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July 2010

Friday July 30, 2010
12 Hour Marathon Reading of George Bowering's Burning Water

August 2010

Wednesday August 4, 2010
The Book of Esther by Leanna Brodie, in the Canadian Theatre Blyth Festival

Tuesday August 10, 2010
rob mclennan, Marcus McCann, Sandra Ridley at the ART BAR (Toronto)

Wednesday August 11, 2010
Pivot Reading Series hosted by Sachiko Murakami - August 11th

Friday August 13, 2010
MS THING - Karen X. Tulchinsky

Friday August 20, 2010
Marion Bridge by Daniel MacIvor

September 2010

Friday September 24, 2010
Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest

February 2011

Monday February 7, 2011
Saint Carmen of the Main by Michel Tremblay

March 2011

Friday March 11, 2011
M.A.C. Farrant at Words on the Water - March 2011

Saturday March 26, 2011
Morris Panych's The Trespassers is part of the Vancouver Playhouse 2010-2011 season!

12 Hour Marathon Reading of George Bowering's Burning Water

Photograph by Jack Bawden


The W.A. Deacon Literary Foundation is pleased to announce a marathon reading of George Bowering‘s award winning novel Burning Water (1980), a novel about George Vancouver’s exploration of the coast of British Columbia.

The venue is a pilot program of the City of Vancouver. Everyone is welcome including students and the general public who will have a chance to take turns reading the novel.

Date of the event: (Friday) 30 July 2010.

Location: 700 block of Granville (between West Georgia & Robson Street).

Time: 8:00 am to 8:00 pm.


George Bowering‘s latest Talonbook is My Darling Nellie Grey.

How High Is the City, 
How Deep Is Our Love

(Photograph by Sabine Bitter)


Fillip is pleased to announce the immediate online release of How High Is the City, How Deep Is Our Love by Jeff Derksen — the second in a series of essays on art and publicness, which thematizes the majority of texts in Fillip 12.

Leading up to the publication launch of Fillip 12 in September 2010, essays will appear on the Fillip website every week for the next two months as a way to build an open dialogue around the relationship between art and its public.

Jeff Derksen’s text is being released in advance of the forthcoming International Chilliwack Biennial where a risograph-printed pamphlet of the essay will be available free to all attendees, and form the basis of a reading group especially organized for the event.

Learn more about Fillip.

Jeff Derksen is also the author of Annihilated Time.

A Good Sign for Faith Fraud & Minimum Wage

George Mihalka has received a DGC Best Director nomination for Faith Fraud & Minimum Wage, a film based upon Josh MacDonald‘s original play Halo.

The film features Martha MacIsaac (Superbad) as a misfit donut shop employee whose sublime intervention captures the imagination of an entire town.

B.C. Battle for the "Spirit" of the Arts

(Marcus Youssef, hosting Black Eye Dinner Party during 2010 Olympics)


The decision to fund a series of art-related festivals called “spirit festivals” throughout B.C. in February is meeting with a fair amount of opposition from members of the Arts community. Of course, planning a three-year $30-million program to fund these aforementioned festivals in order to help people cope with the sad state of the economy does not sound like the most logical use of taxpayer loonies.

> Go to story...

20th Anniversary of the Oka Crisis

On the weekend, more than 400 Mohawks and their supporters marched through Oka, Quebec to mark the 20th anniversary of the Oka crisis, a land claims standoff between First Nations people and the Canadian army. Provincial police raided the barrier on July 11 in 1990, sparking a 78-day standoff between protesters and authorities.

A new chief federal negotiator has been appointed to settle the Mohawks of Kanesatake’s Seigneury of Lake of Two Mountains land claim. The Mohawk community of Kahnawake held a powwow on the weekend, with native leaders billing the event as an opportunity to heal scars from the crisis.

More about the Oka crisis can be learned from Lasagna: The Man Behind the Mask, the story of Ronald Cross, the Mohawk with Italian heritage whose image became a symbol of this confrontation in the media, even as the events of that summer etched themselves indelibly into the minds of North Americans as the latest episode in the continuing 500-year history of “Indian wars” in the Americas.

Hair-Tickling Tales of Torment and Teenagers

The creators of Mom’s the Word are back with their uproarious sequel Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged. The original Mom’s the Word played to sold-out crowds at Just for Laughs in 2001. A French version, translated by Michel Tremblay and directed by Denise Filiatrault, played Juste pour rire the same year.

