Wordworks Winter 2007 Authors talk, on air and online

WORDWORKS Winter 2007

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

authors talk, on air & online

News

Features

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A Note From Our President

The Last Writer

By George K. Ilsley

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To the Editor

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A Note From the Executive Director

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The Press Room

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Life into Fiction A Profile of Lillian Boraks-Nemetz

By Janet Nicol

12 Holley Rubinsky’s The Writers’ Show Broadcasting from the Kootenays

By Lynne Van Luven

Community

14 Adventures in RadioLand

By Holley Rubinsky

17 Launched!

New Titles by Federation Members 23 Regional Reports Member News From Around the Province

Contests & Markets

27 In Memoriam Jane Rule

20 Contests & Markets

Cover from top left, clockwise: Patrick Lane (photo: Fred Rosenberg), Pauline Holdstock, Alan Twigg, John Gould, Tom Wayman (photo: Jeremy Addington), Lynne Van Luven, Kathy Page, Rita Moir (photo: Fred Rosenberg) and Holley Rubinsky, centre.

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

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

A Note From Our President

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Publisher THE FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Editorial Committee MARGARET THOMPSON LINDA CROSFIELD GAIL BUENTE SHIRLEY RUDOLPH

Managing Editor FERNANDA VIVEIROS

Production & Design SHIRLEY RUDOLPH

Webmaster GUILLAUME LEVESQUE

2006-2007 Board of Directors PRESIDENT—JAN DRABEK VICE PRESIDENT—JOY HUEBERT INTERIM TREASURER—GREG BALL SECRETARY—ANDREA LOWE PAST PRESIDENT—BRIAN BUSBY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR—FERNANDA VIVEIROS

Regional Representatives 1. NORTH—AUDREY L’HEUREUX 2. SOUTH EAST—ANNE STRACHAN 3. CENTRAL—KAY MCCRACKEN 4. FRASER VALLEY—SYLVIA TAYLOR 5. LOWER MAINLAND—TBA 6. THE ISLANDS—DAVID FRASER THE FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS PO BOX 3887 STN TERMINAL VANCOUVER, BC V6B 3Z3 T: 604-683-2057 BCWRITERS@SHAW.CA WWW.BCWRITERS.COM ISSN # 0843-1329

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

hose few months since my last report started with a soggy July Summer Dreams Festival in Stanley Park, at which I took part in a panel discussion. About writing, of course.

There was just a handful of listeners but they seemed interested in what we had to say and that, after all, is what it’s all about. Our membership coordinator, Barbara Coleman, was also there, manning the Fed booth and talking up our organization to everyone who dropped by to say hello.

The next big event of the summer was the fateful letter from the British Columbia Arts Council which informed us there would be a shortfall in the anticipated grant. That prompted all sorts of emailing among the Federation board members plus my phone call to Victoria with a plea for an explanation. It came; its gist being that in the future we can expect even less money and that we should look for financial support elsewhere. Not a very pleasant bit of news but perhaps a wake-up call to start looking around for private money.

Then, late in August my wife Joan and I made a very informative visit to Queen Charlotte Islands where we were shown about by Federation member Margo Hearn and met with Canadian literary icon Susan Musgrave at her unique summer retreat near Masset.

Informative, too, was Alan Twigg’s Reckoning Conference held September 15 at SFU, which brought all sorts of writers, publishers, agents and whatnots together for a fruitful day of discussion about BC writing and publishing.

Another soggy affair was Vancouver’s Word on the Street, held September 30, at which I handed out prize money to Sarah L. Taggart, Rebecca Cuttler and Carla Reimer, winners of this year’s Literary Writes contest.

Then it was on to the Surrey International Writers Conference on October 19 where I helped at the Federation booth and made the acquaintance of the exuberant and multifarious Fraser Valley regional representative Sylvia Taylor. It was an eye-opener: all writers’ get-togethers should be as well organized as this.

Early in November came the Joy Kogawa reading at her family house in Marpole. I met this pride and joy of Canadian writing for the first time and found it all a memorable occasion. And a few days later I attended the launch of Geraldine, the latest novel of David Watmough, the first president of the Federation. The moderator was Trevor Carolan, who was a very able Federation executive director during the 1980s.

Whew! It’s been a busy and fascinating season. Hope your Christmas was a joyous one, roaring to go onwards and upwards towards those bestsellers in 2008.

–Jan Drabek

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WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

NEWS

To the Editor

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am writing this letter to endorse the good work of the Federation of BC Writers. I renewed my membership just over a year ago and received immediate support. As editorin-chief of Half in the Sun: Anthology of Mennonite Writing (Ronsdale Press) I was given the following opportunities: a) featured as Member-in-the-Spotlight; b) promotion in the “Launched” section of Wordworks; and c) in its Regional Reports; d) reading dates also appeared in the Fed’s on-line Events Calendar and were emailed by Regional directors to their constituents in Northern BC, the Lower Mainland, and the Fraser Valley. I cannot adequately extol the value of this kind of FREE promotion for a book that was a three-year labour of love (as anthologies tend to be), and which promoted twenty-five BC writers of Mennonite heritage, among them new, emerging and well known writers, both Fed- and non-Fed members.

Not only did I receive this amazing endorsement and book promotional assistance, in the past year a) my writing appeared in WordWorks (Winter 2006 Issue), and received first-rate editing; b) I applied for, and was accepted, to participate in Off-the Page, a phenomenal program that brings writers into local high schools and that also honors writers by paying them fairly for this. This led to an invitation by the school I visited early last year to return in November 2007 as writer-in-residence. The four-day stint involved reading at two convocations, teaching 12 seventyfive minute long classes (Grades 10-12), mentoring a dozen students, and a public reading that included the students’ writings! And c) I receive Vox, a phenomenal twice-monthly e-newsletter that includes publishing opportunities and other valuable writing news such as: calls for submission by anthologies, literary magazines and writing contests, as well as job opportunities. Occasionally, this newsletter is supplemented by information from the Executive Director as she receives it. This kind of information is invaluable for all writers—new, emerging and established.

I am impressed with the professionalism within the organization, though not at the expense of the personal.

Email queries are answered promptly, satisfactorily and with a tone of friendliness too seldom found in today’s society.

I have been equally impressed by the number of new members the Fed has attracted since I joined, many of them well-known, established writers. This underlines my belief in

the value of this organization for writers of all kinds. The Federation of BC Writers is a virtual and actual gathering place, something ALL writers need. This organization is vital, and clearly, news of that is spreading. I cannot look far enough into the future to see a time when I would choose not to be a member.

Elsie K. Neufeld, Poet, personal historian, editor and writing instructor Abbotsford, BC.

WordWorks Seeks Submissions Next deadline: March 10, 2008

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

WordWorks belongs to and is representative of our membership, and its content should appeal to both established and emerging writers. We need cohesive, focused, polished pieces. Quality is the key word. If you wish to write a feature, opinion piece, supplementary piece or column, let us know. Or, if you have a topic you’d like to see covered, but don’t want to write the piece yourself, send us a list of your ideas, and we will find a writer.

We prefer to receive proposals via email. Include your idea for the article (one or two paragraphs should be sufficient), suggested length, why this would be of interest to our readers, examples of other writing you have done of a similar type, and full contact information, including telephone number.

If your article proposal fits our needs for an upcoming WordWorks, we will contact you about completing the piece, the length we need it to be and the due date. Note that we start putting each issue together several months before actual publication.

A feature article or interview generally runs 2,000 2,500 words. Supplementary pieces run 800-1,100 words. Occasionally, shorter or longer pieces are considered. Other articles and column ideas will be considered on an individual basis. We will consider reprints. Honoraria vary.

Send queries to WordWorks Editorial Committee bcwriters@shaw.ca or mail proposal to: The Federation of BC Writers PO BOX 3887 Stn Terminal Vancouver, BC V6B 3Z3

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

A Note From the Executive Director

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ften in the midst of deadlines and projects it is too easy to lose sight of our accomplishments but I’d like to take a moment to congratulate everyone on another successful year. Our annual budget is half what it was ten years ago and yet, with your support, encouragement and participation, we continued to provide valuable programs and services to a healthy membership of over 600 writers in 2007.

Despite the tight budget and a shortfall in our BC Arts Council grant, the Federation funded more of its members in our Off The Page writers-in-school program; supported numerous literary festivals and conferences throughout the province; held workshops in Vancouver, Nakusp, Victoria and Salmon Arm; staffed booths from Prince George to Surrey; promoted hundreds of reading events, workshops and writing opportunities on our website; referred many of our members for editing and ghostwriting work; published four issues of our popular WordWorks magazine, assisted with a number of grievances on behalf of our members; responded to thousands—yes thousands!—of email and telephone queries and held a successful AGM and conference in Victoria. We handed out nearly $1000 in prize money in our annual Literary Writes contest, re-instated modest honoraria for WordWorks articles and found a terrific Events Editor, Margo Lamont, for our website. Bills were paid in a timely manner and the office houseplants thrived.

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ot all of 2007 was devoted to Fed business and horti culture. I took some time off during the summer to reconnect with family and friends in the Azores, a tiny chain of islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But even there, the world of writing and publishing trailed me despite a promise to family that I would leave my work behind and enjoy some serious playtime…without books. And I was doing well until day two when a British sailor, moored in the bay below our summer home, gave me a weathered copy of Hardy’s The Return of the Native, a 1976 Penguin Classic edition with an introduction by Vancouver’s George Woodcock. What’s a beach without a book, I reasoned.

Soon after I met a New York author doing a short-term creative residency in a neighbouring village, a holidaying antiquarian bookseller with a specialty press in Lisbon, a native-born author of whale-hunting books, followed by an Italian playboy and former racecar driver publishing guidebooks, nature essays and poetry from a restored 17th century

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inn. I checked office email from the internet café of a public library housed in a sixteenth-century palace and in between bullfights and religious processions, I collected books, journals…and more literary acquaintances.

One author took me to a travelling book fair where I Fernanda Viveiros spent the afternoon chatting with publishers, writers and literary agents from the continent. I learned that Portugal’s writing and publishing industry was facing many of the challenges seen here in Canada: in recent years the demise of a national distribution system had affected dozens of independent publishers; French-owned big-box bookstores had swept away a number of small independents; sidewalk book and magazine vendors were disappearing from the streets of Lisbon, and publishers were turning to online marketing and sales.

