Wordworks Summer 2006 The Literary Life by WordWorks Magazine, 1982-2012

WORDWORKS Summer 2006

T h e Vo i c e o f B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a Wr i t e r s

The Literary Life

WORDWORK S Summer 2006

THE JOURNAL OF THE FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

News 2 A Note From Our President 28 Regional Reports

Features

Weighing Our Words

Peer review: BC writers consider BC books

Drawing a Line Under the Year A fly-on-the-wall’s view of the AGM

24 Flower Power 25 Story House 26 Toy Gun

By Margaret Thompson

Blue Pencil Blues, or, You May Already Be a Wiener! Edit—the New Four-Letter Word

Contests & Markets

By Ryszard Dubanski, a prize-winning author…

27 Contests & Markets

A Ten-Year Writing Friendship on Haida Gwaii In conversation with Margo Hearne about her “lit-crit” evenings with Dorothy Spiller

11 Dorothy Trail Spiller—A Writer’s Life As told to Margo Hearne 14 The Accidental Publicist By David J. Litvak AGM photos by Margaret Thompson Cover photo by Shirley Rudolph

16 A Dream of Writing The 2006 AGM Annual Lecture By Stephen Osborne

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

WORDWORKS THE FEDERATION IS THE VOICE OF WRITERS IN BC— SUPPORTING, DEVELOPING AND EDUCATING WRITERS WHILE FOSTERING A COMMUNITY FOR WRITING THROUGHOUT THE PROVINCE.

Publisher THE FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Editorial Committee MARGARET THOMPSON LINDA CROSFIELD SHANNON COWAN FERNANDA VIVEIROS

Managing Editor FERNANDA VIVEIROS

Layout SHIRLEY RUDOLPH

Website GUILLAUME LEVESQUE

2006-2007 Board of Directors PRESIDENT—BRIAN BUSBY VICE PRESIDENT—KARIN KONSTANTYNOWICZ TREASURER—GREG BALL SECRETARY—LOIS PETERSON PAST PRESIDENT—MARGARET THOMPSON

Regional Representatives 1. NORTH—LYNDA WILLIAMS 2. SOUTH EAST—ANNE STRACHAN 3. CENTRAL—KAY MCCRACKEN 4. FRASER VALLEY—SYLVIA TAYLOR 5. LOWER MAINLAND—JOCELYN COBURN 6. THE ISLANDS—DAVID FRASER THE FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS PO BOX 3887 STN TERMINAL VANCOUVER, BC V6B 3Z3 T: 604-683-2057 F: 604-608-5522 BCWRITERS@SHAW.CA WWW.BCWRITERS.COM

PUBLICATIONS MAIL AGREEMENT NO. 40685010 POSTAL CUSTOMER NO. 7017320 RETURN UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO FEDERATION OF BC WRITERS BOX 3887 STN TERMINAL VANCOUVER BC V6B 3Z3

A Note From Our President D

elivering the President’s Report at our AGM in May, I risked accusations of laziness in describing the previous twelve months as “A Year of Challenges.” Why rely on such a miserable cliché? The simple answer is that it clearly and cleanly described what had been an extremely trying period in the history of the Fed. As we began a new year in our history, that May evening, we carried some of these challenges forward, while leaving others behind. At the risk of further testing the patience of those who were in attendance, I think it important that I reiterate what I considered our greatest challenge— that being a lack of funds. As I write, we are awaiting responses from both BC Gaming and the Arts Council on our current applications. While monies coming from the former have been quite stable, funding from the Arts Council has declined significantly in recent times. In fact, last year we received roughly 73 percent of the money granted in 2004. Considerable efforts have been made to reverse this trend, perhaps the most significant being our acting on an Arts Council recommendation that we conduct an organizational assessment. This was accomplished in February through a grant provided by the Arts Partners in Organizational Development. As I described the process at the AGM, it was “open, frank, at times painful, at times pleasurable.” To be sure, the assessment further exposed our weaknesses; but, more importantly, it brought light to areas of opportunity. This year we will be working to restore relationships with those who once but no longer provided the Fed with funds, and we will seek out new sources of revenue. It may seem odd, I realize, to focus on the challenges that were posed by faulty software. That said, I feel it important to mention because, whether or not one was aware, the program relied on to maintain our membership database was so flawed that it affected each and every member. It is not an exaggeration to say that it injured the Fed in any number of ways. Amongst its many failings was the inability to properly track membership renewals and a problem that made exporting content from the database onto our online member directory difficult, and eventually impossible. As a result, the Fed suffered a rather dramatic reduction in paid members, resulting in a drop in funds, exacerbating the weakness created by declining Arts Council contributions. During the months leading up to the AGM, our Executive Director, Fernanda Viveiros, developed a new strategy in dealing with this problem: continued page 5 2

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FEATURES

Drawing a Line Under the Year A fly-on-the-wall’s view of the AGM By Margaret Thompson

At 5:45 pm. on Friday, May 26, the lobby of the Listel Hotel slumbers.

he desk clerks murmur to each other, eyes down, apparently absorbed in whatever it is that lies hidden on their side of the counter. Two bellhops, obviously waiting for an influx of guests, dash to the door every time a luxury coach drifts to a halt outside, and return empty-handed, shaking their heads. A couple of guests come downstairs and ask for directions to the best comedy club. The one Fed member who has arrived too early in the hope of being useful fills an armchair by a side wall, next to a gas fire that flames in a welcoming manner, but doesn’t warm. Without any fanfare, the expected coach arrives, and pours out a stream of tourists, elderly for the most part, tottering a little on swollen ankles. The lobby fills with a press of fleece vests, Tilley hats, Bermuda shorts, brand-new Birkenstocks and the sort of bright nylon jackets guaranteed showerproof, breathable, weightless and creaseand stain-resistant that so many travellers feel impelled to wear. The tour guide yells out instructions about room numbers and luggage, and there is a surge of bifocals toward the desk as the first guests start to fill out their cards.

Director, eventually arrives, and skirting a group of women arranging a dinner for eight at a nearby restaurant, makes contact. “Where two or three are gathered together” and so on; the evening has begun. Fernanda has been busy. We carry all the photocopied material for the AGM into the Sculpture Gallery Room. I notice that Fernanda Viveiros and Brian Busby there is little evidence of sculpture; maybe writers are a suspect lot. The room is a pleasant surprise, though: large without being cavernous; small enough to make the readings and lecture comfortably intimate. The noise from the lobby dies away; our AGM world is a small parallel universe within the mechanism of the busy hotel. continued next page

The Lone Fed member is by this time pinned against the wall. As the first coach passengers drift away to the elevators, Fernanda Viveiros sweeps into the lobby. She stops, looking a little startled—Could all these people possibly be here for the AGM?—fails to hear the Lone Fed member’s hail from the far side of the room, and rather like an icebreaker, uses the boxes she is carrying to break a path to the desk. There the Lone Fed member, boxless, but considerably weightier than our slender Executive

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Socializing at the AGM

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Drawing a Line, cont’d Andrea Marvan sets up a table outside the door, ready with receipt books and membership lists, agendas and voting cards, door prize tickets and guest lists. People start to arrive, and soon Andrea is busy with those who are sure they are members in good standing, and are; those who are sure they are members in good standing, but lapsed two years ago; those who think they received a reminder, but can’t remember if they did anything about it; even those who aren’t members but think this is a good time to join. What is immediately obvious to anyone looking around the room is that this year we won’t have to recruit the waitresses as Fed members to get a quorum. Fernanda and Brian Busby, the President, look relieved. They can huddle over lastminute details, and quell the jitters with a hasty glass of wine.

Board members Jocelyn Coburn and Karin Konstantynowicz

ecause the food has arrived. Members converge on the tables at the back of the room and the noise level rises. It is as if the crudités and the hors d’oeuvres fuel the conversation, raising the discourse from polite queries about general well-being and comments on the weather to lively discussion of things literary. At least, that is what the hubbub suggests, what the light catching on the wine glasses, the hilarity, the body language, lead us to imagine. What else would a group of writers talk about with such animation?

exception. The members listen, really quite attentively, to reports: from the President; from the Treasurer, Greg Ball; from Fernanda as Executive Director; from the WordWorks committee; and from the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley regions. There is little point in reciting their contents; all are posted on the website and there can be relished in full, but it is worth noting how enthusiastically both Fernanda (wearing her Lower Mainland rep’s hat) and Sylvia Taylor, Fraser Valley’s representative, convey the vitality of their regions’ eventful literary life.

The result is that the AGM starts a little late. Nobody minds, and it is conducted with dispatch. Unless there are byzantine internal politics, warring factions, power struggles, or rogue members rolling like loose cannon through the carefully scripted agenda in pursuit of their own grievances, there is little chance of drama at an AGM. This is no

Members duly vote in the slate of Board nominees, which includes a number of new and returning faces; Karin Konstantynowicz is taking on the role of Vice President, Lynda Williams returns to the board representing the North, and Kay McCracken and Jocelyn Coburn will represent the Central and Lower Mainland regions respectively. Suffice it

Door prize winner anticipation

Making new friends and catching up with old friends

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to say, the mood is optimistic and upbeat despite the by now almost traditional fiscal angst, and the plaintive hopes for corporate sponsorship and a full-time executive director. Adjournment triggers a renewed attack on the refreshments, and a corresponding surge in conviviality. There is a feeling of unbuttoning, duty done. The rest of the evening’s menu is entertainment, a reward for turning out for a business meeting at the end of the working week. A current of anticipation tingles through the room; it is easy to herd us back to our seats when it is time for The Lecture.

balance plates of melon slices and strawberries and smoked salmon snacks while they fumble in bags and pockets for their tickets. There are a lot of prizes: a weekend at a luxury B & B on Gabriola, a gift certificate to Café de Paris, bookstore gift certificates, Georgia Straight t-shirts, a CD Writer and of course, neon-bright gift bags of tissue-wrapped award-winning books including FED-authored titles—and a last-minute donation by its author Alice Taylor, of a just-published SF novel. The rhythmical voices of the poets chant incantations, cast spells. The audience quiets, breathes deeper, listens. The room is still. Applause as Sandy leaves the lectern rouses people, but they are still subdued as they collect their belongings and start to leave. Some linger, but as the last slices of canteloupe, the final cheese straws disappear, they drift away, calling their goodbyes.

tephen Osborne entertains and informs us with a reminiscence of the Vancouver literary subculture of the 70s as he traces his own literary life. We laugh at the disappearing cars, at 5,000 words in 6 point type on a single sheet of paper, at the inept surveillance of the Pulp Mavis Jones and Sylvia Taylor We pick up the stray used plates and Press terrorists; we nod in agreement at empty glasses. A hotel employee is the strictures on the Creative Writing stacking chairs. Fernanda has carried off the one box she industry, on monoculture and the exclusion of the reader. No need for summaries; you can read every word elsewhere in this has left. Nothing left for the Lone Member to do but follow suit. issue. This is an absorbing half hour, to be followed after one more short break by another half hour of readings, poetry this Back through the lobby, fire still burning like an Eternal time, by Kuldip Gill, Jamie Reid and Sandy Shreve. Flame, a few steps to the hotel next door, and she’s gone. Fernanda and Jocelyn lure members back to their seats by The AGM is over for another year. announcing the distribution of door prizes, and people

A Note From Our President, cont’d from page 2 she side-stepped the program. By transferring the membership data to a simple Excel spreadsheet, Fernanda was able to track membership data, quickly update members’ mailing/contact information as it came in, and send out “reminder to renew” emails on a regular basis. In performing the tasks herself, she saved time and in four months managed to increase paid membership five fold. This program, I’m pleased to report, is not one of the challenges we are carrying into our new year. In these few weeks since the AGM we have replaced the program with an upgrade that is reliable. Rather than risk the transfer of corrupt information, the entire Fed membership database has been keyed anew. At the present time,

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our online member directory is up-to-date and during the coming months, the new clean database will be used to create new online member pages. On a related note, I would like to thank Laurel Hickey who for so very many years donated her time, energy and talent as our webmaster. Laurel’s contributions, which date back to the early days of the website, will be very much appreciated. I would like to welcome our new webmaster Guillaume Levesque. I look forward to working with Guillaume as we meet the challenges of the coming year. Brian Busby, President, Federation of BC Writers

