about philosophy, about the power of ideas, that chortles and sings like an earthy romance.” This reading marks the second time our series has been graced by Annabel Lyon—she read for us shortly after the publication of her first book, Oxygen, (2000) a collection of short stories. She lives with her husband and two children in New Westminster April 24, 2010 THERESA KISHKAN known for novels, poetry, and the masterful essay collection Red Laredo Boots–says curiosity fuels her nonfiction. Kishkan will read from her new novel The Age of Water Lilies, and perhaps works in progress. She in Madeira Park and operates High Ground Press with her husband John Pass, is the accomplished author of nine books of poetry and prose. ARCHIVES: ~ click on author's name for more info Saturday, November 20, 2009 ~ Margaret Horsfield Saturday, November 7, 2009 ~ Ivan E Coyote Saturday, October 17, 2009 ~ Mary Rubio Saturday, September 26, 2009 ~ David Bergen Friday, May 15 ~ Frances Itani Friday, March 20, 2009 ~ Alice Major Friday, February 20, 2009 ~ Sharon Butala Saturday, February 7, 2009 ~ Gary Geddes November 21 2008 ~ Andreas Shroeder November 14 2008 ~ Patrick Lane October 24 2008 ~ Mary Swan May 3 2008 ~ Sheila Munro April 11 2008 ~ Elizabeth Philips 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 November 7, 2009 MARGARET HORSFIELD Margaret Horsfield, author of Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of Clayoquot Sound and Tofino 1899–1929. Published in 2008, this book is based almost entirely on letters and diaries that have never been published, and it contains over a hundred previously unpublished photographs. Her earlier book about Vancouver Island’s west coast, Cougar Annie’s Garden, was published in 1999, and received the BC Book Prizes Roderick Haig-Brown Prize for best book about British Columbia in the year 2000. Horsefield’s other books include Biting the Dust (1997), Beyond Golgotha (1993) and Beyond Bethlehem (1989), For 15 years Horsfield made radio features and documentaries the BBC in England, and for CBC Radio’s Ideas. She has written for a number of magazines and newspapers, both in Canada and in England. November 7, 2009 IVAN E COYOTE Ivan Coyote was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. An award-winning author of four collections of short stories, one novel, two CD's, four short films and a renowned performer, Ivan's first love is live storytelling, and over the last thirteen years she has become an audience favourite at music, poetry, spoken word and writer's festivals from Anchorage to Amsterdam. The Globe and Mail called Ivan "a natural-born storyteller" and Ottawa X Press said "Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture." Toronto Star praises Coyote's "talent for sketching the bizarre in the everyday", and Quill's Magazine says Ivan has a "distinctive and persuasive voice, a flawless sense of pacing, and an impeccable sense of story." Ivan is a columnist for Xtra West magazine, writes regularly for The Georgia Straight and CBC Radio, and pops up in periodicals all across the continent. Her first novel, Bow Grip, was released in the fall of 2006, and was awarded the Relit award for best fiction and named by the American Library Association as a Stonewall honor book in literature. October 17, 2009 MARY RUBIO Mary Henley Rubio, biographer of Lucy Maud Montgomery, has spent a large part of her academic career under the spell of the creator of P.E.I.'s and Canada's gift to the world, Anne of Green Gables. Her recently published Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, reveals the complicated history of a complicated woman, whose soaring imagination has brought joy to millions of readers and some kind of emotional relief to herself, an escape from the many obstacles encountered throughout her life. Sadly that life ended in a drug induced fog of the sort we usually associate with debauched rock stars not someone whose work featured the innocently bucolic pleasures of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Maritime Canada. Henley Rubio, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph will read Saturday, October 17, at 8 pm. September 26 2009 DAVID BERGEN David Bergen, acclaimed author of the Giller award-winning novel, The Time In Between (2005) will inaugurate the Arts Council's fall series of literary readings on Saturday, September 26, at 8 pm. Recently named Carol Shields Writer in Residence for 2010 at the University of Winnipeg, Bergen is at three-time winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and as well has won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award. His most recent novel, The Retreat (2008) was also nominated for a Giller. Like The Time in Between, it explores a clash of cultures, but in a setting far different from the Viet Nam of the latter, for The Retreat is set in and around Kenora, Ontario. May 15, 2009 FRANCES ITANI A veteran author, Itani has published eleven books in various genres and, among other accolades, won two CBC Canadian Literary Awards. Her work has been described as “loving and serene,” and is perhaps best known for her novel Deafening, winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book (2003), and her more recent, Remembering the Bones (2007), which was shortlisted for the same prize. Born in Belleville in 1942, Itani grew up on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, near Ottawa, the middle child of five. She boasts a dual BA (in English and psychology) and an MA in English lit and has worked as a nurse in hospitals across the country. She speaks English, French, German, and some Japanese and Spanish. March 20, 2009 ALICE MAJOR Alice Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a weekly newspaper reporter in central British Columbia. She has lived in Edmonton, Alberta since 1981, where she has served as president of the Writers Guild of Alberta and of the League of Canadian Poets, as well as chair of the Edmonton Arts Council. She won the Malahat Review’s long poem contest (2001)and has been short-listed for the Pat Lowther Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize (twice) and three times for the Stephan G. Stephanson Award, (presented by the Writers Guild of Alberta). In July 2005, she was named the first poet laureate for the City of Edmonton. Her eighth collection of poetry, The Office Tower Tales, was published in spring 2008, by the University of Alberta Press. The UAP also published her last collection, The Occupied World, in 2006. Both books are very much focused on her home city – its geology, history and mythology and have received much favorable critical attention. February 20, 2009 SHARON BUTALA Sharon Butala is the second of five daughters born of a French Canadian father and an Irish-Scots Canadian mother in an outpost hospital in Nipawin, Saskatchewan. She began life on a sawmill at the edge of the boreal forest, then lived in a series of small towns before moving to Saskatoon in 1953. She has lived all but five years of her life in Saskatchewan. Her most recent non-fiction work The Girl in Saskatoon: A Meditation on Memory and Murder, is on The Globe & Mail's 2008 list of "100 reasons to read books". Sharon Butala is well known to Coast residents, especially for her Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature. February 7 2009 GARY GEDDES Gary Geddes was born June 9, 1940 in Vancouver. He completed his MA and PhD at the University of Toronto. Geddes has taught in the Department of English at Concordia University, BCIT, and the University of Victoria. He was awarded the BC Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and author of Falsework, an account of the 1957 collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge and the internationally acclaimed Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things, has been called one of Canada's most important men of letters. His poetry is often political in its thematics and has been translated into five languages, including French, Spanish and Chinese. 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. November 14 2008 PATRICK LANE Celebrated for his poetry, novels, and memoir. His new novel is 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. 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. 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.