Nothing new, right? But there is one important difference between the two countries: the Portuguese—and their society in general—more than believe in the importance of “investing” in the arts, they actually seem to be doing something about it. Government-funded theatres, dance halls and literary festivals are springing up everywhere and business owners are re-branding themselves as “patrons” and sponsoring literary presses and art galleries in the larger cities. Many of the daily newspapers devote as many pages to book, art and music coverage as they do to soccer games, and a well-stocked library is held in higher esteem than a plasma television screen among the young and educated. And their citizens seem happier…although I would be happy too, if I could open the Vancouver Sun and read more than a page or two about our country’s authors and their work.

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peaking of investing in the arts, consider making a donation to the Fed in the coming year. The Federation is a registered non-profit organization and for every donation you give us (over and above membership fees), we can provide you with an income tax-deductible receipt. In this way, you too can become a patron of the arts!

One last—ruthless—housekeeping item: if you have not paid your 2007 membership fees, this is your last issue of

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

NEWS

WordWorks. The FED operates on funds give us a call and we’ll work to raised from a number of sources but accommodate your budget. membership fees contribute in a signifiPlanning for the 2008 AGM and cant way to our operations and serconference is underway, along with vices—including the production of several new projects including the WordWorks. A membership lapse of even launch of a Federation anthology this three months may not sound like much spring. Many of our members are but multiplied by 100 or more members expecting new books of their own this it adds up to a significant budget deficit year and we look forward to promotat the end of each fiscal quarter. And ing their titles in the pages of our Barbara Coleman, producing, printing and mailing our magazine. Please keep sending us your Membership Co-ordinator membership magazine costs muito reading and launch notices for the dineiro. Membership coordinator Barbara website calendar Coleman sends out regular “Reminder to Renew” emails In closing, I’d like to leave you with this quote by Natalie but her time in the office is limited to only a few hours Goldberg, from her book Writing Down the Bones, “…Have each week and her duties often preclude making follow-up a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense calls to lapsed members. If you don’t plan to renew at this of humour and a deep patience that you are doing the right time, drop her a line at FBCW@shaw.ca so that we can thing…” remove you—if even just temporarily—from our database Here’s to a rewarding new year for all of us. and mailing list. If the fees are more than you can afford, –Fernanda Viveiros

Important Reminder The Public Lending Right (PLR) Commission A reminder that the PLR registration period will be open from February 15 to May 1, 2008. If you are an author, coauthor, editor, translator, illustrator, photographer or anthology contributor, you may be eligible for a PLR payment for the service of your books held in Canadian public libraries.

The Public Lending Rights Commission (PLR) consists of authors, librarians and publishers and was established in 1986 to administer a program of payments to Canadian authors for copies of their eligible books that were catalogued in libraries across Canada. Operating under the administrative aegis of The Canada Council for the Arts, the PLR Commission receives annual funding from Parliament through the Department of Canadian Heritage.

PLR payments are determined by sampling the holdings of a representative number of libraries; basically, the more libraries in which an eligible title is found, the larger the PLR payment. Keep in mind, the number of copies found in a library is not taken into account; it is the title’s presence in a library’s catalogue that determines the payment. The available budget determines both the dollar value of a library “hit” and the maximum an author can earn. Cheques are issued in February of each year. In 2007, BC authors received $1,198,589.82 in PLR payments. In total, 15,417 Canadian authors were issued cheques in February 2007 with an average payment of $588.

Persons who meet the general eligibility criteria may register between February and May on the PLR website (www.plrdpp.ca). Registration forms for new authors will be downloadable from their website during this period.

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

the Press Room The New FED Anthology

PWAC Annual AGM

The office received nearly 100 responses to a call for creative nonfiction submissions to the Federation’s new anthology. From that list, editorial board members Brian Busby and Dan Francis whittled it down to 20 final entries. Fed members whose work will be included in the new Federation anthology include Margaret Thompson, Trevor Carolan, Shannon Cowan, Pam Galloway, Jan Drabek, Joan Skogan, Deanna Kawatski, Mona Fertig, Howard White, Elizabeth Templeman, George Fetherling, A.S. Penne, Trisha Cull, Victoria Marvin, Harold Rhenisch, Dawn Service, Pauline Holdstock, Katherine Gordon, MAC Farrant and Luanne Armstrong. The book (title still a work-in-progress!) will be published by Anvil Press in Spring 2008. Readings and book launches will be held throughout the province.

The Professional Writers Association of Canada holds their annual AGM and Conference every May in a different Canadian city. In 2008, Winnipeg will host the PWAC AGM on Saturday, May 31. There will be a selection of professional development seminars open to the public on many different aspects of writing, from writing for beginners to those in their mid-careers. The web address is www.pwacmanitoba.com, click on “2008 National Conference and AGM” for details on this year’s conference.

Fernie Writers Conference The Fernie Writers Conference will take place July 14 to 27, 2008. This year the conference has expanded to two weeks with the first week set aside for workshops in film making, editing and screenwriting. The second week will focus on novel workshops (including a “Starting your Novel” session with Angie Abdou), short story workshops and a poetry workshop.

In association with several professional writing associations, the final conference weekend will feature a Professional Writing Seminar. Mornings will be scheduled for small group workshops on contracts, photography, syndicating columns, and more. Panel discussions will be held during the afternoons. The Conference will include a discussion on lower level college credits from College of the Rockies and upper level credits by a Victoria-based institution. For more information on the Fernie Writers Conference, check out www.ferniewriters.org or contact keith@ferniewriters.org

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CanWrite! Canadian Authors Association National Conference The Canadian Authors Association National Conference will take place July 3 to 6, 2008, in Edmonton, Alberta. Meet writers and publishers from across the country. Attend sessions on fiction, non-fiction, poetry, writing for children and screenwriting. Hear about the hottest markets, the writing industry, marketing and research.

Register to hear the keynote presentation by Ralph Keyes, author of the bestselling The Courage to Write and another fourteen books. Confirmed presenters include Ian Ferguson, co-author of How to be a Canadian and an award-winning playwright and humorist, and Jacqueline Baker, Ted Bishop, Tim Bowling, Louise Halfe, Ralph Keyes, Myrna Kostash, Reinekke Lengelle, Debbie Marshall, Naomi McIlwraith, Kit Pearson, Kimberly Plumley, James Rout, Carolyn Swayze, Cheryl Kaye Tardif, Thomas Trofimuk, Gloria Sawai, Shirley Serviss, Geo Takach, Sheri-D Wilson, Deborah Windsor and Robb Wynn. For more information on CanWrite!, visit www.canauthorsalberta.ca

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

FEATURES

The Last Writer

by George K. Ilsley

In November 2006 I was thrilled to be selected by Berton House as the writer-in-residence for October to December, 2007. The Berton House Writer’s Retreat, established in 1996 in Dawson City, is housed in the childhood home of broadcaster, historian and Canadian icon, Pierre Berton. Dawson City is a small town that lives on history, thrives on art, and still, more than a century after the Klondike Gold Rush, feeds on gold.

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For several years, the he timing meant that I had Canada Council had proalmost a full year to prepare. I vided Berton House with an hit spring sales of winter gear, annual grant. Berton House and read many tales of northern selected the writers, and with adventure, including Pierre Berton’s other partners and mother’s memoir I Married the fundraising, ran the premises Klondike, which details family life in a and the writer-in-residence much more rustic building: no program. running water, sawdust insulation, However, in 2007 this and a trapdoor to the basement privy. procedure changed. Instead The building has been extensively of allocating a fixed amount renovated, and in 2006 was even the to Berton House, each writer subject of a makeover by HGTV’s Photo of George K. Ilsley taken on a gravel bank selected then had to apply for Designer Guys. The decor, although near the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Canada Council funding. masculine in a black leather furniture Rivers at the site of an installation by visiting artist The summer 2007 writer, a kind of way, is overly fond of busts of Claudia Borgna. multiple-award winner Shakespeare. Since we don’t actually already in residence, was know what he looked like, five turned down for funding (and caught in the glare of the Shakespearean busts are just too many. ensuing publicity). Elsa Franklin expressed her surprise at My excitement turned bittersweet, however, in August the Canada Council’s decision, rejecting one of Canada’s 2007, when there was a flurry of news reports about Berton most successful writers, and funding “only obscure writers.”

House funding difficulties. The Berton House executive The example given of an obscure writer who received director, Elsa Franklin, Pierre Berton’s long-time friend and some funding was, yes, me. producer, stated that there was a real possibility that Berton Most residencies are advertised as “subject to funding.”

House might have to close, after the last writer went up at Berton House did not issue conditional contracts. This the end of 2007. meant that Berton House had agreed to subsidize the writer The Last Writer, I repeated aloud. It appealed to me as a they had selected and that is why the panic ensued when the good title, but the last writer was not something I ever wanted to be. continued next page

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

The Last Writer, cont’d Canada Council changed the funding procedure. (A Canada Council spokesperson said that the special grants awarded to Berton House were “seed money” and not intended to be permanent.)

I must emphasize that I would know nothing about any of this except for media reports. I was not directly informed how much the Canada Council contributed towards my residency. Berton The Writers Trust of Canada: www.writerstrust.com House carried out their Berton House Writers’ Retreat: http://bertonhouse.ca obligations towards me in every way, and have treated me very well.

Turmoil and uncertainty can precipitate a re-organization. In October 2007 the deed Association renovated the building, and the Berton House to Berton House and responsibility for the program was Writers’ Retreat was born. Now it is Berton House, Chapter formally transferred to the Writers’ Trust of Canada. There is Two, and the story is not ending, but just beginning to an appealing symmetry here, because Pierre Berton was one unfold. of the original founders of the Writers’ Trust in 1976.

The Berton House writer-in-residence program provides The Writers’ Trust has stated that it has the resources to the gift of time, space and an inspirational setting, and so it continue operating Berton House, and also intends to work is with great satisfaction that I am able to report that I am closely with the Canada Council. The line-up for 2008 has not, after all, the last writer. been announced, and as usual includes writers from all It is however completely true that I am widely considered across Canada. one of the most obscure writers in Canada.