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Blue Pencil Blues, or, You May Already Be a Wiener! Edit—the New Four-Letter Word By Ryszard Dubanski, a prize-winning author…

o you can relax now, knowing you’re in safe hands. We’ve all seen phrases like the one above (often set in similarly faux-modest italics), lists of credits and awards decorating the start or end of stories, poems, articles, and other “cultural product.” The tone of reassurance always reminds me of Steve Martin in his early stand-up routines, fake arrow through his head, smarmily telling the audience that they don’t need to worry because he’s a professional entertainer. And it’s true, it’s all so soothing, delivering yourself over to the professional clown, the prize-winning pen-pusher. Until, that is, you get down, get dirty, get—well, blue-penciled yourself. Though not always literally blue, this instrument’s vigorous, well-nigh priapic activity often has a bruiseful azure impact on the recipient of its editorial attentions. Once it gets a’ going, all the lines, not just the blue ones, begin to blur, and the definition of writer—never mind prize-winning—gets downright fuzzy. Long ago, when Steve used his oiliest voice to tell audience members they were receiving top-hole amusement for their R & R dollar, you knew he was joking around, making fun of the notion that folks don’t really know if they’re having a good time—whether they’re really getting it, whatever “it” is. But when you read that Ryszard Dubanski (just for example) is a prize-winning writer, you tend (at least, I used to tend) to read it kind of straight, as information. It was only when I was well stuck into writing/publishing that I realized what now seems such an obvious truth—the author is usually the one who composed those simple, declarative, third-person bio sentences (duh). Not that there’s anything wrong with that; though Seinfeld certainly demonstrated the farcical impact of a person talking about himself in the third person. But in the mini-bio, as a rule we don’t hear a human voice

talking, even metaphorically; we simply receive a written list of asserted accomplishments, often without asking who’s telling us this and why. Here’s another thing I’ve discovered: accomplishments asserted may not be quite what they seem. I shouldn’t be so surprised, being a modestly seasoned editor myself, first at a university press, later freelance, and then in an institution of medium-to-high learning. I would say, by the by, that my editorial approach to a writer’s work is one of respect (and hope that people I’ve edited have experienced it that way). Perhaps naïvely, I’ve never considered it the editor’s job to substantially change an author’s work; in my view, where the work needs massive alteration, that’s where rejection letters come in so handy. When editing, I see myself as first trying to become sensitive to the writer’s unique voice (via eurhythmic dance, challenging sexual positions, trance-inducing drugs, whatever it takes), then encouraging alterations...but only when they seem necessary to body forth her or his vision more accurately. Of course, a ton of self-delusion and suppressed aggression can come into play in such situations; they do tend to call up human nature at its most human. Still, I thought mine was the majority view (if not always practice) vis-à-vis editing, so when I attended my first major publishing seminar (at the Banff Centre), whatever innocence I’d managed to retain was shattered by a shocking disclosure: the revelation of just how radically edited many of the Canadian classics I’d read really were. We participants were told of deep, secret, substantive editing, where scarcely a word remains unchanged. We heard of case after case where the editor, though modestly remaining invisible, has basically rewritten, sometimes even really written the book. Never mind all those soi-disant professional

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FEATURES

writers; there was a secret society of anonymous, underpaid, exploited editors who were in a sense co-creators, at the very least, of all those books on your bedside table. I was dismayed, but slowly came to accept the notion that sometimes a manuscript has a message that should get out there, yet lacks the skilled author to take it where it must go. You might have an inspirational life story, a deep understanding of Abyssinian cats, a bizarre disease, whatever, and just need an editor to make your scattered aperçus into a book. I could see that. Yet somehow I never dreamt that the principle might apply equally well to prize-winning writings. Guess I thought that literature—however variously it may be defined—was the product of one struggling artist’s work. Oh sure, an editor at a literary magazine might suggest different paragraphing, or implement the house punctuation style, maybe even indicate that a piece could be considered if it were shorter—but that was about as wildly as my imagination ranged.

narcissistic kick of publication, or any positive feedback, that Oscar Mayer feeling just got stronger and stronger. Meanwhile life ground on. After some therapy and a few months of listening to my inner wienie, I went forth and submitted a different piece to a different magazine. No contest this time, just a submission. The response was somewhat enthusiastic, but... could we meet to discuss editing? Troubled (and to think that once publication had seemed simple, a yes/no proposition) but ever-submissive, I agreed. Over three lengthy sessions, several months, and multiple rewrites, I was encouraged to re-fashion my story, removing essay-like elements and making it more strongly and simply narrative. Eventually I wrote a version that

Now the scales have fallen from my eyes; and this is how it happened. Some years ago I entered a creative writing contest—and subsequently heard that I had won it. But there was something oddly vague about the announcement. It wasn’t in writing, for one thing, but delivered viva voce over the phone. I’d be hearing more shortly, the message ran. But, gosh, I was a winner, all giddy with self-approbation— what more was there to be heard?

s it turned out, there’d be plenty more, about two years worth. I had won, it seemed, but only if/when I edited the piece. Felt strange, to win a contest with a piece that still needed lots of work, but what did I know? How was more my question. No problem was the answer; I would be told how. I met with one editor, had a session with him wherein he told me what he liked and didn’t in my story, and made suggestions that would, it seemed, remove two-thirds of it. Before I had pulled myself together enough to respond, I heard that a more senior person had his own plans for my little prize petunia. So we met; his concerns were considerably vaguer, but unmistakably different than those voiced by the previous suggester. And his seniority suggested that his suggestions should take precedence.

satisfied the editor—only then to discover that he was not the editor but just an editor. The new version was handed up to the editor, who found it too narrative and wanted more of a discursive tone, including restoration of the elements that I had been explicitly instructed to excise.

Eventually I produced another version, though feeling by now somewhat uncomfortable. Was I truly a winner, or mere sausage destined for some unknown casing? I submitted it to a deafening silence. Weeks, months passed with no response. My prize, perhaps needless to say, was nowhere to be seen— and without the “free” subscription and honorarium, the

To stop the madness (and avoid a murder rap) I pulled the story. But danger lurks everywhere for the ardent, frantically self-involved writer. In the same period I sold another piece to yet another literary publication. Well, “sold” it—the editor e-mailed to say “we’ll take it with thanks... think it’ll continued next page

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Ryszard Dubanski and Michèle Adams

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Blue Pencil Blues, cont’d come out not next week but in the next three.” A return, this seemed, to my quaint notion of cut-and-dried, yes/no editorial encounters. But “we’ll take it” is such an ambiguous phrase; it could mean anything. What it turned out to mean was, nine months later, no publication, no pay, no further communication, and no response from that amiable editor to my carefully worded e-mails of inquiry. Oh baby, I thought, noting the gestational period of silence.

hen, two years after my original “win” I heard back from one of the two editors I’d encountered earlier, at the first magazine mentioned above. Publication had been erratic, he explained, but now they were back on track, keen to print this year’s winner and last year’s winner, together in one massive winner’s issue of the magazine. But... he had a few edits. Torn between tears and laughter, I said sure. His version of my story arrived; he was excising certain parts, particularly it seemed, those to do with nature and beauty. After two years, my appreciation of those aspects of life had waned; I could live with his edits, though the deletions required further rewriting to fix transitions. As well, though twenty-four months had passed as if in a dream, there was a hot rush now—they were going to print shortly, so I put all other work aside to get a draft that we would both find acceptable ready ASAP. After working late a few nights, I submitted it. Fine, he said; I had incorporated all his major suggestions and they would be going to print shortly. I allowed myself a sigh of relief— closure at last. A week or so later, the phone rang. A guest editor, I was told, would be contacting me soon “with a few suggestions.” They came as an e-mail attachment—eighty-eight (!) changes to my most recent version and a request for my response immediately, as they were going to print tomorrow. I responded with a suggestion of my own, opining that this must be an error, as I had already done a rush edit in preparation for this print deadline. Then, with trembling fingers, I re-sent my most recent version. It came back in an hour with a modest style edit. I okayed it by e-mail, as requested. Two days later (well after the putative print deadline, that is), another phone call. Had I looked at the new version? Apparently they hadn’t read my e-mail (though they’d

requested it urgently and we’d been e-mailing back and forth up until then without incident). Anyway, over the phone I told them I had indeed okayed their newest new version, as requested, when I received it. The next day, yet another call, this one from the original non-guest editor; he had some edits to run by me, it seemed, they’d be coming by e-mail tomorrow morning. No mention of the (highly flexible) print deadline this time... Why don’t I just stop, you may ask: stop tickling the keyboard, stop sending stuff off, stop going on about it all? I don’t know why—it’s like a horror movie; you think the monster’s dead, but then “VLEEP... VLEEP ... VLEEP...” Or maybe it’s more like the Energizer Bunny’s perverse liaison with a hotdog, whereof the grotesque offspring is a wiener that just keeps on going and going and going. written by Ryszard Dubanski edited by Michèle E. Adams (whatever that means)

CODA In the midst of the above hijinks, I discovered I had won another literary contest. The announcement was delivered in a nice letter on thick ivory paper; I was assured of publication in December (and shortly thereafter was even paid a generous honorarium). Despite these reassuring occurrences, recent events have changed me; instead of swelling with prideful glee, I shuddered as I perused their seemingly friendly missive. What were they getting at, I asked myself—where was the hidden agenda? Sure enough, there was a bizarre twist, a sinister, unexpected requirement, cunningly buried in paragraph three of the announcement letter: My winning story, however much I begged and pleaded, could not and would not and must not be edited. Not one word could be changed! Be afraid, gentle writer; be very, very afraid.

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A Ten-Year Writing Friendship on Haida Gwaii In conversation with Margo Hearne about her “lit-crit” evenings with Dorothy Spiller

ast year, Margo Hearne, who lives in Masset, approached WordWorks with a suggestion for an article. She had, she said, enjoyed a long writing relationship with Dorothy Spiller, whose critical sense she valued greatly. Now that Dorothy was getting frail and moving to Prince Rupert to be nearer her family, Margo wanted to acknowledge Dorothy’s skills as a writer and mentor, and as a finale to their long association, to allow Dorothy’s own words to show what a remarkable person she is. We were hooked. As the Spring 2006 issue demonstrated, we are interested in all the strategies members in small, far-flung communities devise to serve their needs as writers. Margo sent Dorothy’s reminiscences, which tell a story of struggle and survival and of writing against all odds, which will probably resonate with many of Margo Hearne and writing mentor Dorothy Spiller at work our members, but she also told us a little about herself, and that’s when it became clear that we were dealing with two remarkable women.

Margo has lived on Haida Gwaii for over 30 years. She fished for 19 of those years aboard the troller/gillnetter “Lady Julia.” She is a fundraiser, journalist and poet. She raised over $1 million to restore the Delkatla Wildlife Sanctuary and recently raised $350,000 to build a Nature Interpretive centre in Massett. She was the Executive Director of the Delkatla Sanctuary Society until recently. She has just finished a book about her time on the fishing grounds and another that echoes her passion for birding, Small Birds Cling to Bare Branches: Forest Songbirds of Haida Gwaii. From there, it was a short step to the conversation with Margo that follows. WW Can you tell me first how you came to meet Dorothy? M.H. I first met Dorothy shortly after she had arrived on Haida Gwaii and had completed building her new house out in the dunes. She was parked in her small red jeep outside the post office in Masset and I went up to her and asked her if she was the published writer. She said yes, and I told her

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how much I had enjoyed her short story “Between the River and the Road” just published in North Coast Collection. I asked if she’d be willing to look at some poetry I had written and she said she’d be happy to. She was very gracious and kind! As we got to know each other she also began to share her work with me. Thus we began our ten-year writing collaboration and friendship here on the islands. continued next page 9

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Ten Year Writing Friendship, cont’d WW What form did those sessions take? M.H. We started “lit-crit” evenings. We had a few rules. Dinner and wine, fun literary chat, then down to business. Each one of us would cook in turn, to make things more interesting and relieve the burden of one of us always doing the cooking. We sent each other a sample of our writing to be critiqued a week or two before the planned evening—it didn’t matter if it was recent or old work—then we had our comments ready by the time our evening arrived. Dorothy’s comments were always very helpful. She didn’t mince her words; in fact, we lost one member who found her “brutal”! I needed her critique. She was always sharp and picked up on the redundant. She encouraged me to continue and I really respected her as a person and a writer. While we often sparred a bit over words and sentences, our evenings always ended in laughter and mutual support. Her quick wit and ready agreement to be part of things assuaged the sometimes lonely feeling of living as a writer here on Haida Gwaii. WW How many people have been involved in the lit-crit evenings over the years? M.H. The group started with just Dorothy and me. It lasted for two years or so like that, then another writer in town heard about it and asked to come along. We found that three was a good number; more than that, and it became “work.” WW Has it been a constant group, or one that has changed often? M.H. Although Dorothy and I usually hung in there, the third person was more transient in this transient community. Over the years we have had only about five or six different writers. WW Does the group continue now that Dorothy’s left the island? M.H. When Dorothy began to plan leaving Haida Gwaii, I continued to be part of a triad for a year or so, then it tapered off, as I wasn’t writing as much new stuff and life got a bit busier. WW Can you give me some idea of what it’s like to be a writer in the Charlottes? You mentioned loneliness, which I certainly understand, and I’d guess lack of resources, too. M.H. Living on Haida Gwaii would seem to be a perfect place to write, but it’s amazing how busy life is and how hard it is to set the time aside to actually write. Then about six years ago, I decided that if I didn’t get down to it soon, it would

never get done. I attended the local Learning Centre every afternoon from 1 to 3:30 pm. I just sat down and wrote for 2 ½ hours every day. It was great! All the stuff waiting to be written finally got down on paper. For three years I wrote and wrote, wrung my hands, cried, sweated and wrote. Out of that came a bird book, now at the printers, and the story of my time as a troller/gillnetter, fishing for a living. I also started a story about my time in the Keewatin District working in a fishing camp, but I didn’t finish it. I also sorted all my poetry, started writing articles for the local newspapers and even had my own weekly newspaper, The Morning Star. I wrote, xeroxed and delivered it every Friday in Masset for a year before I ran out of energy. It was a fun project, as I did all the interviewing and layout and everything, but my work for the Delkatla Sanctuary Society needed attention. I began to fundraise for a Nature Centre, and although it took over three years, I raised $350,000 and had the Centre built. Writing is a useful skill for almost all work. Much of my time now is related to getting my bird book printed and it should be out this spring. Then I’ll be distributing it! My husband, Peter Hamel, and I also do a lot of bird surveys, to keep track of the coming and going of migrant birds throughout the year. We have printed a checklist of birds of the Queen Charlotte Islands and watch birds as a normal part of our day. So writing on the islands is a continuum, part of my life. It can be isolated, and I have to work at keeping connected with other writers now that Dorothy has left. WW Obviously Dorothy’s encouragement had its effect! Do you still feel her influence? M.H. Absolutely! When I’m editing something after it’s been written I hear her say, “If a sentence or word sticks in your head it means there’s something not right about it,” or “Have you ever heard of pathetic fallacy, Margo?!” Her influence will be with me always and her positive encouragement has kept me at it. A lit-crit evening is in the works for April, which I’m looking forward to. I’ll be meeting new people and reading new work, and most importantly it will force me to keep writing, for it’s always something that can slip away in the busyness of my day-to-day life. I miss Dorothy and will be sure to visit her in Prince Rupert in her new home on the hill. She doesn’t write much any more, and she can become confused, but her repartee and laughter are still there, and will, I hope, continue to be part of my life for some time yet.