Jill Daum, Alison Kelly, Robin Nichol, Barbara Pollard and Deborah Williams make up the writing team for Mom’s the Word. The women create collectively, each one contributing personal stories. And each of them remembers what it was like to be a teenager.

Colin Thomas from The Georgia Straight had this to say about two of the actors after a 2005 performance of the sequel:

Deborah Williams is a particularly gifted comic writer. She talks about “falling in love so hard it hurt my hips”, and in the wake of a parenting mistake, she comforts herself with the knowledge that “I will only feel this bad about what I have done until I do something worse.” Jill Daum can also be wickedly self-revealing. She’s freaked out because she knows what a terror she was in her own adolescence. She wants to trust her son, she says, but “the coke-snorting, shoplifting slut from my past won’t let me.”

Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged is playing at Just for Laughs from July 6-18.

Pantsing and Love in a Kitchen

In December 2005, George Bowering found himself stalled on a novel in progress. Naturally, the solution to writer’s block is to keep writing, anything. He made a New Year’s resolution to write a poem every day for the 365 days of 2006. Each month led to a new structure and set of rules for framing each section of poems.

Each month of the result, My Darling Nellie Grey, is being reviewed by Daniel Zomparelli for Geist on a weekly basis. This collection of ongoing reviews is being referred to as “The Summer of Bowering”.

Read the GEIST review of February about pantsing and love in a kitchen.

Of Strange Comfort

On Canada Day, many faces painted with maple leaves jouncing atop bodies wearing red and white can be seen strolling through Cates Park for a picnic, perhaps without happening upon the stone in memory of Malcolm Lowry. They walk along, unaware that across the water, the ‘S’ was once burnt out and that the sign ‘HELL OIL’ would blaze out of the verdant darkness.

Malcolm Lowry was a remittance man who turned up living in the Dollarton Flats on Vancouver’s North Shore. His existence was nomadic to the point that a number of countries have claimed him as their own, including Canada.

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Until The Unsung Sings

Sometimes you don’t really miss someone until they are gone.

On June 22nd, Tracy Wright died after struggling with pancreatic cancer. She was 50 years old.

The actress gave supersubtle performances and often blended into Canadian films to the point that she was remembered as a “real” character rather than as an instantly identifiable actor. It may be said this type of “verismo” is what everyone true to their craft is seeking.

At the beginning of her career she founded the Augusta Company with her husband Don McKellar and Daniel Brooks, an experimental theatre company that brought to life the inventive characters for which she would later be remembered. She most recently earned rave reviews for her performance in Daniel MacIvor‘s A Beautiful View.

Read more about Tracy Wright’s career.

Tomson Highway For Prime Minister?

Tomson Highway will debut his new show “Kisageetin: A Cabaret” — running Thursday through Sunday at the downtown Berkeley Street Theatre, featuring 12 love songs he has composed and written in Cree.

The renowned Cree playwright from Manitoba has indicated that the debut is being dubbed “Cabaret G21” as an attempt to remind everyone that the G20 Summit is being held on Native land and that the 21st Nation is Aboriginal Canada.

Highway foresees a steady increase of Native populations, particularly in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and looks forward to continual cultural evolution for Canada:

“That’s going to be happening within the next couple of decades, so we have to be ready for those days. We have to be ready for the day within the next two generations or so for a native prime minister, for instance. That is a very real possibility.”

Read more about his Cree Cabaret.

bill bissett - a poem from time

A poem from bill bissett’s upcoming book time
is now available as a downloadable PDF:

th swans uv etobicoke (PDF)

> Go to story...

Stephen Collis - from On the Material

Ikea     this furniture is fine but what
Are these strange names and relentless allen keys
For     sibling tree economies
All capitalizing on lumbering     snoozing insect wars

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Ken Norris and Garry Thomas Morse discuss After Jack

In this conversation with Ken Norris about After Jack, Garry Thomas Morse discusses love, life and what it’s like being one of Canada’s most haunted.

“I always refer to this as the imaginary turf war, where poets undergo these private battles and torments which matter so little to the public. I am not indicating they should matter. I think we tend to squander our energies over trifles is all. This is a human story, not merely a poetic one.”

> Go to story...

Ken Belford - from Decompositions

Before I understood the overstory
structure, I lived among the poor
that result from deforestation, on
the edge of an abandoned pasture
seeded with aggressive grasses.

> Go to story...