And so Berton House has another new lease on life. It has been a family home, and moved from one corner of Dawson George K. Ilsley’s most recent book ManBug was short-listed to another, expanded in size and provided Pierre Berton’s for the ReLit Award. While writer-in-residence at Berton House mother with a kitchen table on which to write. The interWriters’ Retreat, he worked on pieces of non-fiction and a new vening fifty years saw several unrecorded occupants and novel, and held a prose workshop at the Dawson Community owners and then Pierre Berton bought the building and Library. For more information, check out his website and blog donated it to the Yukon Arts Society. The Klondike Visitors at http://thatwriter.ca and http://thatwriter.zaadz.com/blog.

References: • “Berton House Faces Uncertain Future.” Jeremy Warren in Yukon News, August 10, 2007.

• “Don’t close the door on Berton House.” Ken McGoogan in The Globe and Mail, August 17, 2007.

• “Berton House crisis.” Melanie Rutledge (Canada Council) in The Globe and Mail, August 2007.

• “Writers’ Trust to take over historic Berton House.” CBC, Quill & Quire, etc. October 1, 2007

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WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

FEATURES

Life into Fiction

A Profile of Lillian Boraks-Nemetz

By Janet Nicol

I remember standing behind the wall and hearing a carousel play and I had typhus and was starving. And I heard children laughing but it was all behind the wall…

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Janet Nicol photo

t is a windy October afternoon as students make their way to Lillian’s creative writing class on the UBC campus.

“She creates a safe and nurturing environment to write,” a young female student tells me as we await the teacher’s arrival.

“She gives us structure and feedback,” another student adds.

Just then Lillian enters. She takes off her raincoat, revealing a lavender jacket and matching scarf with comfortable black slacks. Lillian has blonde hair; dark mascara emphasizes her eyes. Among other accomplishments, she is an energetic grandmother of three.

But as Lillian herself would say, it is what lies beneath that matters.

The Old Brown Suitcase is Lillian’s best-known teen story and she has just completed an adult novel. This is her 26th year teaching “Life into Fiction,” a writing course offered through UBC’s continuing education program.

The chairs fill up with six females and a male, ranging in age from 20 to 40-something. To each student Lillian hands back a writing exercise on using metaphor.

Lillian encourages her students to dig deeper in their writing. “You really have to tell the truth,” she says. She coaches them to “open up the interior” of the person. “We are hanging on the outside of ourselves,” she says. continued next page

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Life into Fiction, cont’d “Life plus imagination,” are the secret ingredients to writing, Lillian believes. “Both are powerful sources.”

She mentions a previous assignment on childhood memories. “The dearest and most profound time of our lives,” she calls it.

Today, students will perform dialogues. Enthusiastic group feedback follows each reading. The writing is lively and the process instructive.

Later, I ask Lillian about the highlights of her teaching.

“I have a tremendous feeling of satisfaction and of bringing students as people out of themselves,” she says. We are sipping tea in the living room of Lillian’s home, a tastefully furnished apartment enriched with colorful wall paintings and glass art.

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illian tries to make her students understand they have a right to contemplate their life “because people are brought up to think they don’t have that right.”

“What I have found is that most people are blocked,” she says. “And they do not want to remember things.”

Lillian describes an “ache” she felt acutely in the early years of her marriage while raising two children. She was suppressing painful memories of a childhood spent in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation and later as a hidden child in the Polish countryside.

“I felt different and I didn’t know any other child survivors then,” she says.

Lillian was conflicted. “I was a very happy-go-lucky, fun-loving blonde individual and inside I was a very sad and very unhappy child.”

“I carried all this stuff for a long, long time,” Lillian says.

“I was told to forget the past.

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The society in which I lived was indifferent, even hostile to the Holocaust.”

The prison of her past became a metaphor for Lillian’s blocked relationships with family.

“I was incarcerated behind the ghetto wall and I remember standing behind the wall and hearing a carousel play and I had typhus and was starving. And I heard children laughing but it was all behind the wall,” she recalls.

“I had scars that had never healed and there was no one to heal them but myself. So that started me writing my prose.”

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n unusual encounter gave Lillian more insight and encouragement. She agreed to accompany a friend on a prison visit. The inmate turned out to be a refreshing contrast to most people Lillian knew in Vancouver. “We were all raising children,” Lillian explains. “So we talked about brownies and mahjong.”

“He was my mentor,” she says of the man behind bars.

“We were able to talk about Kafka and Dostoevsky and you see, I was into those things.”

“He told me I should pursue a career—read a lot and go back to university— and start writing my experiences,” Lillian says.

“He found that part of me that was hidden behind the wall. I came out that way. I couldn’t come out to society but I came out with him and we wrote letters for a while.

And that was a great help.”

“He was freer than I was,” Lillian says. “That was what I noticed.”

Language was both a barrier and a gift for Lillian.

Her family emigrated to Canada after the war when

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

FEATURES

Lillian was twelve. She learned French in Montreal and later was sent to a girls’ boarding school on Vancouver Island. Already fluent in Polish and Russian, she resisted English.

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Janet Nicol photo

ut when Lillian went back to college, as her mentor suggested, she found a new way of looking at English. She took a UBC writing course taught by poet J. Michael Yates who encouraged her to translate the writings of Polish émigré poets.

“When I started doing that, I discovered that English wasn’t as big a barrier because I could see beautiful Polish poems being formed in English.”

Lillian with some of the students taking her “Life into Fiction” course.

Using her Polish name, Jagna Boraks, she became a translator and began writing a memoir.

A publisher suggested Lillian write a novel for young on short stories. As a co-founder of a group for child adults. “So I had to transform a memoir into a novel and I survivors and hidden children at the Vancouver decided to do it in flashbacks. It worked!”

Holocaust Centre, Lillian continues to speak about her The Old Brown Suitcase, printed in 1994, went on to childhood experiences in an outreach program for garner literary awards and is available in hundreds of high public schools. schools. The fictional story of Slava Lenski, a child Holo“I think the work that remains to be done (about the caust survivor, continues in The Sunflower Diary, based on Holocaust) is the impact that surviving parents have Lillian’s time in boarding school where she faced a “strong had on their children and on their children’s children,” identity crisis“ as the only Jewish girl among Christians. she says.

Then came The Lenski File following Lillian’s own attempts to find her younger sister who had been hidden by he delicious irony of fiction as an art form is its her parents during the war. capacity to reveal the truth of our lives. Lillian has “We never knew whether she died for sure and I felt that seized upon this irony and applied its lessons with it was up to me as the eldest daughter (to search for her.)” her students and in her own work. But a writer’s knowledge Lillian began the search in Poland in the 1960s and has is not enough. Character counts. made many trips since.

With quiet emphasis, Lillian leaves me with the mantra The teen trilogy ends with unresolved questions and she offered earlier to her students: “It takes courage to be a Lillian picks them up writer—to write the truth.” again in Mouth of Truth, an adult novel currently making the Lillian’s website: www.texturespublishing.com/Boraks-Nemetz/index.htm rounds of publishers.

UBC Continuing Studies website: www.cstudies.ubc.ca Two collections of Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre: www.vhec.org poetry behind her, Lillian is now working

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Holley Rubinsky’s The Writers’ Show

Broadcasting from the Kootenays

By Lynne Van Luven

“Writing a second book [is] like picking grit from your teeth in a dust storm,” one character says to another in Holley Rubinsky’s novel Beyond This Point.

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ubinsky has—at least temporarily—left the dust storm behind. Since the summer of 2006, the Kaslo writer has been engrossed with a new project, the results of which can be heard Mondays at 6 pm., live on CJLY, Kootenay Co-operative Radio, in Nelson.

There’s no need to feel left out if you live beyond the folds and forests of the Kootenays; just head to your computer, go to www.kootenaycoopradio.com/writers/ and voila!

The Writers’ Show. With just a mouse-click (and the right software), you are able to listen to Rubinsky’s interviews with 34 (and counting) British Columbia writers.

The Writers’ Show now encompasses Seasons One through Four and includes interviews with a wide array of writers, including John Lent, Angie Abdou, Kristjana Gunnars, Bill Gaston, Caroline Adderson, Terry Glavin, Kathy Page, John Gould, Katherine Gordon and Patrick Lane, as well as publisher Diane Morriss of Sono Nis Press and agent Morty Mint.

Before her 2006 novel, Rubinsky made a name for herself with her collection of linked stories, At First I Hope For Rescue, published by Knopf in 1997, and Rapid Transits, her 1990 short story collection published by Polestar. She’s also the winner of a National Magazine Award for fiction and the first winner of the $10,000 Journey Prize. Her books, which are critically acclaimed, reveal a careful, sensitive observer, someone who has faith in humanity despite its flaws.

On a Saturday morning in November, I telephone Rubinsky to talk more about her radio program. “You’ll soon hear a whining like an airplane taking off,” she warns me. “It’s the washing machine.” Accustomed to the vagaries of home offices, we persevere, only raising our voices a little over the noise.

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“Right now this show is taking up most of my time—it’d be asking for too much if I wanted to have any other kind of life,” she says. “I’ve been on an incredible learning curve. I’ve forced my brain into learning new things.”

Those new skills included teaching herself some HTML code for the web pages and figuring out how to record and edit her interviews in GarageBand, a Macintosh editing software.

T

he Kootenays are “hard to get to,” Rubinsky warned me early in our communication process, as I tried to find time to travel to the Kootenays to interview her.

Kaslo is a ten-hour drive from Vancouver, and in the fall and winter, flights in and out of Castlegar (known to locals as Cancelgar) are plagued by poor visibility.

“When you live in an isolated place, it is important to find a way to become part of a community outside of a very small town,” Rubinsky says. And thanks to her work on The Writers’ Show, many of us can move beyond our own small interior spaces.

Rubinsky credits the CD she recorded for Beyond This Point as the initial catalyst for her recent radio work. “The technology so interested me, it made me think there was a whole resource I wasn’t paying attention to. And you know, I do have a good radio voice.”

Indeed she does. When you listen to any of her shows, you notice that Rubinsky is not one of these new “it’s all about me,” interview hotshots who adore the sound of their own voice. Instead, her delivery is calm, almost meditative; her questions are few and well-articulated, and she gives her guests plenty of room to explore their own thoughts, to think aloud.