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Dorothy Trail Spiller— A Writer’s Life

taken off with somebody else. He was pretty unhappy about that, so I told him I had a friend I’d like him to meet. I invited Joy to dinner, she and Rod started talking and that was the last I saw of him that evening! ‘We go out together and we just talk the whole time,’ he said. ‘I enjoy listening to her so much.’

As told to Margo Hearne

“In those days, you couldn’t just go out by yourself, there always had to be someone else tagging along. So lo and behold, they decided to get married! Everyone seemed to be marrying then, and when a crowd of us had been out together celebrating the New Year my sister announced her engagement to an accountant friend of Fred’s. Fred, who was with me, said, ‘Well if they’re going to get married we should get married too.’

Dandelions are growing all along our street golden-yellow Dandys like sunshine down the street, pretty little dandelions so sweet, so sweet are they, nodding in the sunlight and blowing all away. “That was the first poem I ever had published,” Dorothy told me recently. “I was seven years old when I wrote it! I’m 83 now and I’ve been writing for 76 years. It was in the Vancouver Province’s children’s column The Tillicum Club. I was so excited when I saw my poem in print that I decided to write a novel. I was going to call it Three at Home, about my brother, my sister and myself. Unfortunately I talked about it at school and all the boys walked up and down the corridors yelling ‘Three at home—three at home—three at home,’ so I gave up! “I did go on writing poetry. I joined Canadian Girls in Training (CGIT) at the local Presbyterian Sunday School. The leader of CGIT was called Annie Gibson and she subscribed to the Canadian Girls Own Paper. She introduced me to it and I sent work to them. To my surprise, I got published. Quite a few poems actually, and a few postcard stories as well. She also introduced me to her cousin Fred, whom I ended up marrying. But that was later. “I noticed poems also being published by a girl called Joy Cook and when I was about fourteen or fifteen we eventually met and became friends. We were both members of the Junior Branch of the Vancouver Branch of the Vancouver Poetry Society (which was then a branch of the London Poetry Society in the days when Canada had a Governor General from Britain). We both continued to write all through school and when I graduated I had about two years to go before looking for a job. Dad told me that if I wanted to ‘do something with my writing’ my parents would help. They would give me a chance. So for the next few years I continued to write. “Then the war started in 1940. My brother Rod joined up. When he came back from a long trip abroad he discovered that his girlfriend had got tired of waiting for him and had

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“I just sort of laughed it off, then the next day Fred said, ‘I asked you to marry me yesterday and you haven’t said anything yet.’ So, I had given him a day to think about it and he still wanted to get married so I guess he was serious. We got married. “I had a job by then but in those days if you married you got fired. The war had ended and I was told that I was going to have to go because ‘all our boys will be coming back and we’ll have to make jobs for them.’ Now I had no work. Fred had quit his job the day before we got married so now neither of us had work. We were in a crummy apartment. I had always known Fred drank a bit, but now I discovered that he drank all the time. I naturally assumed that when we got married, he would stop drinking. In fact my mother used to say ‘Fred lives in your pocket, he never lets you out of his sight!’ “I used to say, ‘Well, that’s good, he’ll be with me all the time.’ But as soon as we got married, he wasn’t with me anymore. He was down at the Invermere beer parlour. “I thought ‘Well, I’ll just stick with it, I’m married now, we’ll solve these problems, I’ll get a job and everything will be okay.’ “Unfortunately, at Christmas I discovered I was pregnant. So I couldn’t work. I just gave up my writing, which I had continued. I couldn’t have a bunch of babies and a drunk coming home at one o’clock in the morning and keep writing. I didn’t think about writing. I just gave it up. We were still in the crummy apartment as Fred’s mother ‘lived in’ as a ladies companion so we couldn’t live with her. “Then we had two children. Fred’s mother bought a house and said we could live in it. So we moved in with the children, Andy and Alec. Suddenly Mrs. Spiller had a heart continued next page

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Ten Year Writing Friendship, cont’d attack and died. I found out she was 73, not 65 as she had said she was! She didn’t want to admit she was older and so did not qualify for a pension. When Fred heard his mother had died the song Goodnight Irene was playing on the radio. Now whenever I hear that song it takes me right back to that time. “Fred inherited the house but no sooner was it handed over to him than he decided to sell it. I begged him not to. ‘We’ve got this house, we just have to make payments on it, but it’s still cheaper that renting. It’s a nice house in a nice neighbourhood.’ But he sold it anyway. “I went to a lawyer to find out if he could sell it, and of course he could, for in those days I had no rights to the house at all and couldn’t stop him. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but the buyer was a soldier who was stationed in Lahr, Germany. He had a wife and small child and wanted, when he came out of the army, to have someplace to come back to. His wife was supposed to keep up the payments, but she didn’t, and as her husband was in Germany, serving his country in the army, we couldn’t do anything about it. She never did make the payments. “So. Now we had nothing. Nothing. Not even a place to live. I looked around and the only place I could find was a small vacant store not too far from where I grew up. There was a small living space behind it with a wash-hand basin, a toilet, sink, kitchenette and cupboards. No bath unfortunately. “I opened the store and called it the Children’s Shop. I got into a little trouble with that as there was another store in the East End called the Children’s Shop so I had to keep quiet about it. I couldn’t put up a sign or anything. We were in South Granville, just across from the original White Spot. Fred was supposed to be keeping the books while I was running the store. Well—his way of keeping the books was to raid the cash-box on a regular basis. He never did keep the books. “I managed to keep the shop going although I wasn’t making very much money. I’d be up until 1 am. sometimes, changing the window displays as well as having the kids to look after. Then I got pregnant again. Finally, the bankruptcy people came along, put a closed sign on the shop and a lock on the door. We couldn’t make the payments. They told me that if I ever run a business again, not to let my husband get into the till! I don’t know how they knew that, I certainly never told anyone.

“Fred got a job up north, in Sunnyside, along the Skeena River, in the cannery beyond Port Edward near Prince Rupert. It was about 1953. I moved my stuff to my parents. They loved the kids and wanted us to stay in Vancouver. Then Fred phoned to say he’d lost his job and needed money. Here I was, feeling really desperate, having closed everything up and made arrangements to come to Sunnyside and he wanted money! Then he phoned again to say that he now had a job at Nelson Brothers as a cashier in the store. So the kids and I got on one of the Union Steamships and headed north. “Fred met us at the dock in a little car and took us to a small cabin he had found for us at the end of the road. It had an oil stove for cooking and heating but no furniture or anything and our own furniture had missed the boat. We had diapers for our youngest, Tommy, but we couldn’t wash them. There was a little stream running at the back and the only way I could get Tommy clean was to hold him under a little waterfall. He hated it! I never had to worry about him going over to the stream on his own. We lived there for a week without furniture. “I used to walk into Port Edward every two or three days for groceries. I have pictures of the boys and me walking into town in those days. Things settled down a bit and Fred kept his cashier’s job, then there was a big hullabaloo in Port Edward. Nelson Brothers fired everyone in top management and sent young Sonny Nelson up to manage the cannery. Fred got fired too although he had nothing to do with this management crisis. He had always been drinking. “Now we had to get out of the Nelson Brothers house we had been in. I went into Prince Rupert and found a place on East 8th. It had a huge living room which I divided into bedrooms for the boys. Fred got a job in a garage in town then landed a job in a cannery in Shearwater, a remote village half-way down the coast. He took off. “The kids and I stayed in Prince Rupert; it was now about 1957 and I was about 35 years old. The Hungarian Uprising occurred, which drove many emigrants into Canada. One was an Olympic champion, a runner, and he had no place to live. So someone bought the place we were living in and gave us notice to get out! There I was, with three young children, an absent husband and no money and we had to get out of our house to make way for an Olympic champion! I started looking for a place again and couldn’t find one. “Fred said he could get us a place in Shearwater and I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t want to go but there was nothing in

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Prince Rupert for me. There were simply no houses for women with children in those days. Fred sent us some money, which helped out, then he sent word that he wanted the money back. I asked how we were going to get to Shearwater and he finally arranged for us to get a trip down on the Union boat.

write a book about my mother and father, the main character being a little girl who grew up in a friendly environment. I still have the book and called it many things but eventually settled for Between the Waves of the Sea. I managed to finish it; I still have it, although it was never published.

“It became quite obvious that Fred wouldn’t last very long in his new job. Every week someone ran up to Ocean Falls and got a bottle for those who couldn’t live without the stuff, and Fred was one of those so he soon got fired. He hitched a ride on a fish boat to Prince Rupert and left us down in Shearwater with no way of getting out. And really no way.

“I never got any feedback until I joined the Cross Canada Writers Quarterly. We used to critique each other’s work. We would send it to five other members and get five different critiques. The criticism wasn’t very detailed, more general, but on the whole, it was the first critiquing I had ever really had. I was just getting into it when unfortunately, the magazine folded.

“I finally phoned Dad (Mother had died in the meantime) and told him what had happened and asked him if he could help me with the fare. Dad told me he didn’t want me going up to Prince Rupert. ‘I’ll buy a house, I want you and the boys to come down and live with me and I want you to keep house for me.’ I thought it sounded all right, but then what? I had four boys and no money, but would have a house and that was it. “I needed a job. I knew I couldn’t find a job in Vancouver but could get something in Prince Rupert. I had already qualified as a Clerk 1. I told Dad I wanted to go up to Prince Rupert, as I knew I could find work there, so he sent me the money. “Fred hadn’t found a house. I found a place and told Fred that I’d have to find work. Even though married women didn’t work in those days, I couldn’t go on living like that anymore. A job came up for a temporary clerk-stenographer in Indian Affairs. When I went for the interview I was asked if I had my husband’s permission to work. I said “Oh yes, you’d better believe he wants me to work!” “I wasn’t very happy there. The woman I worked for was just hell, but I stuck with it, then after two years I got a job with the new Superintendent of Indian Schools as a Clerk Grade III. The Superintendent covered all the area from Prince Rupert up to Hazelton, Terrace, the Naas River and Bella Coola. He was a Mennonite and a really good man, that’s all you could say, a really good person. He gave me back confidence. I still had four boys and not much else, but at least I didn’t feel quite so bad about myself. That was when I started writing again. Fred no longer lived with us. He had become abusive to the kids and I wasn’t having any more of it.

“I got letters and articles published around that time as well, but no fiction or poetry. I started writing Waterface, my novel, around 1981, when I was nearing retirement. “Chappie,” a short story, was written in 1984 though I found I couldn’t really concentrate on short stories until after I retired. I had started Barton Bay when I was in Shearwater and I’ve used parts of it for short stories or novellas. It was based on my experiences and the people I met. During all that time I never got help with my writing and didn’t meet the Prince Rupert writers’ group until I moved to the Queen Charlotte Islands, where I now live. “I had “Journeys with George,” about those times of my life, published twice, once in Northcoast Collection and then in an anthology of the Northcoast Collection by Caitlin Press. “Between the River and the Road” was also in Northcoast Collection. “Fishing Rights” was published in West Coast Review. I also had quite a lot of poetry published in Fiddlehead and various other literary magazines and “Dreams of Orange Trees” was recently published in Room Of One’s Own. I also won a writing prize in the recent Federation of BC Writers’ contest. I have about 5060 poems out, at the moment, to different places. “Geese over the Naas Villages” started when I was in Greenville in the Nisga’a territories and the geese were migrating. I remember talking to someone about it and he mentioned how timeless migration was. After I thought about it for some time I tried to capture how limited our human perception of time is in comparison to that of migrating geese. Now I have been to Lax galts’ap one final time so many of the people I knew are gone—I too am getting old. it’s not likely I’ll go there again. Though the geese return wings embracing and climbing air from undulating tides flight, after flight, after flight into the four villages.

