Bill Arnott’s Beat An Emerita in New West
to print. The list of submissions is extensive, the majority of it excellent work from established authors.
I was reading author tips from Elmore Leonard who stated emphatically, “Don’t start a story with weather!” So I won’t. However, it may interest you to know it was a warm spring day, blossoms blushing the city like a haiku/tanka festival. I was meeting with Poet Laureate Emerita Candice James in the literary city of New Westminster, a Vancouver suburb and BC’s former capital. Silver Bow Press is the company she runs, having taken over a fourvolume-a-year publisher and grown annual production to twenty-plus titles of poetry and fiction. Next year she anticipates bringing thirty books
Crossing town for our visit I felt an odd sense of nostalgia. James and I both made an unlikely professional transition to the arts – writing and music, from a background in finance. I suspect there aren’t many of us. Having done that for twenty-five years I knew Greater Vancouver as well as anyone – certainly better than most cabbies, the result of countless house calls, office and coffee meetings everywhere in southwest BC. My father-in-law was a cartographer, designing and publishing street maps. And on multiple occasions relied on me to find new or missing addresses. This was before the google car with the pointy thing or CSIS and retailers knowing precisely where we are (and what we’re shopping for) at all times. But having cocooned for a few years in Vancouver proper, I’d become insulated by readings and performance gigs within walking distance of home. It felt good to break from the downtown chrysalis, remembering the vast veins of creative bullion beyond my trickling creek and personal prospector pan. There is indeed “gold in them there hills” or in this case, a well-treed town on the banks