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FEATURES

Rubinsky has lived in Canada for almost 30 years now, but the roots of her love for radio go right back to her high school days in Long Beach, California, when she took a radioproduction workshop. “It was pretty basic, six people around a mike, clapping erasers to make sounds, that sort of thing.”

Nevertheless, when Rubinsky first went to CJLY to do her show demo, she says what should have been a twenty-minute process took her about two hours. “I finally got it done. I was totally fried, but successful.”

Rubinsky says she “did not want a celebrity show, and did not want to try to be Eleanor Wachtel,” famous for her author interviews on CBC Radio.

“I’d need a producer for all that,” Rubinsky notes, “so I decided I wanted to do the simplest and most obvious thing, which was talk to writers, to hear how they think about their work… I wanted the show to inform people.” And, she emphasizes, the show is for “writers and readers.”

“I select people at random,” she says. “I’m not going through an A- list and a B-list… I started out with Bill Gaston and Cynthia Flood. It’s all pretty organic—I send an e-mail to a writer, and we take it from there. I have a list, of course, but I feel really excited and grateful when people agree to be on the show.”

(Confession time here—I felt pretty excited and grateful when Rubinsky asked me to be on The Writers’ Show last summer to talk about creative nonfiction. It was fun, and her questions made me think.)

Rubinsky’s natural and inveterate curiosity seems to guide her interviews. “I want to know about what is mysterious about writing and also how the process works. I want the show to convey the excitement a writer has... Anne Fleming said her excitement came from the sentence; John Lent said his comes when he gets just the right word.”

It is comforting to hear so many writers’ voices: Rita

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

Moir confessing how hard she worked on her last book, The Windshift Line: “Forty times. I wrote it forty times”; or Tom Wayman observing that “Writing poems is like painting. Writing a story is like working on sculpture; you have to see around it.”

“Since the show’s inception more and more people are getting involved including writer Bill Schermbrucker who did a series on the memoir,” says Rubinsky. But she’d welcome even wider participation. “I’d like to hear correspondence from book reps, from different regions; I’d like people to go to book launches and talk on their MP3 and e-mail it to me so we could use it on the show.”

In short, Rubinsky is open to a panoply of ideas that would broaden the conversation she hopes her shows are stimulating. She’s looking for people to read selections from how-to-write books; she’s happy to have writers interview each other, and she’d be keen to have writers choose music and talk about their own writing process.

“Send me an e-mail, phone me, tell me what you think,” Rubinsky says. “Listen to the shows in classrooms, use them as resources.”

A

nd although Rubinsky has no plans for radio-world domination, she hopes that community or campus radio stations might pick up her show.

In the meantime, for the rest of us, marooned without the right word early in the morning or despairing over a dud-sentence late at night, The Writers’ Show is right there for us to look up and listen to.

Lynne Van Luven has a PhD in Canadian Literature and has taught journalism and creative non-fiction at the University of Victoria since 1997. Lynne is the editor of Nobody’s Mother, which was nominated for two nonfiction awards in 2007 and is now editing, along with Bruce Gillespie, a companion anthology, tentatively entitled Nobody’s Father: The End of The Line.

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Adventures in RadioLand

By Holley Rubinsky

When I had the brainstorm of doing a half-hour radio show, I had no idea the learning it would involve. I knew I would never use the PCs at the station for editing, nor be willing to make the one-hour trip each way to Nelson in order to do it, so I thought, Hey, I’m a Mac person, I’ll edit the show in GarageBand.

I

have at least six draft versions of Bill Gaston’s interview—my inaugural program—because there were decisions that always had to be made with time (or word) limitations. Should I use the part where he talks about —? Or can I piece together the sections where we get into reviews? Which I did, and it’s a frank, good show.

In the beginning I didn’t have a USB microphone (I’ve had good success with the Blue SnoBall), and so when I needed to add something, I had to book the studio and drive to Nelson. Sometimes to say a dozen words. That’s how anal one can get.

For Anne Fleming’s show (#2), I sat in a comfortable chair on the verandah, laptop in lap, dark glasses on over reading glasses, and thought, This is lovely. I’ll have this conversation edited in no time. Then I lost the edit—you know that feeling—went into the house, came back out, resettled and began again. She had such a great story of a drive across the country, phoning her editor about the title for Anomaly, that I listened to so many, many, many times that I could tell it at a cocktail party and think it was my own.

Like community and campus stations everywhere, CJLY (Kootenay Co-op Radio in Nelson) depends upon volunteers and that includes programmers. I had recorded a reading from a book at the station and saw that Terry Brennan, now Operations Manager, liked my voice. So that summer, on the verandah, a friend and I began drafting a program. What could a show for writers have in it (that wasn’t a copy of Eleanor Wachtel)? Would it have editing segments in which I gave a student writer the benefit of my wisdom?(!) Would it include anecdotal publishing stories?

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Kootenay Co-op Radio has an excellent show proposal form, which helped me begin to think in minutes and seconds—necessary for radio—30 seconds for this, 15 seconds for that, two minutes for something else. Answering “What Topics Do You Intend to Explore,” without the adjunct of enthusiastic hand waving, took time. “Describe your program in one imaginative sentence”— imagine the pressure.

I sat with a draft of what I might say to introduce the show and put on a timer and talked out loud to myself, trying to be radio-like. One minute of radio talk is— well, a lot of words. Maybe 200. Which is why anyone doing a show for the CBC needs to have writers. And producers to make the arrangements and develop topics and questions.

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s a volunteer programmer, I do it all—contact BCbased writers and others in publishing, arrange studio dates, email KCR and then guests regarding times and changes in times. Then the writer and I share ideas about possible subjects—the editing process, finding an agent—usually by email. Then I make elaborate notes, print them off, head to the station and record a conversation.

Initially I was too nervous with the technical aspects to be capable of reading words on a page, assuming I could find my reading glasses (on the floor or at home) or pick up the notes from where they lay, on a console, out of reach, without knocking my laptop off the perch where it was busily recording the conversations directly into GarageBand from the computer in Studio B. Terence Young (Show #22), among others, was very kind when I

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FEATURES

came to a halt and couldn’t think of another word. Pauline Holdstock, too (Show #20).

(Thank goodness for editing, which has allowed me to cut out the words I say in conversation to encourage someone—“wow” and “right,” annoying to listen to on radio; and my vast, befuddled silences.) Then I pack up and come home to edit.

The first emails to potential guests were tentative and lengthy, describing the show and what it was about (or what I thought it was about.) I tested the concept on Cynthia Flood (Show #7). If she had said no, I would not have continued to fill out the proposal. Then I tested the letter on Bill Gaston, and the result was I had two writers who were willing. So I filled out the final proposal and was given the go-ahead to come in for training—a bit easy-going for someone with my technical deficits—and make an appointment for the demo. The demo was a circus. Missing was the trained monkey to reach that slider while keeping the puffball mic—yes, again—millimetres close; it’s hard to see around those things.

T

he show, however, got a go, and there have been unexpected experiences ever since. A year ago November, for example, in order to get to an interview in Nelson, I totaled my vehicle, slipping on black ice. My passenger wasn’t hurt, nor was I, except superficially. A lot of bleeding, and trauma that came later. That day, after an ambulance ride, wearing a new

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

bandage and with a spreading hematoma across my scalp, I went to Studio B and talked to Carol Windley (Show #10).

She knew, intuitively, that something had happened, but I wouldn’t tell her, because she’d just come back from the Giller Awards party in Toronto—I’d seen her on TV— and I wanted to talk about that. Our interview, when you listen to it, is distracted, a case of both of us carrying on in the way that people do of a certain age who are determined. I had to cancel George K. Ilsley (Show #12), who at a later date, outside of the recording, asked me how I was.

The Writers’ Show is now an hour long, with 34 shows archived online and counting. Connecting writers to writers around the province has always been my goal but I’ve also made some good friends thanks to my adventures in RadioLand.

Holley Rubinsky is a fiction writer living in Kaslo, British Columbia. Beyond This Point (McClelland & Stewart, 2006) is Rubinsky’s third work of fiction. She is the author of At First I Hope for Rescue, Knopf Canada, and Rapid Transits and Other Stories, Polestar. She is the host and producer of The Writers’ Show, the show about writing and publishing for writers and readers, archived online.

• Holley Rubinsky’s website: www.holleyrubinsky.com • Her e-mail address: holley@telusplanet.net

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Launched!

New Titles by

Federation Members

Birdies, Bogeys and Kiwis: Golfing Around New Zealand

Return to Open Water: Poems New & Selected

Liz Clark Wild West Coast Publishing, September 2007 ISBN 978-0-9784176-0-4 $21.95

Harold Rhenisch Ronsdale Press, September 2007 ISBN 978-1-55380-049-1 $21.95

A high-handicap golfer, Canadian travel writer and photographer, Liz Clark toured New Zealand with her best pal and favourite golfing partner. After driving with “Mr. Wanderlust” up hill and down dale over 8,000 kilometres, Liz invited Kiwi golfers throughout the country to share highlights of playing a round on more courses than one could play in a lifetime.

Whether it be on a rustic pasture or a wellmanicured classic course, contributors tell it as it is and as it was, way back when. It’s a good read, filled with suggestions for accommodation, dining, and side trips to interest the whole family. “‘Birdies, Bogeys and Kiwis’ offers a refreshing and completely new perspective on golfing and touring New Zealand. We highly recommend it.”

—Kiwi Golfing Legend Marnie McGuire Torontonian Liz Clark currently lives in the Pacific Northwest. Now able to travel extensively, she and her husband enjoy sharing stories and images of people and places from wherever their ramblings take them. Her nonfiction articles have appeared in several magazines across Canada.

This is her first book.

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In this spirited celebration of the creative spirit, Rhenisch presents a vision of the world that places Canada, and poetry, at the crossroads of world culture. Included are a hymn for whales, a love poem for herring, black-comic stagings of Shakespeare, tongue-in-cheek deconstructions and celebrations of philosophy and literature, laments for the missteps of history, enraged political blasts, and deep ecological lyrics. Mozart enters riding the bulls into the Williams Lake Stampede, and a rhinestoned Jesus sings Elvis lyrics on a car hoist at Canadian Tire.

Long-praised for his innovative creative nonfiction and his mastery of the long poem form, this “New & Selected” presents the best poems—comical, elegiac, satiric and lyrical—from twelve volumes of verse of one of Canada’s best, most original, and most mercurial poets.