“I had a steady job though I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. I was just managing to stay afloat, always in debt, but managing. In the evenings, the boys had to be in by eight and in bed by eight-thirty. Then I would sit down and write. All this time I’d been thinking about how I would

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

The Accidental Publicist By David J. Litvak

It was never my intention to become a publicist. It happened by accident. Really, it’s true.

had just spent six months at a friend’s house in Portland, Oregon, writing a book about my surreal experiences in Nelson, a wacky mountain town in Southeastern British Columbia. After sending my book out to numerous publishers, I made my way back home to Vancouver so that I could meet with a few of them face to face. My last meeting was with Jo Blackmore, the owner of Granville Island Publishing, a self-publishing company located appropriately enough on Granville Island. The truth was that I didn’t have enough money to self-publish my book but I wanted to leave no stone unturned in my quest to become a published author (which at this point had become an obsession).

While I was waiting to meet Jo in her office, I noticed an intriguing book on the shelf. The cover featured a pair of European refugees standing in front of what looked like the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest (a city that I had visited once before). I leafed through it for a moment and then put it back on the shelf but made a mental note to ask about it after our meeting. A few minutes later, Jo appeared and we talked about my book and the possibilities of publishing it. She then asked me if I had any advice about publicizing Escape From Pannonia, the book that I had been glancing at earlier. It was a Holocaust love story written by Steve Floris, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. I started writing suggestions for her about how to publicize it in Seattle, Portland and Vancouver. Three pages later, she suggested that I do publicity for Escape From Pannonia. I replied that I would have to read it first whereupon she handed me the book. After I read Steve’s incredible account of how he and his wife serendipitously survived the Holocaust I was excited about sharing his story with readers everywhere—and voila, an accidental publicist was born. Being a publicist has benefited me as a writer in numerous ways. I have learned invaluable lessons about the publishing

industry, especially in regards to the important roles marketing and publicity play in the success of a new book. In some ways, it’s the perfect day job for an aspiring writer, especially since writing is an integral part of publicity. As David Litvak of Cascadia Publicity part of my job, I regularly have to write proposals, press releases, biographies, testimonials and letters. I have also learned that for a book to be successful, not only does it need to be well written and publicized but it also needs to be properly distributed and displayed in bookstores, libraries and non-traditional markets. In addition, the book tours, media appearances, interviews and book launches I organize for other writers have prepared me for the realities of today’s book publishing industry. Thanks to being a publicist, I have made some great contacts with radio and TV producers and newspaper editors, reporters and reviewers in the United States and Canada. These contacts will come in handy once I have my own book to promote. And to top it all, my life as a publicist has led me to meet some inspiring authors and has also led me to some amazing places that I would never have discovered or visited on my own. For example, Eric Wickham, the author of Dead Fish and Fat Cats (and the Executive Director of the Canadian Sablefish Association) invited me to attend a Fish Expo in Seattle and a World Fisheries Congress in Vancouver. At Fish Expo, where all the movers and shakers in the fishing and aquaculture industries assemble, I flogged Eric’s book and fished for publicity. I hooked up with two editors of prominent American fishing publications; Linc Bedrosian of National Fisherman and John van Amerongen of The Alaska

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Fisherman’s Journal and they both ended up writing great reviews of Eric’s book in their respective publications. And as it turned out, both John and Linc were musicians. I was beginning to wonder if all editors of fishing publications were fishing musicians. However, at the World Fisheries Congress, I didn’t meet any more fishing musicians. Instead, I met a fascinating array of fisher folk from around the world including fisheries officials and academics, marine biologists, scientists and environmentalists and representatives of aquaculture companies and organizations. And to top it all, at the Dead Fish and Fat Cats book launch I got to meet and introduce renowned scientist and environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki, who wrote the introduction for Eric’s book. So I am grateful to Eric and his book for having exposed me to the life aquatic; to a world filled with salmon, sablefish and fishing musicians.

here was nothing fishy about Sally Rogow, a renowned special-needs educator and the author of an inspiring book for teenagers called Faces of Courage: Young Heroes of World War II. Thanks to Sally and her book, I got to attend several Jewish book festivals and explored Toronto and San Francisco’s Bay area with her. Between readings at schools and bookstores and interviews at newspapers and television stations, Sally and I wandered around Bathurst Street and explored Toronto’s thriving Jewish community. A highlight of our trip was a five-day stay at a bizarre hotel called the Montecassino. Its 70s motif, plush carpeting and second-floor lobby made it the perfect setting for a Coen Brothers movie. And there were a lot of interesting characters lurking about the hotel (who would have made great extras in one of their movies). In fact, one night as we were huddled outside the hotel’s entrance (a false fire alarm!), I met a member of the Winnipeg Rock band, The Waking Eyes. The musician and his band mates (who were out partying for the night) were recording an album at a nearby studio, but I was invited to see and hear some of the band’s music at a private listening session in his room. My next major trip with Sally was to the Bay area where I was a chauffeur, publicist and guide all rolled up into one. From our home base of Berkeley, we got to explore some amazing places like Los Altos Hills, San Mateo, Palo Alto, Atherton and El Cerrito. Highlights of the trip included listening in on the inspiring readings Sally gave to teenagers at the Tehiya Day School in El Cerrito, St. Joseph’s Sacred Heart Catholic School in Atherton and Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills. We browsed great bookstores including

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Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Bob and Bob’s in Palo Alto (which has one of the largest selection of Jewish books and Judaica on the West Coast) and Afikomen Books in Berkeley. There were some great fringe benefits to publicizing Sally’s book and travel was certainly at the top of that list! In working on the publicity for Tom Johnston, a Canadian Motor Sport Hall of Fame inductee and the author of Sports Car Road Racing in Western Canada, I got to attend the Portland and Seattle Vintage car races and was given a test drive in a Porsche at 120 miles an hour. What a rush! All for the sake of publicity, of course. On Robbie Burns Day earlier this year I marched through the lobby of the downtown branch of the Vancouver Public Library with two men in kilts. I was escorting Celtic author Bill Galloway and his bagpipe-playing son, Alex, to a reading downstairs while holding up a placard of the cover of Bill’s book, They Called Me Otherwise: Stories of Growing Up in Africa, Scotland and Canada. I, unlike Bill and his son, was not wearing a kilt but I became exposed to a different culture—one I wouldn’t have known had I not been involved in the publicity for Bill’s memoir. More recently, I have worked on the promotion of Lance Berelowitz’s award-winning book, Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination (Douglas & McIntyre, 2006). I organized readings and coordinated publicity for Lance in the United States and attended his reading at Powell’s City of Books, the premier bookstore in the Pacific Northwest. This Portland bookstore is a writer’s and book lover’s paradise and being in attendance was just another of the many perks of being a publicist. I also had the privilege of doing publicity for Homefront and Battlefront: Nelson BC During World War II (which was recently honoured by the BC Historical Federation). The author of the book, Sylvia Crooks, a native of Nelson, wrote it as a tribute to the patriotic populace of the town that had indirectly led me to becoming a publicist in the first place. Thanks to Sylvia and her meticulously researched book, I was able to reconnect with the Kootenays. So things had come full circle. Being a full-time writer is my ultimate goal but in the meantime I can’t complain, for my life as an “accidental publicist” has provided me with plenty of adventures and inspiration and it’s made me a better writer. Come to think of it, perhaps my becoming a publicist was not so much an accident, as it was a path towards my own literary life.

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

The 2006 AGM Annual Lecture

A Dream of Writing By Stephen Osborne

My theme tonight is “A Dream of Writing,” and it consists of notes on literary life gathered from journals kept intermittently over the years, and stories written, told, and some of them published, since 1990. I begin with a memory of literary life, in a tiny story written last year in the third person, and recast tonight in the first person. This story called Writing Life.

he only car you could drive in those days no matter how drunk you were was a Volkswagen Beetle with a broken heater, and no one had ever seen a Volkswagen in those days with a heater that worked. I remember driving a Volkswagen out of the city after a night of heavy drinking and exorcism at the home of a well-known poet whose girlfriend had been troubled at the Ouija board by a phantom stalker. Finally I picked up the planchette in both hands and spelled out an invocation summoning the phantom stalker, whose name was Jack Bicky, into the back seat of the Volkswagen that I had parked in the street, and then I went out and got into the Volkswagen and began the long, slow drive across the city and out past Boundary Road, completely drunk and accompanied only by the angry spirit of Jack Bicky, who was never heard from again. You couldn’t do that in any automobile today. A writer I knew very well named D.M. Fraser, who had a reputation for his brilliant short stories, set out from Vancouver in December in a 1948 Peugeot with a 30 hp engine and a broken heater, intending to drive to his hometown of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, 4,600 kilometres away, in the company of a little-known paraphrenic poet who paid for the gas and sandwiches and a case of Canadian Club whisky. The Peugeot made it through Quebec and New Brunswick in a blizzard that lasted three days, and then they parked in a snowdrift on Temperance Street in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and in the morning when they got back to Temperance Street the Peugeot had vanished. They dug around in the snow for most of the day, and found neither the car nor the last of the whisky, which was a real problem on a Sunday in Nova Scotia, when all the bars and restaurants were closed and the liquor store was simply out of the question. 16

It was illegal in Vancouver in those days to stand up in a beer parlour with a drink in your hand. I had occasion to remember that Peugeot some years later, when a grey Volkswagen Beetle with a hole in the floor given to me by a girlfriend who had gone home to Selkirk, Manitoba, disappeared in thick fog near the corner of 6th Street and 6th Avenue in New Westminster, after a publishing friend who borrowed it to deliver a box of books went back to where he had parked it a few minutes earlier and it was gone. The friend called the police and the towing companies, and he went back the next day to search the neighbourhood, but that grey Volkswagen was never seen again. I told him to go home and forget about it, it was just like that Peugeot in the snow in Nova Scotia. In those days a draft beer cost a quarter and a phone call cost a dime. You could get from Halifax to Vancouver on the CNR day coach for seventy-five bucks. Fog in those days was not like fog is today. I used to borrow a red Volkswagen Beetle from an editor I knew and drive out at night to the delta with D.M. Fraser in order to visit a Trotskyist poet who liked to drink whisky and talk into the night on his big front porch. We would drive home drunk on the secondary highways in the fog and, when we got lost, stop the car and get out the spare bottle and wait for the sun to come up. One night we parked in the fog and D.M. Fraser got out and fell ten feet into a ditch at the edge of the road and lost his eyeglasses. We thrashed around in the dark on our hands and knees like a couple of kids trying to pin the tail on the donkey and then climbed back into the car

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and finished the spare bottle. The strange thing about this story is that two days later when the fog cleared, we drove straight out to the same ditch without thinking about it and the eyeglasses were lying right there in the grass; it was as if the Volkswagen had a memory of its own. Another editor I knew who drove a green Volkswagen Beetle offered me a ride one night in heavy rain and when we got into the car she handed me a cord that ran out to the windshield wiper. You pull that end and I pull this end, she said, and we’ll get through this. I was drawn irresistibly toward her. We met up again ten years later in Winnipeg, when neither of us was driving a Volkswagen any more, and we’ve been shacked up ever since in a condo somewhere over on the east side. She says there was free daycare in those days and there were phone booths everywhere. All you needed was a dime for the call and the patience to let it ring.

n the year 1972, the Social Credit movement in Canada, which some of you will recall, was slipping into decline, having passed through its Funny Money Epoch and its Monumental Pavement Epoch of enormous bridges and

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universities on the tops of mountains and wide highways running through the neighbourhoods of cabinet ministers and properties owned by their children who had been prescient enough to buy up the rights of way, and the great plan to pave over the east side of Vancouver with freeways had been blocked at the Georgia Viaduct, and W.A.C. Bennet, the last of the great Social Credit tub-thumpers, having realized that he was about to be defeated in his final campaign, called out to the party faithful at a rally in Vancouver: “Hear me now, my friends, for the Socialist hordes are at the gates.” That year my socialist friends and I had begun publishing books and pamphlets and broadsides and a fourpage magazine in a third floor walkup over on Pender Street across the alley from the Marble Arch beer parlour. The Marble Arch beer parlour was a sleepy establishment favoured by old age pensioners who lived upstairs and came down in the evenings to sit quietly against the wall and talk among themselves or to exchange or avoid eye contact, and sometimes to play “Fascination” on the jukebox, and the Marble Arch beer parlour served for years as our editorial office and manuscript reading room. We raised forty-five continued next page 17