Since 1982 Harold Rhenisch has published twelve books of poetry, a book of essays, a novel and four books of creative nonfiction.

His most recent nonfiction book, The Wolves at Evelyn, won the 2007 George Ryga Award for Social Responsibility in Literature. Harold recently moved from 150 Mile House in BC’s Cariboo region to Campbell River on Vancouver Island.

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

COMMUNITY

The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam

Blue Valley: An Ecological Memoir

Thuong Vuong-Riddick Hagios Press, September 2007 ISBN 978-0-9783449-0-9 $19.95

Luanne Armstrong Maa Press, September 2007 ISBN 978-0-9685302-4-5 $23.00

“In the style of a travelogue and a memoir, this elegantly written volume tells the saga of the author’s extended family from focal ancestry to the present as her family adapts to and eventually triumphs over the whirlwind of historical forces that beset Vietnam in the 20th century. Meticulously researched, written from a grassroots, personal level, Dr. Vuong-Riddick’s book captures the many cultures, legends, religions, customs, architecture, landscape, and even the sounds and aromas of a civilization that is one of the most complex in the world. Drastically different from dry political accounts of this tragic country, the reader is fêted with a unique blending of ethnic Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese traditions and mentality overlaid with French and American cultural influences.”

How does the ecology of a place shape a life? In Blue Valley: An Ecological Memoir, well known novelist and young-adult writer Luanne Armstrong illuminates and expands our understanding of what it means to belong to a place. This latest book in Maa Press’ Colours of the Columbia Series is a valuable and powerful addition to the growing body of literature about place, natural history and ecology.

—Yuen-Fong Woon, PhD, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria, Author of The Exulted Wife Thuong Vuong-Riddick was born in Hanoi and studied in Saigon and Paris. In 1969 she emigrated to Canada and taught French literature at the University of Montreal, McGill University and the University of Victoria. She is the author of Two Shores/ Deux rives (Ronsdale Press).

Armstrong’s memoir about a lifetime relationship with a farm on the shore of Kootenay Lake in British Columbia is grounded in her belief that ecological restoration is dependent upon writing language back into land. Through an intimate and graceful contemplation of the ties that bind us all to place and home, Armstrong creates a work that truly embodies the distinctiveness of her homeplace on Earth.

Luanne Armstrong is the author of numerous books for both youth and adults.

She lives on her heritage farm on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake where she gardens, writes and goes for long walks. She is also an adjunct professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

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Lifting the Stone Susan McCaslin Seraphim Editions, October 2007 ISBN 978-0-9735487-8-5 $16.95 Lifting the Stone is the finest collection yet by a prize-winning poet with a growing reputation for writing with passionate candor and exquisite finesse on matters of faith and spirituality in the tradition of Herbert, Hopkins and Avison. A series of courageously forthright treatments of the problematics of 21st Century belief is complemented by a set of affectionately witty accounts of family, students and mentors, electronic technology, and a veritable bestiary of creatures; and the book concludes with a luminous meditation on water “in her myriad transformations.”

“With an equal measure of grace and grit, she sings from the still centre of being human and conscious on a glorious, defiled, everyday earth of love and pollution, dogs, moths and God. —John Terpstra Susan McCaslin is a poet, educator and workshop facilitator who has authored ten volumes of poetry, including A Plot of Light and At the Mercy Seat. Susan is the editor of the anthologies A Matter of Spirit: Recovery of the Sacred in Contemporary Canadian Poetry and Poetry and Spiritual Practice: Selections from Contemporary Canadian Poets. She is currently on the editorial boards of Event literary magazine out of Douglas College, New Westminster, B.C. and The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Harvard Divinity School).

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Horse Power

1970: A Novel Poem

Ordinary Days

Ann Walsh Orca Book Publishers, October 2007 ISBN 978-1-5514388-1-8 $9.95

Elizabeth Rhett Woods Ekstasis Editions, October 2007 ISBN 978-1-894800-98-3 $18.95

Cornelia Hornosty Ekstasis Editons, November 2007 ISBN 978-1-894800-97-6 $18.95

Once again Callie is forced to take part in her mom’s latest crusade. They head into ranch country to camp—bloodthirsty mosquitoes, stinky outhouses and all—at a protest to save a rural school. Callie’s grandmother shows up with her biker buddies and the singing grannies. Callie hates camping and wants nothing to do with the protest. To make matters worse, Callie’s only possible ally, her cousin Del, is mad at her. The last time Callie visited, she was thrown from Del’s horse, Radish.

Callie claimed the horse was vicious and now Del’s parents are forcing her to sell Radish. Callie wants to help her cousin, but she’s terrified of the horse. Del is just as tenacious as the rest of Callie’s family, and Callie is forced to admit that she’s not going to be allowed to go home until both the horse and the school are saved.

1970: A Novel Poem is poet and novelist Elizabeth Rhett Woods’ personal exploration of a pivotal year of turmoil, discovery and transition. Draft-dodgers, Viet Nam, literature and LSD, love affairs, liaisons and leavings—each has their season in a year scarred by the Kent State tragedies and the War Measures Act. Against this backdrop the poet traces an interior landscape of restlessness and renewal. Beginning with winter and a thirtieth birthday, Woods’ novelistic approach artfully paints the divided heart of spring romance leading to summer disappointment and the inevitable upheaval of autumn. Witnessing the self as a character in a novel, the poet exposes the forces driving transitions from youth to maturity, intoxication to sobriety, marriage to separation, and finally East to West.

The finely crafted poems of Cornelia Hornosty’s Ordinary Days celebrate the quotidian with the deceptive informality of Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts.” Anything but ordinary, Hornosty’s latest volume documents a personal journey of growth, love and loss with the wry detachment of a silent witness carefully noting atmosphere, nuance and gesture. Events, people and scenes described from the outside reveal their essence through language that is casual and precise against the relentless rhythm of successive moments. Conversational yet strangely classical, the poems of Ordinary Days lull the reader into tranquil awareness only disturbed by an unexpected intensity, reverberating with a lasting echo.

Ann Walsh is the author of numerous historical fiction books for young adults and has edited two anthologies of historical fiction for young readers. She has published a book of poetry, and her short stories, for both adults and children, have been included in anthologies and magazines in many countries.

Elizabeth Rhett Woods has published four other books of poetry and three novels, including Beyond the Pale (Ekstasis Editions, 2006) and the underground classic The Yellow Volkswagen (PaperJacks, 1971).

Her poetry and plays, including the 90minute verse play Maya (Tuesday Night, 1974) have been broadcast on CBC Radio.

She lives in Victoria.

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Cornelia Hornosty (nee DeYoung) lived in Ontario for 28 years and has been living in Victoria since 1995. Three previous collections of her poetry were published by Borealis Press in Ottawa: Voice with Flowers (1991), Under the Beaks of Millions (1993), and The Inner Romaine of Our Lives (2000), as well as a chapbook with Leaf Press titled Small Lake with Pine Trees (2003).

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

COMMUNITY

Divided

Running Down the Wind

Stay Black and Die

Gerhard Winkler Rogue Literary Press, December 2007 ISBN 978-0-9736201-2-2 $21.00

David Fraser Ascent Aspirations Publishing, December 2007 ISBN 978-009736568-2-4 $19.95

Addena Sumter-Freitag Commodore Books, December 2007 ISBN 978-0-9683182-7-0 $16.00

Divided is an action-packed drama from the first to the last page, taking place in the city of Berlin during the Cold War. The Berlin Wall is erected and life lines between East and West are cut by a ruthless Communist system. Innocent people are incarcerated and tortured by the Stasi.

Historical detailsare explained and provide a fascinating background to the events taking place. During that time the world stands on the edge of a nuclear confrontation. Several attempts are made to free victims from Stasi prisons. Escaping might result in death.

“Divided races on with believable characters with actions romantic and/or violent in a fascinating time and place in world history.

Gerhard Winkler lets his readers experience 1961 Berlin and its destructive divisions.”

—Bernice Lever Gerhard Winkler enjoys the outdoors and many of his travel writings were published in RV magazines in Canada and the USA. Gerhard has won several awards for his essays and short stories. He belongs to the Rogue Writers who were instrumental and encouraging in having this book published.

Running Down the Wind, Vancouver Island poet David Fraser’s second collection of poetry is a beautifully crafted book featuring poems written over the last two years of living on the island. The attractive cover design by Patricia Carroll welcomes the reader to venture into the lyrical world inside. In Running Down the Wind, Fraser reflects on life as an observer of very personal events, of metaphysical interpretations of the landscape around him, and of the social and political directions of our voracious world. His poems engender raw emotion, express love and loss, delve into the author’s psyche and display the anguish and the joy that characterizes life.

David Fraser lives in Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island. He has edited Ascent Aspirations Magazine since 1997. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in over 50 journals including Three Candles, Regina Weese, Ardent, Quills and Ygdrasil.

His first collection of poetry, Going to the Well, was published in 2004, and The Dark Side of the Billboard (short fiction) was published in 2006. His latest passion is developing Nanaimo’s newest spoken word series, WordStorm.

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

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“Growing up black in Winnipeg meant the day a substitute teacher read you something other than Little Black Sambo and almost changed your mind about Reading .. It meant wiping the spit from your brow and walking past the lawn jockeys, the songs and the taunts.

Growing up in the Sumter family in Winnipeg meant your mother was the strongest, bravest, scariest woman in the neighbourhood, if not the world. A woman who put people in their place. Including you. “Only two things you have to do in this world,” she would say, “and that’s stay black, and die”.

Stay Black & Die is a great piece of writingfunny, moving, unsettling, and beautiful.”

—Anne Fleming, The Georgia Straight Addena Sumter-Freitag is a 7th generation African Canadian. She grew up in Winnipeg’s North End, and has lived all across Canada.

She has been involved in theatre for the past 25 years and has performed across Canada and in Australia. In recent years Addena has shifted her focus toward storytelling and poetry, performing at the Vancouver Storytelling Festival, Vancouver Spoken Word Festival, and the World Poetry Reading Series at the Vancouver Public Library. SumterFreitag is a vibrant member of Vancouver’s writing community and currently working on her next collection of poetry and short fiction.