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

A Writing Life, cont’d dollars from our unemployment insurance cheques to buy a hand-waxer (an implement sadly no longer to be seen in publishing offices), and then another twenty-five dollars to put the deposit on the telephone on which we ordered a $7,000 typesetting machine from Boston Massachusetts, where the Compugraphic corporation was so eager to get another machine into Western Canada (the first had been at the Chinese Times a few blocks along Pender Street, where we had first seen one in action) that they sent us a brand new Computype with no credit check and no down payment. I remember having to sit on the floor to make that call because we had not yet acquired a single stick of furniture on which to carry out the business of making literature.

he offices that we occupied covered the third floor of a decrepit building that you can still see today directly across Pender Street from MacLeod’s Books. Have a look at it when you’re over there: it looks just like it did in 1972, which is not much changed from when it was the first Paris Hotel in the city, named during a time when the Chicago Dentists occupied the floor above the Boston Oyster Saloon on Hastings Street, and then it was the Vancouver Publicity Bureau in the thirties; in 1974 Brian Shein described it in a collection of plays and essays called Theatrical Exhibitions, as follows: “I began writing this book in Vancouver in the Pulp Press offices one dull Sunday afternoon: the radiators were steaming, it was raining or going to rain. Down below at the corner of Richards and Pender a drunk with a shopping bag and a guitar case began barking like a dog at the traffic light. The light changed, he crossed the street. For the last few weeks I had been sleeping under a rubber raincoat on the office floor, scraping up enough to buy liquor or a bit of food by cashing in empty beer bottles at the store down the street. There was a long roll of Telex paper feeding into the typewriter. I typed slowly, deliberately, with no hope except to record the source of the sweats that came over me.” The idea for a four-page magazine emerged one idle afternoon when we discovered that you could get 5,000 words onto an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper in 6 point type if you weren’t too picky about margins. The trick was in folding the sheet over to make leaves, and then to find a way to get it to readers. We had soon hit on the idea of charging three cents a copy and consigning the whole price to bookstores

that would agree to carry it on their front counter. I have copies here, so you can see that what we called a magazine would be called a zine today, and I like to think that 3Cent Pulp is one of the forerunners of the zine world as we now know it. We chose three cents as the cover price because there was a tax on books at that time so anyone making a purchase in a bookstore always had a few pennies in their change, and we announced a biweekly publishing schedule because we were too young to know better, and a subscription price of $10 a year, which represented to us, as we put it in our subscription offers, a considerable saving over the cover price of three cents a copy. Within a year we had 250 subscribers and a corresponding budget of about $2,500; writers, artists and editors were never paid, and neither was the rent or the phone or the bill for the telex rolls we used for correspondence, all of which came from other sources. Each issue contained rants, poems and stories and miscellaneous additional material. We printed 1,000 copies and shipped them out in bundles to bookstores across the country and engaged the post office on the question of second class mail privileges, which at that time extended only to newspapers; and for six months the most eloquent writer among us, a poet and a songwriter of some renown, typed out a series of letters on one of the telex rolls—the telex roll came with carbon paper built in, so copies of all correspondence from that period has been preserved in bulldog clips that we hung on the wall in an ever-lengthening row. In the end the eloquent poet won the argument with the post office by proving beyond doubt that our threecent magazine was indeed a newspaper, with the result that we were the first literary magazine in the country to qualify for the postal subsidy. Every age is particular for and perhaps peculiar to those who grow up in it. For my friends and me the seventies found its expression in what we called garbanzo publishing, a form of literary publishing outside the academic world and even, now that I think of it, outside the known publishing world. The Vietnam War informed everything that happened in that period and we tend to forget now, just as we did then; the war simply went on and on, and American presidents were all crazy. Garbanzo publishing evolved in opposition to the universities and the few publishers around, and it extended to broadsheets and pamphlets (The Destruction of Vancouver was the title of the first pamphlet; Incest: Breaking the Taboo was another, and a reprint of The Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, many books of fiction and poetry, a few plays, scurrilous comix maligning Richard Nixon and Pierre

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drawn to writers and editors whose response was to avoid Trudeau). At night we went out with pots of wallpaper glue eye contact at all costs. Our table in the Marble Arch was and put up broadsides against the government, and poems and harangues and instructions for the application of fire to often visited by Trotskyists and Anarchists and a Maoist public buildings (which I wrote myself )—and then we went named DJ who stopped trying to recruit us for the party into the Marble Arch for a quick dozen before closing time. when she decided that she would rather laugh at our jokes And from time to time we staged extempothan insist on the party line. There were raneous overblown performances of no humourists among the revolutionarimprovised song and poetry and rants that ies of that time as there were none we called Garbanzo Musicales. These were The idea for a four-page among politicians anywhere, as we some of the elements of a particular magazine emerged one learned when a couple of MPs anliterary scene, for we were by no means the nounced in Parliament that a publishidle afternoon when we ing house in Vancouver called Pulp only scene in town: there were others and they were proliferating through the decade. discovered that you could Press, recipient of a Canada Council There were feminists at Press Gang get 5,000 words onto an grant, was a terrorist operation with Publishing and at Makara magazine; there 8.5 by 11 inch piece of links to the Italian Red Brigade and was were social activists at Stan Persky’s place under scrutiny by something they called paper in 6 point type if you where New Star Books came into being, Canadian Security forces. We had and over at the Georgia Grape, and high weren’t too picky about written and published a satirical pambrow literary types at Talon Books on phlet called The Anarchist Peril based on margins. Powell Street; there were poets and artists a nineteenth-century French textbook in over at Intermedia, and a first generation which anarchists were categorized by the of artists and conceptualists at the Western shapes of their heads; this was the Front. evidence that aligned us with international terrorism of the time. Literary and cultural life as I present it here found its health in a counter-culture widespread enough that one could find The Red Brigade was a frightening band of middle-class respect and support among peers, and social structures that knee-cappers, who had a week earlier murdered Aldo Moro, are no longer ready to hand: I mean cooperative housing, a prominent Italian politician, whose bloody corpse had daycare subsidy, a proper unemployment insurance scheme been on the front page of every newspaper in the world. that paid out for eleven months with few questions asked, When Aldo Moro’s funeral appeared on the evening news, it accessible welfare. One can see looking back that these was followed by a shot of our office on Pender Street, which institutions and various acronymical programs, LIP, LEAP, looked on TV as if it really were a terrorist’s office (whatever OFY, CYC, provided for a Literary Life as well, and were that might be); there was an unmistakeable grungy headpart of a political will that has withdrawn from the culture quarters look to the place, enhanced by the little TV logo for in recent decades. terrorism in the corner of the screen (a fist clenching a pistol in silhouette), and then there were the terrorist publishers here were no locks on the doors to the Pulp Press themselves, an unsavoury crew of malcontents grimacing offices, which remained open to the street for five uncomfortably before the camera. These guys looked like years and the fire escape at the back door became a perpetrators; there could be no doubt about it. There were refuge for a homeless security guard named Geoffrey who three of them there in the headquarters beneath the terrorist used to curl up on the landing in his uniform, and when one logo: their pseudonyms were George Telford, Big Bill of us worked late with a case of Old Style beer open on the Stevenson, and me in the middle, with no pseudonym at all. floor, pounding away on one of the typewriters parked Jean-Paul Cortane, our pseudonymous anarchist editor, had under a Telex roll, Geoffrey might show up and begin already gone underground. reading aloud in a whisper the essay on Utopia in the Over the ensuing months and then for five or six years, we Columbia Desk Enclyclopedia, which he said was a piece of were visited by policemen disguised as a series of clean writing dear to his heart. For some months the neighbouryoung men with short hair, pressed shirts and loosely hood was haunted by a pale young man who carried around knotted ties. The most spectacular of them wore reflector a varnished box with a door in the side of it that when continued next page opened revealed a plaster replica of Einstein’s head; he was

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

A Writing Life, cont’d sunglasses and shiny white shoes and carried a plaid sports jacket over his shoulder. His story was the same as the others; he was in the neighbourhood and thought he’d pick up some of those political books he’d been hearing about. We sent him down to MacLeod’s Books on the corner, as we did his colleagues, but neither he nor his colleagues ever showed up there. At the same time the telephone began acting strangely, and we took to lowering it out the window when meeting with authors or anyone else we didn’t wish to embarrass. The phone, the same one we had used to order the $7,000 typesetting machine, had a 25-foot cord and it hung down the outside of the building well past the second floor where the receiver twisted slowly in the air just outside the window of the local Alchoholics Anonymous, who had moved in after the Kung Fu parlour that had been our neighbours before them, having run up $300 worth of phone bills on the Pulp Press telephone, had skipped out in the middle of the night.

I wrote the farewell essay to the readers of 3Cent Pulp, dated 20 Jan 1980, a Sunday, the week that smugglers had been discovered concealing contraband Mercedes Benzes in the sand dunes of Arabia, the week that No. 18 on the Born Again Hit Parade was “Why Should the Father Bother,” and the week that the Canadian Civil Defense Commander assured the public that no one had anything to fear from a nuclear attack, as he put it, “as long as they don’t attack at night, or by surprise.” I put these interesting facts in the essay because they had come to my attention while I was writing it. 3Cent Pulp was nothing if not aleatory: it was a product of chance operations. “We are getting old,” I wrote, in 1980, “and lacking a bureaucracy with its feckless capacity for regeneration, want to have a rest and dry out for a while.” The farewell issue contained many extra pages of poetry and prose and weird art as a token recompense for the unfulfilled subscriptions that we were abandoning, and we thanked all of our readers and all of our contributors and ourselves and then that was that. The Seventies was over.

he Literary Life that I am thinking about began to During this time we employed a mailing system that used take form sometime in the 1960s when I began little stencils stacked up in a hopper to address copies of the learning to read with my ears, and it developed in magazine to its subscribers, and we stamped out the logo on the seventies as I began learning to publish and to find the front page by hand on every one of the one thousand audiences, and since 1990 it has come to include writing as copies in each edition. Editorial duty rotated through the well as part of a literary practice that remained for me group of editors and writers and troublemakers who made the office and the Marble Arch beer parlour a regular part of grounded always in reading and in publishing, and since I their intellectual lives. By 1980, we had published 107 issues began writing in the late eighties, I have been trying to find a sentence that will allow what has already happened to flow and had been banned twice from the Vancouver Public into the present without impediment, without having to Library and we were two and a half years behind in the contend with the scaffolding of the grampublishing schedule; by our own matical past—the imperfect, the perfect, the calculations we had spent $65,000 pluperfect—all strategies for diverting the in the Marble Arch beer parlour, If Pulp Press might be said merely previous into a tangle of backwardwhich is the equivalent of 130,000 ever to have had a Golden flowing streams, endlessly shedding entropy glasses of beer. We had printed a total of 117,000 copies of the Age, it was that day in as they recede from view. In 1971 I was twenty-three years old; I had resolved on a magazine, about half a million 1971, when a bookseller’s life of quiet desperation: a hot plate, an iron pages of literary writing, and we had perfected the financial manage- benevolence, fine weather cot, a typewriter, a footlocker filled with ment technique that we had named and the Unemployment socks and underwear and the works of 100% Loss Financing. And we had Insurance all conspired to Leonard Cohen, Donald Barthelme and Feodor Dostoyevsky; these are all my launched the 3-Day Novel Contest, augur success, and the worldly goods. The War Measures Act is still a literary event born in the in effect, the Prime Minister has taken a future lay before us like an Piccadilly Pub a few days before the wealthy flower child as his bride, and the Easter Weekend of 1978, and that open door. media are speculating openly about the still thrives today, despite recurring future of his wardrobe. The typewriter is a attempts to put it to sleep.

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Hermes Baby, tiny, green and indestructible. (It will be seen for the last time years later in a distant part of the city, on a top closet shelf next to a frayed cardboard box filled with abandoned manuscripts.) The hotplate lies waiting in a second-hand furniture store in a jumble of household implements in which an aluminum pot, a frying pan, a soup bowl and a china plate are soon to be discovered; already things are beginning to complicate themselves. Nevertheless, having been confounded in love and perplexed by life, I am determined in the words of the Japanese poet of the everyday to become a weather-beaten skeleton before the snares of futurity snatch me up. In a corner of the second-hand furniture store sits a Multilith printing press which I add to my growing inventory of personal effects in exchange for a $20 bill before dragging it up the alley to my room in the back of an income tax preparation office, whose proprietor pays me a tiny sum for making myself visible in the front window every other day. I assemble the cot on the dark side of the room, and drag the printing press over near the window on the light side; a summer will pass as I learn to understand its operation and to begin publishing tiny volumes of poetry, while around me the relentless melting away of the world continues. For this is the core of my experience, the continuous seeping away of reality, which seems to constitute the basis of a secret knowledge of which no one speaks. I am silent in my little room, heating soup on the hotplate, writing in a blue notebook in the afternoons, tending to the rumble of the printing press in the evenings, but rarely do I achieve anything like a state of rest; I am self-conscious most of the time, and often feel like an (absurd) object of scrutiny rather than the subject of a life. In my search for a subjectivity of my own I will encounter an older woman whose husband, an athletic man capable of great rage, will assault me in the street in the middle of the afternoon, while screaming over and over: “You fucked my wife!”; and a self-described ex-Nazi named Helmut, for whom I will compose a series of romantic letters addressed to a woman named Ruth, the object of his unrequited love. (Ruth will never reply: in the end I will want to write, “I am ruthless without you, Ruth,” but Helmut, who speaks a rough broken English, will never agree.) I am of course my own object of scrutiny all this time, and as I write down my observations in my notebook I suspect that my own subjectivity will eventually find a sentence of its own making, and that such a sentence (of which I will be both subject and object), will always await me as I wait out the events of this season, this immediate summer which recurs entirely in each of its moments.