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

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 it’s recommended that you read one or two copies of the publication in question to make sure your writing “fits” publication requirements. Be sure to read submission guidelines.

Our home page at www.bcwriters.com lists recent additions to Contests and Markets. Be sure to let your regional rep know when you win a contest or get something published so it can be included in the regional report. Good luck!

LOOMING DEADLINES All Rights Reserved www.allrightsreserved.ca (Spring Theme: “Heroes and Villains”) Deadline: January 21, 2008 Halifax-based magazine publishes emerging and established writers and artists. Seeks submissions of unpublished poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, as well as literary stories told through visual art/ photography for spring and fall themed publications. Pays with a copy of journal. Six poems or one story per submission. Full details online.

PRISM International Fiction Contest http://prism.arts.ubc.ca Deadline: January 31, 2008 The winning entry will be published in the 2008 Summer Issue of PRISM International. Grand prize: $2,000.

Runner’s-up prizes: $200 each. The entry fee is $28 for one story, plus $7 for each additional story. Winners will be notified in June. Complete submission requirements posted on Prism website.

The Malahat Review Novella Contest http://web.uvic.ca/malahat Deadline: Postmark February 1, 2008 Send 10–20 thousand words that comprise a single work of unpublished fiction. No restrictions as to genre, subject matter, or aesthetic approach. Mail to The Malahat Review, Novella Prize, University of Victoria, Box 1700 STN CSC, Victoria B.C. V8W 2Y2. $35 entry fee gets you a one-year subscription.

CV2

www.contemporaryverse2.ca Three different looming deadlines for CV2. Check website for details:

1. Contemporary Verse 2 Spring 2008: The Jilted Issue: Poetry of love lost Deadline: January 10, 2008

Work can be in any style or tradition, collaborative or by a single author.

Maximum 20 pages. Send poetry as an attachment in Word .doc or .rtf format or in the message of an email to Kevin McPherson Eckhoff & Heidi Garnett at portage.anthology@gmail.com. Include your email address, phone number, and a brief biography.

Lookin’ for love in your poems, review, essays and critical writing on poetry and the love-dashed heart.

2. CV2 48 Hour Poem Contest Deadline: March 28, 2008 Preregistration Postmark Receive a list of 10 words and put them into a poem within 48 hours April 5–6.

3. Summer 2008: Poem as Travelogue Deadline: April 1, 2008 Looking for poetry and critical writing that explore travel in its many and varied forms.

Search for Spirituality Anthology Deadline: January 31, 2008 The Search for Spirituality, an anthology for Gay, Lesbian, Bi and Transgendered writers from different faiths and cultures who have found a connection with spirituality, seeks uplifting, inspiring, healing and comforting stories of 15002000 words. Send submission with contact information and brief author biography to: lbtspiritquest@gmail.com

Up & Coming Mature Writers Call for Poetry Submissions Deadline: January 31, 2008 Inviting submissions for an anthology of contemporary Canadian poetry featuring up-and-coming mature writers.

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS The Antigonish Review www.antigonishreview.com Mail unpublished fiction or poetry to The Antigonish Review, Box 5000, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, B2G 2W5. TAR is quite specific about style, so read the submission guidelines online before submitting.

Broken Pencil www.brokenpencil.com Considers fiction from 50 to 3000 words. Query them about articles on indie/alternative culture. They have a rant section, too.

dANDelion www.dandelionmagazine.ca Bi-annual magazine focuses on prose and poetry. Accepts email submissions in .rtf or .doc format, or by mail to dandelion Magazine Society, c/o Dept. of English, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4. Only responds to submissions that have been accepted for publication.

WORDWORKS–WINTER 2007

CONTESTS & MARKETS

Descant www.descant.ca

Press, Inc. 423 - 100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1H3.

Descant considers submissions of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, essays, art and photography. They freely admit to taking up to 12 months or longer to respond.

Check website for details.

Queen’s Quarterly www.queensu.ca/quarterly

Reads fiction to 4,000 words and poetry (3 to 5 poems). The Fiddlehead prides itself on its rejection notes, responds in up to 6 months, and requires a SASE if you want to hear back from them. Send to: The Fiddlehead, Campus House, 11 Garland Court, UNB, PO Box 4400, Fredericton NB E3B 5A3.

Queen’s Quarterly is a multidisciplinary journal aimed at the general educated reader. Publishes articles, reviews, short stories and poetry. QQ encourages electronic submissions. (If you send hard copy and they accept your work, you’ll need to send it as an e-mail attachment anyway.) Send your unpublished work (after delving into the guidelines, of course) to: The Editor, Queen’s Quarterly, 144 Barrie Street, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6

Grain www.grainmagazine.ca

sub-TERRAIN Magazine www.subterrain.ca

Grain has a nine month reading period, and will be accepting submissions of prose and poetry until the end of May. For details, check the website. Grain Magazine, PO Box 67, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7K 3K1.

Reads fiction, maximum 3,000 words or non-fiction to 4,000 words.

Unsolicited poetry must relate to themes. Submissions will not be considered without SASE. Send to:subTERRAIN Magazine, PO Box 3008 MPO, Vancouver, BC V6B 3X5.

The Fiddlehead www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/Fiddlehead

Wascana Review www.uregina.ca/arts/english/ wascana/wrhome.htm Considers unpublished work of fiction, poetry, reviews, and articles. Mail submissions, with SASE, to Dr. Michael Trussler, Editor, Wascana Review, Department of English, University of Regina, Regina, SK, S4S 0A2

ONLINE Boxcar Poetry Review www.lone-crow.com/BOXCAR/ Seeks your best poetry, artwork, photography, interviews, and reviews.

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

New Orphic Review Send submissions of fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays, along with SASE, to New Orphic Review, 706 Mill Street, Nelson, BC V1L 4S5

RESOURCES FOR WRITERS Duotrope’s Digest www.duotrope.com

On Spec www.onspec.ca Quarterly magazine features speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror. Focuses on prose, considers some poetry. Check website for guidelines.

Easy-to-sort database for over 1200 current markets for short fiction and poetry. Become a registered user (it’s free) and you’ll have access to a submissions tracker.

Prairie Fire www.prairiefire.ca

Editors’ Association of Canada www.editors.ca

Send a maximum of six poems OR one short story (maximum 10,000 words) per submission, along with a brief cover letter with a short bio, your contact information, and title(s) and genre of the piece you are sending. Let them know if you are just starting to send out your work. Send SASE if you want your manuscript back. If not, say so in your cover letter and send a small SASE or postcard, or your e-mail address, so they can respond. Prairie Fire

The EAC promotes professional editing as key in producing effective communication.

Places for Writers www.placesforwriters.com Good place for up-to-date market information. Lots of interesting content, including links to a variety of Canadian writers’ sites.

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The Writers’ Show with Holley Rubinsky www.kootenaycoopradio.com/ writers Lively interviews with writers, editors and publishers. BC Writers Holley has talked to include Angie Abdou, Vivien Bowers, Anne DeGrace, Katherine Gordon, Pauline Holdstock, Patrick Lane, Rita Moir, Kathy Page, Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Adam Lewis Schroeder, Alan Twigg, Tom Wayman, and Terence Young.

Kootenay Co-op Radio in Nelson airs this show on Mondays at 6 PM, but thanks to archiving you can listen to any of the past shows online whenever you like.

FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Regional Reports North Audrey L’Heureux, Prince George alheureu@shaw.ca New member Jack Boudreau is scheduled to autograph his popular local history books at Coles in the Pine Centre mall on December 22. Titles to be autographed include: Crazy Man’s Creek; Grizzly Bear Mountain; Mountains, Campfires & Memories; Wilderness Dreams, Wild and Free, and his latest, Sternwheelers & Canyon Cats. This is Jack’s first public appearance following a year of convalescing.

Hilary Crowley continues to write her weekly Outdoors column in the Prince George Citizen. She has written country profiles on Bhutan and India which were published by the International Health Division of the Canadian Physiotherapy Association. Her travel pieces on India and Bhutan were published by small publications in England. She had several short pieces accepted for publication, including an article on obesity and its relationship to lifestyle diseases in developing countries for the Canadian Physiotherapy Association; a feature article on eco-travel for Stemma magazine; a report on a hiking trip to the Muskwa Kechika Wilderness Area for Cloudburst Magazine and a short account of life in Northern BC for the Lonely Planet Guide To Canada. Hilary continues to participate in the Island Mountain Arts creative writing component of the Summer School of the Arts in Wells.

Sheila Peters has announced that she’ll be teaching English 213 Creative Writing – Nonfiction, a second year university credit course online through Northwest Community College beginning January 7. Interested members can contact her at speters@nwcc.bc.ca Lynda Williams launched her book Okal Rel Anthology 2 at the Sentry Box in Calgary where she shared the stage with anthology editor John Preet and Calgary authors Randy McCharles and Sandra FitzPatrick. On November 22, Lynda was interviewed by CBC’s Allana Stuart, and a week later she

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gave the keynote address to Quantum Leaps in Terrace using examples from her nine published books on how a science background can inspire creativity.

Si Transken has co-edited a new book, Making noise: Northern women’s caring and in/visible dis/abilities, featuring the writings of 26 Northern BC women. The book is available from the UNBC Press and the UNBC Women’s Centre. Si also did a reading at the Vancouver Rape Relief Centre’s fundraiser for First Nation’s Women’s Court Challenge ($30,000 was raised in one night!), and for the Vancouver Remember Me Ceremonies held December 6 at the Vancouver Library.

Rob Budde launched his new book of poetry, Finding Ft. George (Caitlin Press), on Saturday, December 1. Rob, along with Si Transken and Ken Belford, also read at The People’s Co-op Bookstore in Vancouver, Capilano College (North Vancouver), and at Vernon’s Vertigo Gallery.

New member Dan Boudreau reports that he uses his recently published book, Business Plan or BUST!, as resource material when providing business planning workshops and one-on-one coaching. He also writes articles on business and entrepreneurship topics for his Boudreau Biz column for the Prince George Free Press and for his blog at www.boudreaubiz.ca Jacqueline Baldwin’s poem, “I Want The Pipes To Play The Flowers Of The Forest,” from her book Threadbare Like Lace was read by Michael Enright in November during his CBC radio program The Sunday Edition. Her long poem, “Rural Medicine, 1970,” appears in a new anthology edited

by Si Transken.