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Many year later, which is to say only a few years ago, a young man who had been a student of mine in a creative writing workshop at the University of Victoria sent me a note to say that he had been riding along the Trans-Canada Highway with friends on Canada Day and he was reading a story that I had written about leaving the city in an old Toyota and driving through the Fraser Canyon, and as they were coming up to the Fraser Canyon, he looked out the window and saw an old Toyota chugging along in the right hand lane, and then he saw that the driver of the old Toyota was me, his old teacher, driving into the canyon that I had written about in the story that he was reading at that moment. He began waving his hands and calling out to his friends in the car, but no one believed him. I assumed when I read his note that he had mistaken someone else for me, but then I looked again at the date and remembered that indeed I had driven up through the canyon on Canada Day, and then I began to feel what it would be like to be observed inside one of my own narratives. This is perhaps the closest I will ever come to meeting myself in passing.

he first book printed on the printing press that I bought in the second-hand furniture store was a slender volume of poems by my brother Tom Osborne; it was called Please Wait For Attendant to Open Gate. I took a copy into Duthie Books on Robson Street behind the old library and Bill Duthie, who some of you will remember, I hope, growled at me and thumbed through it and ordered forty-five copies and paid me cash right from the till. It was an illuminating moment. Such a thing would rarely if ever happen again, but we couldn’t know that then. If Pulp Press might be said ever to have had a Golden Age, it was that day in 1971, when a bookseller’s benevolence, fine weather and the Unemployment Insurance all conspired to augur success, and the future lay before us like an open door. In fact literary writing and publishing in Canada in the seventies was a never ending struggle to find an audience. Finding Canadian books in Canadian bookstores was not an easy thing to do—you had to go to the Canadiana shelf, a hodgepodge of genres and authors stuck in a back corner of the store. Literary publishing is always a struggle. Thirty years ago Canadian literature was barely visible; today it’s highly visible as a consumer category and the great concentration of bookselling in the hands of a single company creates an equally unfriendly environment for the evolution of a literature. The interface between readers and writers has been thoroughly institutionalized: a single functionary in the vast Chapters-Indigo chain controls the reading of the nation continued next page

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

A Writing Life, cont’d (the CBC radio and its annual pageant of naming One Book that every Canadian ought to read, One Song to dance to, is perfectly in harmony with the monopolist version of culture that giant institutions like Chapters-Indigo represent). Big Brother is always wanting to tell you what to read and think—in the seventies no more than it is now: everything in the modern age tends toward monoculture. I meet young writers today who believe and are determined by the belief that an MFA is an important step in becoming a writer, that an MFA will lead to an agent and a publishing contract; and indeed in the Creative Writing industry there is no direct route from writer to publisher, from writing to publishing, from writers to readers. The mediators are Creative Writing teachers, agents and editors who have been immersed in the Creative Writing system, and the central buyer at Chapters Indigo; there is no counterculture to this monoculture of literary production, which is a form of consumer packaging: from author to agent mediated through Creative Writing programs to publishers and the “positive” review by critics who emerge from the same literary loop, a loop that excludes readers themselves. The result is a number of adequate, occasionally good first titles and a deluge of second-rate second and third titles; this is equally true in fiction and non fiction, and in journalism. Read any issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism to see the evidence. The literary journals published and written at the universities are notable mainly for their lack of editorial voice, lack of publishing passion, and very little sense of being part of a discourse, of an exchange between writers and readers.

o along with this concentration of the marketplace, and access to audience goes the concentration within the last two decades of writing itself within the confines of the university Creative Writing departments, where so many of us find the employment as sessional instructors and workshop leaders that we need in order to survive in literary life, but where literature itself, through the statistical process of large systems, is being homogenized and flattened out. I say this as an editor and a publisher always on the lookout for good writing. I feel like Dwight Eisenhower, the old golfer, when he took a few minutes away from the fairway to warn the world about the rising power and the vast reach of the Military industrial Complex; similar vast impersonal structures are at work today in what can be named the Creative Writing Industry, which has been

growing steadily for twenty years, until now the system Big Brother is always of compromise and nonwanting to tell you commitment that ensues what to read and from the workshop system of creative writing, and the think, in the seventies role of agents and editors no more than it is in massaging the product, now; everything in the is shaping a generation of editors and critics and modern age tends writers all of whom share toward monoculture. the same indoctrination. Those who are not included in that closed circle are the readers, of whom there are many more now than there have ever been, and they are reading a literature of diminishing value: a literature that is increasingly becoming a literature without verbs. I know because I have counted the verbs. The literature of the seventies was rough and it was angry; it had to struggle to find an audience. Now the audience is there but the literature is disappearing. I look for it, I publish it when I find it, I wait for it. I want to write it.

iterary life is a life of subsidy. Everyone in the literary life requires the equivalent of a day job or an independent income; such is the fact underlying these stories that I tell tonight. We subsidized our publishing operation in the early years by typesetting the free classified ads for weekly newspapers, at a rate of 50 cents a column inch. The work usually took place in the evenings; one of us would sit at the typesetting machine and tap away the endless lists of household merchandise and because the ads were free they went from large appliances down through furniture and linen to individually listed pots pans knives forks and spoons, and used cars and then the entire contents of the garage, and the rest of us would sit in the Marble Arch talking fiercely about higher things. Eventually a replacement would climb the fire escape and relieve the incumbent. Some of us wrote bogus letters to the editor for those same newspapers. As we learned the art of typography we began setting type for larger publishers, and we opened up a printing business and printed broadsides and pamphlets and books for other impecunious publishers who had other ways of supporting their publishing habit. In the eighties some of us began dealing in computers and selling them cheap to writers; we used to meet dealers in parking lots where the exchange of cash in wads for computers in boxes could take place safely in

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broad daylight. Soon I was teaching courses in small publishing and desktop publishing, and we held workshops and courses in our office on Homer Street. After Geist got going I was able to teach writing at the UVic writing department, and I still teach courses in narrative writing and in publishing at SFU.

hen I think of writers working I remember a story by D.M. Fraser written directly into the typesetting machine that came from Boston, Massachusetts. D.M. Fraser, like many writers during that time, was able to find work occasionally invigilating at examination time for the English Department at UBC. In the story by D.M. Fraser, which is called “The Examination,” the protagonist, a writer, invigilating: “is thinking of a song heard on the radio, this morning: something about the waters of oblivion. Send her all my salary / from the waters of oblivion. What he heard, the rhyme he understood, was Celery. Send her all my celery, he heard. Now he thinks of the tall green celery growing there, the pale green stalks waving wetly in the murky deeps, the waters of oblivion. He knows those waters well: he has seen the celery… The gardeners wear flippers and masks, pale green, who go down in the waters of oblivion. Gently, they weed and prune.” Let me return to Brian Shein, a writer who like D.M. Fraser was a great influence in my writing and publishing life, who is now writing the epilogue to his book, Theatrical Exhibitions, in the Pulp Press office on Pender Street: “It’s six o’clock in the morning. I’ve been sitting up all night in this shabby downtown office, the Pulp Press office, the place where I’ve gotten into the habit of coming after the beer parlour closes, after everyone’s gone home. Just here, to be alone with the cartons of books, the cluttered mailing desk, correspondence falling from the clips on the walls. At the end of the hallway, the typesetting machine. The printing press squats in its separate room where it’s dark and smells of ink and I never go, unless I’m looking for a bit of liquor someone might have hidden there. To be alone here, near the centre of the city. To read, fumble through filing cabinets looking for something to catch my interest. Letters, books, all that paper. To smoke cigarettes. To make coffee or tea with one of those metal coils you plug in and hang over the lip of the cup. To type, slowly now.

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“On the desk, a cup of tea, my third tonight. My cigarettes. Two empty cigarette packages. Magazines, books, scraps of paper, flakes of tobacco and ash. The teletype roll, hung from a bent coat hook on the wall. Outside, the first bus has gone past. It’s cold out there but no rain, no snow. Only, when I came here around midnight, a thin gloss of ice on the sidewalk. “These details. I want to put them down here, to give you a sense of how it is that I am sitting here, writing this. I want you to understand that, to know where I’m writing from. This office. This second-hand barber’s chair, an arm-rest missing, hauled in front of a desk. “It’s quiet here at night. Hardly any cars in the street. Around one or two o’clock the streetwasher lumbers past, flushing the gutters. The traffic light at the corner of Richard and Pender keeps on all night long. Walk. Don’t walk. Around four-thirty tonight I could hear, faintly, someone playing a bugle a few blocks away on Granville St. They were playing Taps. Day is done, gone the sun. The bugle faded, rose briefly, faded, disappeared. I went to the window to see if there was anyone in the street. No one. But someone else, surely, maybe in the Niagara Hotel or one of the apartments over Bill’s Luggage Shop, someone else heard the bugle, tried to remember the words. “I like this section of town. It is shabby. People live their lives in the windows of third-rate hotels, in beer parlours, in cheap office buildings. We live to occasional music, obvious music. A bugler in the empty heart of the city. A jukebox. A drunk singing to nobody but his memories, and those deaf, voiceless. Failing that, the sounds of rain, of a radiator, distant traffic. We look out windows in the dead of night, never sure if there are other eyes from other nearby windows looking down into the same street. “A cold blue-grey light across. It’s eight-thirty now, almost time for someone else to arrive, stumble up the stairs with a cup of coffee bought from the Alcoholics Anonymous Fellowship Hall on the floor below. Cars in the street, seagulls calling, a ship’s horn, the day beginning. “A piece of paper, with words on it. This sheet of paper, for instance. A mask, that I hold in front of my face. The only mask I have, the only one I move behind. It will have to do.” Thank you very much, Stephen Osborne

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

WEIGHING OUR WORDS Peer review: BC writers consider BC books

Flower Power by Ann Walsh Orca Book Publishers (2005) ISBN: 1-55143-386-9 Talk to any young person between twelve and eighteen and they will all say the same thing—parents are embarrassing. They sing along with the radio when your friends are in the car. They phone your teachers. They answer the door in their dressing gowns. They accompany you when you are clothes shopping. Callie Power’s mother is more embarrassing than most. Endowed with a firecracker temper, she is forever reacting to situations. This time it is the next door neighbour who has set her off. He is threatening to chop down the maple tree in his front yard. But this is no ordinary tree. This tree’s branches overhang the Powers’ property, and in those branches is a rather high-end tree house—it has a roof, a door and even glass windows! It was built for Callie’s mother when she was a little girl. Now Callie uses it, so it is rather like a family heirloom, and to prevent its destruction, Callie’s mother, Dian, has climbed the tree and chained herself to it. To make matters worse, she has called a press conference to alert the entire city to the situation. In fact, her protest has gone national, prompting Callie’s father to telephone from Ottawa after he sees the story on the evening news. Grandma Powers, an older version of Dian, shows up to help, and after that, things quickly spiral out of control. Singing Grannies lend their support to Dian’s cause, while a gang of bikers show up to help Mr. Wilson, the owner of the tree. Add to that a crowd of neighbours, Callie’s classmates, a traffic jam, reporters and police, and the result is nothing less than mayhem. Callie, of course, is mortified. She wants nothing to do with her mother’s protest but is dragged into the middle of things despite her objections, and when all is said and done, it is Callie who comes up with a solution to the problem. Flower Power is part of the new Currents imprint from Orca, a high-low series of short novels for reluctant readers in the eleven to fourteen age range. It is a humorous romp through one young teen’s embarrassing weekend with her mother and the world.

Reviewed by Kristin Butcher

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Story House by Timothy Taylor Knopf (2006) ISBN: 0-676-97764-2 Timothy Taylor’s new novel, fittingly enough for a story in which architecture plays such a major part, is a construct of brilliant design, formidably detailed, yet as stark and implacably direct as Greek tragedy. The Story House itself, a strangely contradictory and mysterious building in East Vancouver—a house without a kitchen, with a double helix staircase at its centre, different play of light on each of its three levels, and Haida symbols in its basement—looms over the entire novel. It may be the first design of Packer Gordon, a legendary architect whose later buildings appear to float in the air or merge seamlessly into their surroundings like organic outgrowths of the earth itself. Against this background we watch Packer’s two sons, half-brothers Graham and Elliot, born within six months of each other to different mothers, come to grips with their own enmity and their father’s legacy. We meet them first, fifteen years old, as they fight with disturbing intensity in the basement of Story House, used as a boxing gym at the time. The battle has been set up by their father to resolve their differences, but its only result is Elliot’s head injury. Twenty years later, Packer is dead and the brothers struggle with their own feelings of inadequacy. Graham has followed his father’s profession, but he renovates tired buildings so that they are once again fashionable rather than designing them, and his marriage is childless and failing. Elliot is perversely drawn to imitation, importing fake watches and carpets, associating with shady characters like Rico and Kirov, although he has started to withdraw from crime, producing fake fakes instead, as he is now a family man. Both are uneasy and confused; both are ripe for change.

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The narrative skips back and forth in time, from character to character (it takes concentration!) but all the time the action is pulled inexorably back to the Story House. Pogey, the boxing coach, falls through the skylight down the centre of the staircase and dies in his gym in the basement; Deidre, Elliot’s wife, once made a video of the house as a student exercise, in which Pogey remarks that he sees the building as a school; Avi Zweigler, a TV producer, lives in one of Packer’s remarkable houses in California; out of Graham’s pilgrimage to see this house grows the plan to make a reality show out of the revival of the Story House itself; and it is Graham’s discovery of the boarded-up house that brings Elliot back into contact with his brother in the surreal attempt to deconstruct and reveal Packer’s vision. The Story House brings illumination to the brothers, if nothing else; it is a school in which they learn. But the momentum at this point in the book is all toward disaster, the long arm of the past reaching out, long-delayed consequences of ancient actions finally hitting their targets, a perfect symmetry of cause and effect. The only survivors are the wives: Graham’s estranged wife Esther, living like a castaway on a beach in Haida Gwaii, finally meeting the indestructible Deirdre. And in a searing comment on the times, the only ones who profit are Zweigler and the TV production company; they have a smash hit on their hands.

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Toy Gun by Dennis E. Bolen Anvil Press (2006) ISBN: 1-895636-68-X Barry Delta, a burnt out parole officer, is an unlikely protagonist. He’s the wrong side of middle-aged, alcoholic and hanging on to his job by a thread. His working days seem to consist of haranguing and being rude to his young female supervisor, going out for coffee, turning his computer on and off, and complaining about paperwork and his heavy work load. For some reason women of all ages and in all walks of life seem to find him irresistible, with several envisioning him as the father of their child. To that list of loonies add a bar waitress, a long term girlfriend, and a wife of ten years. The last in a trilogy featuring this depressed and depressing character, Toy Gun grinds to an addled end with Delta bashing his head against a locker, torn between whether to jump on the Greyhound bus and escape or to return to his pregnant girlfriend, the absolute worst choice among all the women he’s been toying with. So do not read this novel for a laugh or an escape; it’s rarely funny and it’s never uplifting. It is not a whodunit and the plot is as muddled as the man. The bad guys do not get caught. The hero does not find redemption or reel any closer to self-recognition. What little work he does do in the service of the government is worse than nothing at all. It’s downright scary to think that this is how parole officers actually work, but it probably is. The author is not fooling around here. He actually worked in Vancouver himself, the setting for this novel, for twenty years as a parole officer. Later, armed with a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, Bolen went on to write these seamy, inner city tales. He’s good at what he does; this would make a great television series. “Only a clever writer could make stupid people this interesting…” asserts a review sentence by the Globe & Mail on the book’s back page. I agree. There’s not a false note in it. Only a clever writer could keep us reading on once we discover what a dreary world we’ve been pulled into. This novel is a slice of grimy realism, way thick.

Reviewed by Cherie Thiessen

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CONTESTS & MARKETS

Contests & Markets Please note that inclusion in WordWorks is not an endorsement of any contest or market. We encourage our readers to thoroughly research all contests or markets before submitting work and ideally, it’s recommended that you read one or two copies of the publication in question to make sure your writing “fits” their requirements and guidelines. Our homepage at www.bcwriters.com lists recent additions to Contests and Markets.

Looming Deadlines

Markets

Other Voices

Broken Pencil

www.othervoices.ab.ca Deadline: Received by September 1, 2006 Accepts submissions of unpublished poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction prose, essays, solicited reviews, photographs, and artwork. Receptive to work from new and emerging writers and artists.

www.brokenpencil.com Considers fiction from 50 to 3000 words, just not at the same time. Query them about articles on indie/alternative culture. They have a rant section, too.

29th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest www.3daynovel.com Deadline: September 1, 2006 (to register) What are you doing September 2-4? How about writing a novel? This year some of the participants are going to participate in front of TV cameras in Edmonton, courtesy of Book Television and Chapters-Indigo. This might be the perfect opportunity to find out if you really do have a novel in you.

Surrey International Writing Contest http://siwc.ca/contest/guidelines.php Deadline: September 8, 2006 Linked to the annual Surrey International Writers’ Conference, this contest attracts submissions from all over the world. Read the guidelines carefully. Fiction, non-fiction and poetry all welcome.

Filling Station 2nd Annual Short Story Contest www.fillingstation.ca Deadline: September 30, 2006 Journal of contemporary poetry and fiction invites submissions of short stories, maximum 3000 words.

Prism International Literary Non-Fiction Contest http://prism.arts.ubc.ca Deadline: September 30, 2006 In addition to the contest, Prism accepts submissions yearround. They have a delightfully comprehensive list of submission guidelines that covers, among other things, the issue of posting writing to an online discussion forum and whether or not it should be considered published. With the proliferation of such groups, it’s a good thing to know, and hopefully more print journals will address the issue in their own guidelines.

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The New Orphic Review Reads mailed submissions of fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays. Send, with SASE, to NOR, 706 Mill Street, Nelson, BC V1L 4S5

The New Quarterly www.newquarterly.net Accepts submissions of no more than one short story, 3-5 poems, or 1-3 postscript stories (under 5 pages) at a time.

On Spec www.onspec.ca Quarterly magazine features speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror. Mostly prose, some poetry.

Zines Poemeleon www.poemeleon.org Deadline: September 30, 2006 New poetry journal is looking for submissions of ekphrastic poems for the next issue. These are poems that evoke a particular work of art. Check submission guidelines for details.

Fringe http://fringemagazine.org Describes itself as “the noun that verbs your world.” Accepts submissions in all sorts of categories. Guidelines? You know what to do.

Writers’ Resources New Pages www.newpages.com “Good reading starts here,” says the website, and they’re not kidding. Great place to find lists of online lit mags, alternative magazines, indie bookstores and more.

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Regional Reports

Writing 210 are resurrecting Treeline, a literary journal first published in 1981, as volume 6 of It’s Still Winter, a Web Journal of Contemporary Canadian Poetry and Poetics based out of Prince George. Treeline 3 was launched April 12, 2006. See www.fsj.nlc.bc.ca/glainsbury/T3/Treeline3.htm

North Lynda Williams, Prince George Lynda@okalrel.org Al Rempel has poetry included in Half in the Sun: Anthology of Mennonite Writing (Ronsdale Press, October 2006), a collection of fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction by twenty-six BC writers of Mennonite heritage edited by Fed member Elsie K. Neufeld. Si Transken has just returned from a marvelous adventure in Ontario. She presented six essays at various academic conferences (the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Assn., the Canadian Association of Schools of Social Work, the Association for Bibliotherapy and Literature for Life, the Canadian Women’s Studies Assn.). Si is also delighted to report that the Sudbury Women’s Centre and the Sudbury Writers’ Guild invited her to do a workshop with them on these themes. Donna Kane reports that twelve artists will participate in the first Muskwa-Kechika Artist Exploration Camp. From August 6–14th poets, visual artists and musicians will work together to raise awareness of one of the world’s great wilderness areas and to create an exhibit of their work to be showcased at art galleries in the Peace Region and beyond. For more information on the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area visit www.muskwakechika.com. For more information on the art camp visit www.donnakane.com. Dee Horne, CEO of Scroll Press, a small literary press dedicated to quality fiction, invites writers to submit completed manuscripts to Scroll Press. For details, check out the website at http://scrollpress.com. Prisoners Under Glass, the first book published by Scroll Press, can be ordered from your local bookstore or from any online bookstore. Lynda Williams’ story “The Harpy” was published in the Mythspring anthology edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Genevieve Kierans. Lynda is also pleased to announce she will serve as book editor for Scroll Press for a title by Calgary author Rebecca Bradley. As chair of UNBC Press, she is in the final stages of bringing The Forestry Diversification Project to press, a collection of poetry edited by Robert Budde. Rob reports that students of Northern Lights College’s Creative

George Sipos hosted a poetry reading at the Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George on April 26. Readers were Sue Wheeler, a well known writer, editor and teacher who lives on Lasqueti Island, and Barry Dempster from Ontario who has published many books and is a poetry editor with Brick Books. Prince George poet Laisha Rosnau was presented with the Acorn-Plantos award which she won earlier this year. Michael Armstrong won the Victoria competition of the CBC Poetry Face Off. A recording of his performance was broadcast in April on CBC. Visit the website www.cbc.ca/ poetryfaceoff for interviews with the poets. Former FED board member Brenda Koller has just launched her new book, Canadian Rockies Adventure Guide (Hunter Publishing, 2006), a volume in a best-selling series of adventure guidebooks.

Central Kay McCracken, Salmon Arm kaymcc@jetstream.net Sarah Weaver Kipp reports that she is working on a contract to adapt her guide for shoreline living, On the Living Edge, Your Handbook for Waterfront Living. She has already adapted this popular BC book for Alberta, Saskatchewan/ Manitoba and Ontario, and now the City of Edmonton has asked for a custom version to help its citizens understand the city’s many stormwater lakes. Congratulations to Ann Walsh, whose young adult book, Flower Power, was nominated for this year’s Chocolate Lily Award, and is reviewed on page 24. Dona Sturmanis has started her Tuesday night writers’ evening at the Bean Scene, on Bernard Street across from the Paramount theatre in downtown Kelowna. Event takes place from 6 until 9 pm. and costs $15. Dona is a creative writing teacher and the editor of the magazine, Okanagan Life. She can be reached at donasturmanis@yahoo.com The arts and creative writing festival held by the city of Kelowna in May was successful. Historical novelist Jack Whyte was the chairman of the proceedings and there was a good crowd in attendance. Fed member Nancy Holmes, poet and creative writing academic at UBC–O, is bringing together “town and gown” by asking Canadian poets and writers to WORDWORKS–SUMMER 2006

REGIONAL REPORTS

come and read at UBC–O during the Fall and Winter semesters. Watch for news from UBC–O on their website. Sterling Haynes sold two new stories to The Medical Post [Rogers TV] and had another published by BC History magazine. The Kelowna branch of the Canadian Authors Association is planning the fall and winter programme next week. Check in at the website in September; members meet at 1 pm at the Rotary Centre for the Arts, on Cawston Street in Kelowna [across from Pospera Place, the hockey arena] the last Saturday of the month. Karen Bissenden and Kay McCracken had poems included in a stunning new anthology, radiant danse uv being: a poetic portrait of bill bissett, a blewointment book published by Nightwood Editions. Kay was thrilled to read her poem “Xcellent Birds” at the book launch held May 18 at the Ironworks Gallery in Gastown, Vancouver. Twenty-three poets read poems and honoured bill bissett, who presided over the packed room with the presence of a court jester. An enthusiastic crowd gathered at the Java Express in Salmon Arm on Friday, May 26, for the last Writers’ Coffee House till September. Karen Bissenden, John Vivian, Kay McCracken, Howard and Alice Brown, were joined by local writers Miranda McLaws, Bonnie Jackson, Ken Firth and others for an entertaining evening of readings. A lively group of writers gathered at Garland Gracesprings Farm on June 4 to participate in Deanna Kawatski’s 10th annual writers’ retreat, a great success by all accounts. Deanna has been invited to give a day-long writing workshop at the Chase Wellness Centre on July 8. For details email deemay@mail.ocis.net The 4th annual Shuswap Lake International Writers’ mini Festival gratefully acknowledges Fed members Kuldip Gill, Michael Hetherington, Ernest Hekkanen, Deanna Kawatski, Bernice Lever and A.S. Penne for volunteering their time and talents in Salmon Arm on June 24. The Fed made a donation to the Shuswap Writers’ Festival this year and we hope to sponsor one or two FED members at next year’s event. Many thanks to The Federation of BC Writers, The Shuswap Association of Writers (SAW), local businesses and organizations (The Shuswap Writers’ Group), Canada Council for the Arts and the League of Canadian Poets, and all the volunteers for their support. The festival isn’t quite over yet as the popular Short Short Story Contest takes place at the Writers’ Coffee House on Friday, July 21, in Sorrento as part of the Shuswap Lake Festival of the Arts. See www.shuswapwriters.ca for contest details.