Central Kay McCracken, Salmon Arm kaymcc@jetstream.net Horse Power, the second in Ann Walsh’s Flower Power Series (Orca Currents) has just been released.

Ann’s creative nonfiction piece, “Cariboo Gold” appeared in Heart of the Cariboo Chilcotin, More Stories Worth Reading (Heritage House).

A launch at the Williams Lake Museum was well attended with Ann and six other contributors reading. Ann is also the cover girl, er, make that “cover grannie,” of the current issue of BC

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BookWorld (Winter, 2007.) That issue also includes Ann’s article about living the writing life in a small town.

Twenty pages of Patsy Alford’s chapbook, Mrs God Takes the Hastings Express, will appear in the Dalhousie Review this winter. Six of Patsy’s poems have been accepted for the next edition of the Naropa University on-line magazine Not Enough Night.

The Okanagan Writers’ League (OWL) continues to feature their members in the Kelowna Daily Courier’s insert in the Event newspaper. One of the most recent was by Barbara Shave about her travels in Peking. In November OWL featured books by Okanagan writers at the Holiday Festival of Creations in Kelowna. Book sales were brisk, bringing in $497.

Sterling Haynes had three haiku, “Nuit Blanche - Poems for Late Night,” appear in a Toronto anthology. He also sold a story to Rogers TV called “The Eccentric Dr. Sam.” On December 1, Gail Anderson-Dargatz held a forum and invited many of her favourite authors and several of her favourite booksellers from across Canada to talk about the books on their Christmas wish lists.

Alice Brown, Howard Brown and Dorothy Rolin read at the November Writer’s Coffee House in Salmon Arm. David Baxter and partner Dusty Tucker write a monthly column, “Lake Life,” for the Friday AM. The December issue featured their piece, “Yuletide celebrations begin with the Winter Solstice.” David also performed at two Celista coffee houses in the fall.

Candice Lucey’s column, “Kids in the Kitchen,” featured a cranberry apple crumble recipe in the December issue of Friday AM. Kay McCracken worked her short, short story Christmas Sardines into her monthly column, “Write On” published in the Friday AM. The story was read on CBC radio several years ago.

South East Anne Strachan, Nakusp sisinwriting@hotmail.com Kootenay writers are active throughout the region and beyond! Nelson’s Judy Wapp has her poem “Train Music” appearing in the anthology Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came

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to Canada in the Vietnam War Era. This book includes the work of nearly seventy poets from across the continent.

Linda Hunter reports that Deep Water Press of Nelson (www.deepwaterpress.ca) launched Julia Star’s The River Books: Book One-Love Work Wisdom on December 15 at Ten Old Books in Duncan.

Linda Crosfield has a poem in the Leaf Press chapbook, Starting With Bread, edited by Patrick Lane. Margrith Schraner’s travel story made the judge’s long list selection in the Fed’s Literary Writes 2007 competition.

Angie Abdou of Fernie will be teaching at the Sage Hill Teen Writing Experience in Moose Jaw again this July. She will also be conducting a workshop called “How to Start Your Novel” at the Fernie Writers Conference held in Fernie during the third week of July.

Luanne Armstrong read from her new book, Blue Valley: An Ecological Memoir, in Nelson, Creston, Argenta and Kootenay Bay. The book is also listed on the CBC website as one of their top five suggested reads for 2007.

She has essays in four forthcoming anthologies, Body Breakdowns (Anvil Press), Stories of Growing Up Rural (Red Deer Press), Double Lives, Writing and Motherhood (McGill Queens University Press), and the forthcoming Federation of BC Writers anthology edited by Daniel Francis.

Kuya Minogue will hold the official opening of her ZenWords Zen Centre in Creston on January 20. She will also teach an “Introduction to Memoir” course during February and March.

On December 1, a group of local literary luminaries raised $340 at “Books for Kids: A Literary Cafe,” a fundraiser to purchase books for kids for the Nelson Food Cupboard Christmas Hampers this holiday season.

Nelson’s Otter Books is also in on the act: anyone can purchase a children’s book there, receive 15% off and have it included in a Christmas Hamper. South East Fed members reading that evening included Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Linda Crosfield, Olindo Chiocca, Ernest Hekkanen, Susan Andrews Grace, Ross Klatte, and Margrith Schraner.

On December 11, en route to Puerto Vallarta, and hence down the coast to Yelapa to spend the winter, Ross Klatte read from his memoir Leaving the Farm at Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane to a small but appreciative group of listeners. While in Mexico, Ross will work on a novel based on his and his wife’s experience as back-to-the-landers circa 1970.

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

Fraser Valley Sylvia Taylor, Langley words@sylviataylor.ca In addition to other courses, Sylvia Taylor taught LifeStory and Personal Memoir courses for White Rock Continuing Education, Sunrise Pavilion in Surrey, and several private writing groups and organizations. She consulted in business communications and coached on four book manuscripts and continues to write several articles a month for The New View/The Now newspapers of Surrey. She also worked in Florida for three weeks with literary agent Cricket Rogers Freeman and gathered material for future articles, and will be in Hawaii in February, working with a client on her novel.

Kuldip Gill has recent publications in the Literary Review of Canada, October, 2007; and in the new anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, & Beyond (W. W. Norton, 2008). Kuldip read at University House, University College of the Fraser Valley, in Abbotsford on November 16 with Sonnet L’Abbe, Summer Pervez and Tariq Malik. The reading was hosted by UCFV’s Centre for Indo-Canadian Studies and by Writerin-Residence Richard Van Camp. Kuldip presently teaches in the English department at UCFV, where she was the 2006 writer-in-residence.

Lois Peterson will see her first novel for children, Tansy Here and Now, published by Orca Book Publishers in the fall of 2008. Her article “We Have Ways of Making You Talk interrogation techniques to help uncover your characters’ stories” appears in the January 2008 issue of The Writer magazine. Lois will be teaching a variety of workshops and courses in the Vancouver area in the new year including “Editing Fiction From the Inside Out” for the Editor’s Association of Canada - BC Branch, and “Down the Rabbit Hole—Adventures in Writing for Children” for the Surrey Creative Writing Diploma Program. She continues to undertake contract work with government agencies, nonprofit associations and individual writers.

Susan McCaslin launched her new volume of poetry, Lifting the Stone (Seraphim Editions, 2007), at the Toronto Arts and Letters Club on Oct. 25, 2007. In early November, she toured with the book in Ontario, reading at the Art Bar Poetry Series in Toronto with Christopher Dewdney, in London for Poetry London, and at Redeemer University

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College and Bryan Prince Bookseller for the Hamilton Poetry Centre in Hamilton. In London, she was interviewed by Penn Kemp for her radio program Gathering Voices. Susan was also part of a program, “The Divine Mr. Blake,” which aired November 18 on CBC’s Sunday Edition. On her return, she read at the Fort Langley Art Gallery in her home town.

The Islands David Fraser, Nanoose Bay ascentaspirations@shaw.ca Julie Paul had stories published in The Dalhousie Review (“Boring Baby”) and The Fiddlehead (“Radio Who”), and is one of three writers featured in the anthology Coming Attractions 07 from Oberon Press. Julie Paul’s first collection of stories, The Jealousy Bone, has been accepted for publication by Emdash Book Publishing and will be released in early 2008. She has been instructing Continuing Ed. writing courses at Camosun College since May, 2007.

Kathy Howland and the Desperate Writers Group of Port Alberni launched their first book, a collaboration of their work entitled Desperate Writers at the Rollin Art Centre on November 10. It was a huge success, selling 32 copies in two hours.

Kamal Parmar had a poem, “Yet, you believe”, published in The Prairie Journal (Issue number 49). She has been selected as one of six poets who will shape the Fall 2007/ Winter 2008 publishing cycle on DailyHaiku (Volume 2: Cycle 4).

Trisha Cull has won the Prism International Rogers Communications Prize for Literary Non-fiction, for her essay, “Becoming Vegetarian,” judged by Jane Silcott.

Peggy Herring has released her new chapbook titled Lima Bean and other short prose. Published by Bada Talaab Press, it contains 11 postcard stories and original art by Swati Lall. It is a limited edition, printed on handmade paper from India; each copy signed and numbered.

M. Elizabeth Symons of Symons Studio moved from Deep Bay to Victoria in September. During her seven years up island she owned and operated The BaffleGab Fine Art Gallery in Qualicum Beach where she taught painting,

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drawing and creative writing. She also taught at Malaspina and North Island College through the continuing education programs. Presently she is teaching creative writing at University Canada West. Her classes include poetry and short story writing for young people, and for over 50 beginners with emerging talent. Also scheduled is a class on rewriting the novel.

Joanna M. Weston had two poems published in Canadian Woman Studies, a print journal from York University; three poems in Feel the Word online; a poem in Cranberry Tree Press’ anthology Delicious; one poem in Rain Dog, a U.K. print magazine; two poems accepted by Tower Poetry Society for their January edition; two postcard stories published in The Painted Door online; two reviews in The Danforth Review online, and one review in Shadow Box Media online.

Yvonne Blomer participated along with five other Victoria poets in the Times Colonist’s holiday celebration.

Poets were commissioned to write a poem on the holiday season for publication in the Times Colonist during the week of Christmas.

Quill and Quire named Tin Angel, Shannon Cowan’s new book for teenagers, as one of the best books of 2007 (Lobster Press).

Joanna Streetly’s essay, “Treading Water” was published this fall in the anthology, Between Interruptions: thirty women tell the truth about motherhood. The anthology was edited by Cori Howard and published by Key Porter.

Joan Donaldson-Yarmey of Port Alberni is happy to announce that her first novel, titled Illegally Dead, has been accepted for publication by Sumach Press of Toronto. The mystery is about a travel writer who solves a murder while traveling and researching the Crowsnest Highway in Southern Alberta for an article for a magazine. It is the first in a series and will be published in the fall of 2008.

Kim Goldberg had two poems in the latest Tesseracts anthology (#11), in November. In October, she joined 36 other poets across Canada in committing “Random Acts of Poetry” on unsuspecting strangers in public places and handing out free copies of her latest book, Ride Backwards On Dragon. She has had poems recently published in Prism International, filling Station and Front. Her article “Decoding the Language of Liuhebafa” is in the fall 2007 issue of the Journal of Martial Arts and Healing.