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South East Anne Strachan, Nakusp sisinwriting@hotmail.com Fed members in the South East Region continue to produce and publish work. Thanks to all for supporting the Federation of BC Writers through challenging times. Your efforts help to make this a vital organization of benefit to writers in our region, and keep us connected to the provincial writing community. Lynne Phillips and Louise Sidley, both of Rossland, Pearl Myers of Revelstoke, Stephen Lones of New Denver, Linda Lee Crosfield of Ootischenia (near Castlegar), Rita Moir of Vallican, and Anne Strachan of Nakusp all contributed to the Spring 2006 issue of WordWorks. If you haven’t read this issue celebrating BC’s grassroots literary culture, now is the time! Poetry and prose about the historic Columbia River written by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes appears in the recently published River of Memory (University of Washington Press, 2006). Eileen was asked by co-author William D. Layman of Wenatchee, Washington, to give voice to the Canadian portion of the Columbia River for the volume, which accompanies a first-ever exhibit of historical photos of the Columbia from mouth to headwaters. Eileen also reads her poem “The Sovereign River” on an accompanying CD produced by Lynette Westendorf. For information about the exhibit go to: www.wenatcheevalley.org/riverofmemory/ index.html. The exhibit will travel to Nelson in summer 2007, where it will be installed in the new Nelson Art Gallery and exhibition space. During a recent trip to Vancouver, Holley Rubinsky was interviewed by Rebecca Wigod, Books Editor, The Vancouver Sun, and by Gudrun Will, editor of the quarterly Vancouver Review (writing for BC’s online newspaper, TheTyee.ca). Holley talked about life and about her first novel, beyond this point (lowercase or not, no one can decide!) The interviews are on her website, www.beyondthispoint.com Linda Lee Crosfield has a poem in the anthology Between Sleeps—a collection of writing from the middle of the night, chronicling the 3:15 Experiment from 1993–2005. In May she read from her 3:15 poems and other work at the Kootenay Gallery in Castlegar. Nakusp member Barbara MacPherson is conducting writing classes through the Columbia Basin Trust Literacy program. As well as writing regular articles for Herb Quarterly, Barb recently became a contributing editor for the magazine.

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Karen Hamling’s loving memorial to Kootenay artist Les Weisbrich (“Les Weisbrich: Taking a closer look at what we see”) appears in the Spring/Summer issue of ARTiculate Magazine, “the first word on arts, culture, and heritage in the Columbia Basin.” Hagios Press is pleased to announce the publication of Flesh, A Naked Dress, a new book by Nelson poet and Fed member Susan Andrews Grace. The BC launch of this book (as well as Interim: Essays & Mediations by Vancouver poet and essayist Patrick Friesen), took place at Nelson’s Oxygen Art Centre May 19, 2006, to a standing room only crowd. The event received support from the Kootenay School of Writing and the Canada Council. Hagios Press is an award winning literary press from Regina, Saskatchewan, and these books are part of their spring 2006 publishing list. Thank-you for sharing your writing news, keeping us informed and connected. Keep writing!

Fraser Valley Sylvia Taylor, Langley sylviataylor@uniserve.com Many thanks to the membership for nominating and voting me in, for my sixth term as Fraser Valley Regional Director. And a big welcome to new and returning members. The AGM and mini-conference was a success, with many attendees and a very positive view to the Fed’s future. We have a wonderful crew onboard and the coming year will see many improvements for this worthy organization and its members. Along with preparing for the upcoming Fed year, I have recently become Editor and Chief Writer for The New View magazine in Surrey, a BIA-funded, community-focus publication, and I continue to do commissioned writing, editing and teaching for private, commercial, and public sector clients, notably, SFU, the Professionals In Transition Program and the Co-Housing Association. As the teaching year winds down, I am also preparing to teach and edit for the fifth year, at the Willamette Writers’ Conference in Portland, Oregon, in August. We say goodbye to our dear friend and colleague, Max Plater, 58, who passed away June 12, 2006. Please see page 31 for more information on Max, a wonderful mentor to so many in the Fraser valley. Happy writing to all, Sylvia Taylor

Margo Bates will give a presentation at the George Mackie Library in Delta on September 27, as part of a series on cooking, fueled by the recipe for the Telkwa Hall Rum Punch in her book, P.S. Don’t Tell Your Mother. The book was chosen as one of the top summer reads by futurist and bestselling author Ann Coombs in her The Living Workplace online newsletter, which is distributed to 250,000 people world-wide. Margo is also expanding her speakers bureau with authors like humorist Gordon Kirkland. Susan McCaslin’s poem, “A Cylinder of Light,” was displayed on Vancouver buses as part of the Poetry in Transit program. She also read from her volume of poems, Flying Wounded, while giving a talk entitled “Coming Up Through Chaos: Growing Up with a Parent with Mental Illness,” to the Langley Child and Youth Conference on Mental Health. Her poem “Preceptor” was a finalist in the Sandburg-Livesay Anthology Contest for 2006. Kuldip Gill, Writer-in-Residence at the University College of the Fraser Valley, read, presented a writer’s workshop and offered a blue pencil session at the Salmon Arm Writer’s Festival in June. She also just announced her One Book– One UCFV initiative for this summer where everyone at the University College, on the linked campuses, and in the adjoining communities, is encouraged to read What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin in preparation for the author’s visit in late September. Lois Peterson presents a moderated critique group to help keep writers writing over the summer. Words of Summer will combine informal writing instruction with peer critiques of works in progress. Takes place on alternate Tuesdays from 7-9 pm. July 4, 18, August 1, 15, and 29 at the Whalley Library, 10347-135 St., Surrey. Elsie K. Neufeld is editor-in-chief of Half in the Sun: Anthology of Mennonite Writing, (Ronsdale Press, October 2006) a collection of fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction by twenty-six BC writers of Mennonite heritage. Contributors include Andreas Schroeder, Barbara Nickel, Patrick Friesen and several Fed members: Al Rempel (Prince George) and Roxanne Willems (Abbotsford). The book includes fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. Last fall Elsie initiated and coedited a special West Coast issue of Rhubarb, a Winnipegbased literary magazine; was editor of Who Will Wind the Watches?, an anthology of BC seniors; and edited/co-wrote Brown Sugar and a Bone in the Throat: Jean’s Life, the memoir of BC’s ninety-three-year old social activist D. Jean Scott.

WORDWORKS–SUMMER 2006

REGIONAL REPORTS

Margaret Florczak read her poetry at the launch of West Coast Line’s 48th edition. Her poem, “Surrey, a City,” as seen from the King George Highway comes from a collection entitled, Synapse: disjunctive.

in memoriam Langley poet Max Plater, MFA, was best known for his book of poetry, Winter Fires (Exile Editions, 1998). His poetry has been published in The Nelson Introduction to Literature, Surrey Seen, The Amethyst Review, A Writer’s World, Undertow, and Third World Canada, as well as recognized in several poetry competitions. Plater read in many venues, most recently on CBC radio. As an English, history and creative writing teacher and as a member of The Hand writing group, Plater was a well-loved mentor. A Sufi at heart, he lived with his wife Judi, daughter Amber and son Trevor, and loved bright colours, gypsy music, puns, nature, and freedom of spirit.

usk On Barnston Island

Through the haze of buttercups light rises along the restless contours of a horse thrusting in shadows through the long grass reflected curves and turns in bursts of topaz. Beneath the spires of cottonwoods the cotton floats in shafts of evening air Drifting into eyes of cyclists spinning on a sudden edge of the glazed river shuddering towards the Georgia Straight. Because of what you’ve lost today the sun scoops up two silhouettes of children racing home on bikes beneath an avenue of trees. Through telescopic sight the sun in concentrated flame on ochre flesh. Max Plater

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Lower Mainland Jocelyn Coburn, Vancouver jcoburn@sfu.ca In celebration of BC Book & Magazine Week in late April, William (Bill) New read from his latest collection of poems, Touching Ecuador, at Pulp Fiction Used Bookstore. Kobzar’s Children: A Century of Untold Ukrainian Stories, published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside had its launch on June 1st. The anthology includes photographs and stories supplied by contributors from across the country. The three contributing authors from BC are Danny Evanishen, Stefan Petelycky, and Fed member Paulette MacQuarrie. Julie H. Ferguson’s latest book, Sing a New Song: Portraits of Canada’s Crusading Bishops (Dundurn), was released in May to excellent reviews. Gwynne Hunt’s play, Mary’s List, was performed at the Fraser Valley Fringe Festival. She is hoping to bring it to the Vancouver East Cultural Centre too, perhaps in July or August. Cullene Bryant’s In The Dry Woods, published by the Books Collective in Edmonton, won best short fiction in the national competition held by The Word Guild. Mary Duffy, Bonnie Nish and Sita Carboni each presented a short reading as part of the World Peace Forum at the Vancouver Public Library. Heather Haley’s poetry is currently on display at the Vancouver Public Library as part of the World Poetry Fifth Anniversary Celebration. On June 14, the Federation of BC Writers hosted a wonderful evening of readings by members Michele Adams, Ryszard Dubanski, Bonnie Nish, Bernice Lever, Cullene Bryant and visiting author David Helwig at Cafe Montmartre in East Vancouver. Allan Brown published an article about his writing experience in the April issue of Powell River Living Magazine, and gave a reading and talk, “Haiku Hour,” on April 3 at the Powell River Public Library. Six of his haiku and one tanka were posted on the Monday’s Poem site (Leaf Press) through April 17-23. Kudos to Irene Livingston whose picture book, Finklehopper Frog Cheers, has been chosen by the Canadian Children’s

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Book Centre for inclusion in Our Choice 2006. She won first prize in this year’s West End Writers’ Contest for her prose piece “Tits Like a 1950 Studebaker” and received honourable mention for “The Seniors’ Building.”

The Islands

Sunshine Coast writer Eugene James read from the opening chapters of his novel-in-progress, Gladiatrix, a first-century Roman adventure epic featuring female gladiators, at the Pink House in Lower Gibsons. Roy Roberts presented ekphrastic poetry (inspired by art in other media) in a group show at the ARC Gallery, reading the results on opening night, May 5.

Keith Harrison read from his new novel, Elliot & Me, during BC Book & Magazines’ literary tour in East Vancouver on April 27. He also read at the Vancouver Public Library two days earlier.

David Fraser, Nanoose Bay ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Sandra Harper had a travel article, “The Delights of Dubravnik,” published in four local newspapers. Lee Edward Fodi, author and illustrator of Kendra Kandlestar and the Box of Whispers, was interviewed for The Kamloops Daily News and a review of his book was published in the Surrey Now. On April 16, “North by Northwest” host Sheryl McKay interviewed Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, editors of the groundbreaking anthology In Fine Form, The Canadian Book of Form Poetry. Michèle Adams, author of a short story collection, Bright Objects of Desire, was interviewed for the Danforth Review and an excerpt from the book will be published in an upcoming issue of Geist. Ryszard Dubanski is enjoying some success of his own: his book, Black Teeth (Signature Editions), was shortlisted for the Carol Shields award. Gordon Mumford had two readings/slide presentations scheduled for his African books (White Man’s Drum and Drums of Rebellion): April 11 at the New Westminster Public Library, and April 27 at the Vancouver Public Library’s Amazing Lives: Fact & Fiction series. He was also interviewed on Co-op Radio prior to these events. On April 2023, he was at the Victoria Floating Boat Show, promoting his WWII memoirs, The Black Pit ... and Beyond and The Sampan Girl. On May 3, Margaret Anne Hume read from her new biography, Just Mary: The Life of Mary Evelyn Grannan, at the VPL downtown. George K. Ilsley launched his novel, ManBug, on April 12, at the Honey Lounge in downtown Vancouver. He also participated in the RAW Exchange reading series on June 15, along with Betsy Warland and David Helwig.

On May 13, Margaret Thompson presided over the Fed table at the annual Victoria Literary Info-Fair, handing out information and selling back copies of WordWorks to a steady stream of visitors. Pauline Holdstock and M.A.C. Farrant presented workshops and manuscript critique sessions at the fair. On June 9th at a gala in Delta, B.C., Kristin Butcher received the 2006 Chocolate Lily Award for her novel, Zee’s Way. John Wilson’s book, Four Steps to Death, was nominated for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. John has been busy promoting his new YA title, Red Goodwin (Ronsdale, 2006) and he read at Miners Memorial Day at the Cumberland Museum and Archives on June 24. Margaret Cadwaladr and Sheila Munro have life and memoir writing workshops planned for the fall and Margaret has also been invited to speak at the Garden Writers annual symposium and at Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia in August. Lyn Hancock’s most recent book, Tabasco the Saucy Raccoon, became listed on the Association of Book Publishers of BC’s Bestseller Children’s List in positions 3, 2, and 1! The book was reviewed and classified as “Highly Recommended” by CM (Canadian Materials/University of Manitoba). Angelika Kolompar has just published Vancouver Island Poetry: Haiku, Senyru, Tanka (Loon Books, 2006). The book consists of 200 poems, illustrations, calligraphy and photos and is available from Chapters in Vancouver and Nanaimo. Sidney member Myrtle Siebert recently returned from a Maui Writers Conference Challenge trip from Dublin to Shannon in Ireland. The twenty writers, led by four bestselling authors, were challenged to produce two stories inspired by what they saw on the trip. Myrtle’s story, “Little Friends in Ireland,” about the magical little people, will appear in an anthology to be published in October and sold to fund scholarships for writers wanting to attend the Maui Writer’s Conference. The annual conference and associated retreat is held on the week before and Labour Day weekend on Maui.

WORDWORKS–SUMMER 2006