Mary Ann Moore’s poem “Jean” was included in Starting with Bread (Leaf Press), a chapbook by the Glenairley poets, edited by Patrick Lane. In January, she will be teaching a sixweek writing course called “Passion to Paper” through Elder College at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo.

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The Acorn-Plantos Award committee announced the selection of Christine Smart as the Peoples Poet, 2007, based on her collection of poetry, Decked and Dancing, published

by Hedgerow Press.

David Fraser read from his new poetry collection, Running Down the Wind at Planet Earth Poetry at the Black Stilt Café on October 19. Poems have been accepted for publication in the print magazines, Conceit and Imperfectionist’s Monthly, and in the Anthology, Voices of Israel. Other poems have been published on-line in Locust, Long Short Story, and Autumn Leaves in November 2007.

Lower Mainland Compiled in-house

On December 2, 50 people braved four inches of Vancouver snow to come to a talk/reading by Kate Braid at the Vancouver Art Gallery, on how she used Georgia O’Keeffe’s and Emily Carr’s biographies to write the poems of Inward to the Bones: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr.

George K. Ilsley will have an article, “The Golden Rule,” about his experiences as writer-in-residence at the Berton House Writers’ Retreat in Dawson City published in the Spring 2008 issue of Yukon, North of Ordinary.

Roy Roberts’ poem, “She’s a Babe,” appears in Ascent Aspirations’ Borderlines Anthology 4, and two other poems, “Furniture” and “Fishing,” appear in the current issue of Prairie Fire magazine. Roy and Elizabeth Bachinsky recently read to an appreciative audience of artists and art lovers at the Echo Chamber event as part of the East Side Culture Crawl on a program of poetry and music.

Bernice Lever read poems for Vancouver’s World Poets on Aug. 27, at WOTS on Sept. 30, and at a Dorothy Livesay celebration on Oct. 29. She had a piece posted in September for Reckoning ‘07 by BC BookWorld. She read for the Canadian Authors Association in Coquitlam and with the winners of Burnaby’s 40-year Celebration contest. Bernice also worked and judged at the Surrey International Writers Conference this year and was given the Special Achievement Award from the Surrey Board of Education on Oct.19. After Bernice took part in Random Acts of Poetry, she and kc dyer launched new books on Bowen Island on October 14. Her poem “Mystery” was accepted by Diamond Dust, USA. She

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FEDERATION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA WRITERS

also spoke on Vancouver Co-op Radio and Bowen Radio.

Giles Slade’s interviews with David Suzuki on the subject of the Bali Summit will appear soon in Greenliving Magazine and Utne Online. The paperback edition of his book, Made To Break, was Amazon.ca’s number one recommended nonfiction choice for Christmas 2007.

Sandra Harper has published a young adult novel, Breaking Out, which features a 12-year-old boy who lives in Kenya and faces three major challenges in his life.

Nora Ryan read from her novel, Marie’s Story, at the Squamish Public Library on November 29 as part of an AIDS awareness campaign. Marie’s Story, a first person narrative of a young Haitian girl living with HIV/AIDS, is the third book in her Caribbean trilogy published with Trafford.

Heather Haley has found label support for her forthcoming cd of poetry and music. RPW Records will release “Princess Nut” in March, 2008. Heather’s poem “Whore In

The Eddy” was recently featured in The Beast Poem Project by experimental performance poet Jennifer Karmin at the Chicago Calling Arts Festival. Her poems “Window Seat” and “Poetess” will be published in the next issue of The Collared Pecarry out of Sedona, Arizona.

Diane Tucker will be reading from her newly released book of poems, Bright Scarves of Hours (Palimpsest Press, 2007) on January 31, 2008, at 32 Books in North Vancouver. Michael Hetherington will be reading at Upstart Crow Books in North Vancouver on January 25.

Aileen Penner, Deb McVittie, Cat Borrie, Kim Lundsbye, d.h. wolferstan, Jenni Uitto and Danielle Arsenault are pleased to announce the arrival of their writing group’s new name, emdash collective. Graduates of SFU’s The Writers Studio (2005), the group has been meeting biweekly for two years. Their latest reading was held at 32 Books in Edgemont Village, owned by Fed member Deb McVittie.

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In Memoriam

Jane Vance Rule: 1931–2007 Jane Rule died of complications from liver cancer on November 27, 2007, at her home on Galiano Island, surrounded by the family members and friends who had cared for her in the last two months of her life.

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he tributes that immediately followed were full of resonant keywords: lesbian author; Canadian novelist; icon; advocate; role model; pioneer; freethinker. Like most labels, these suggest a lot, but not all. Above all, she was a writer whose life and work manifested a belief in social equality, in community of every kind, and in personal generosity.

Jane Rule was an American by birth, and a Canadian by choice. Born in New Jersey on March 28, 1931, she spent most of her childhood moving from place to place in the United States before settling for a time in San Francisco. During those formative years, she rapidly learned about marginalization: by the age of 5 she had concluded that being a girl had its drawbacks; at 6 she found that being left-handed was regarded as a behaviour problem at school; she was myopic, and didn’t get glasses until the age of 10 when she was “entranced” to be able to see “individual leaves on trees”; she was always the new kid at school and dyslexic, too; and at 12 she was six feet tall. Reading Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness at the age of 15 was a moment of epiphany; as she relates much later in the essay collection Lesbian Images, she suddenly discovered that she was “a freak, a genetic monster, a member of a third sex…”

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n 1952 she earned a BA in English from Mills College, “studying the great liars in order to learn to tell the truth,” and followed that with a year in England as “an occasional student” at University College, London, working on her first novel at the same time.

Returning to the States, she briefly attended Stanford, and then in the fall of 1954, she accepted a teaching position at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, where she met Helen Sonthoff. The

continued next page

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In Memoriam, cont’d poisonous atmosphere of McCarthyism and the lack of time for writing drove Rule away from Concord and America, and in 1956 she moved to Vancouver where she was soon joined by Helen Sonthoff. They became Canadian citizens in the early 1960s.

In 1964, after 22 rejections, Rule’s novel Desert of the Heart was published by Macmillan.

Reception was cool officially, but the book generated a torrent of letters from lesbians who sensed that Jane Rule was the one person who might understand them. The publicity made Rule a role model and advocate in spite of herself. More interested in “bearing witness to the world we live in,” Rule commented, “My own sense about role models is that you only need bad ones. You can say: ‘I’m certainly not going to be like that when I grow up.’ And good ones simply get in the way of you developing into the person you were destined to be.”

Her novels were character-driven, all except one narrated by more than one voice.

She subtly challenged myths about lesbians and gay men, always portraying them within a community of all-sorts, depicting homosexuality as part of everyday life.

In her own life, Rule created community wherever she could. For 15 years she supported Little Sister’s in their protracted dispute with Canada Customs. She acted as a mentor and housemother to writers and students finding their feet in Vancouver, lending Margaret Atwood, amongst other things, the card table on which she wrote The Edible Woman when she first arrived at UBC in 1964. She was the voice of the lesbian and gay community in her column “So’s Your Grandmother”, which characteristically started as a gesture of support for The Body Politic after a police raid, and then

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continued for 10 years.

Writers’ organizations also received her encouragement. Vancouver author Trevor Carolan remembers Jane Rule as an early supporter of the idea of a Federation of BC Writers, giving “her moral weight to our push in getting it started.”

As he recalls, “she served for a couple of years on the Newsletter Committee (I have her listed on an old Council phone-list for 1984-85, and I’m pretty sure she served at least another year or two after that from her home at The Fork…)”

In 1976 Jane and Helen moved to Galiano Island and instantly absorbed another community there. They welcomed local children to their pool, with Jane acting as lifeguard. Visitors recall their memorable hospitality and exuberant embrace of life. BC BookWorld publisher Alan Twigg remembers Rule as one of the “sanest and funniest” people he has ever met.

In recent years Rule’s literary output declined, but she could still be relied on for trenchant, unexpected opinions. Rule opposed same-sex marriage. “With all that we have learned,” she wrote, “we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there.”

Honours mounted in later years. In 1996 came the 2nd Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award; the Order of British Columbia in 1998; and, in a simple ceremony followed by a potluck picnic on Galiano in 2007, the Order of Canada. Despite all the achievements, however, Jane Rule hoped to be remembered simply “for being lusty and feisty and full of life.”

That she is.

—Margaret Thompson

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The Federation of BC Writers: Are You A Member Yet? 8 Great Reasons to Join x

Off The Page Our popular writers in schools program allows published FBCW members to present readings, talks and workshops to students around the province. Participating members receive $200 and inclusion in the Off The Page directory located on our website.

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Literary Writes The FBCW holds an annual writing contest featuring a different genre each year. Winners are awarded cash prizes and participate in readings at the Word on the Street festival in Vancouver. Winning entries are published in our member journal, WordWorks.

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WordWorks Our quarterly journal features author interviews, essays, new title section, markets and contests, current industry information and members’ achievements. The journal is delivered to our members and others in BC’s writing, publishing and educational communities. Our members also receive a complimentary subscription to BC BookWorld, an invaluable source of information on BC books and BC authors.

Visit our website at www.bcwriters.com

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Promotion The Federation arranges and sponsors readings and book launches, refers members for participation in regional literary events and festivals, and promotes our members’ achievements in WordWorks, on our website and through email announcements to our members and others in BC’s literary community.

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Work Opportunities Members can post their areas of expertise in writing, editing, design and desktop publishing on our online Hire A Writer directory. The Federation also hires and refers experienced FBCW members to conduct workshops, present readings and lectures, and judge contests.

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Workshop Discounts Federation members receive discounts on Fed-sponsored workshops, on courses offered by SFU’s Writing & Publishing Program, and on workshops offered by the Victoria School of Writing.

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Free and Expert Advice Puzzled by a contract clause? Copyright Issue? Looking for an editor or publicist? Consult the Federation for professional advice and access to our resources and network of affiliated organizations.

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Inclusion When you join the FBCW, you become a member of BC’s vibrant writing community. We offer opportunities to meet and network with colleagues at Fed-sponsored events, to express your professional concerns at an influential level, and to contribute to the growth and development of our organization to better serve your needs.