Browsing “Vancouver Book Club”

Read All Over celebrates the bookworm in all of us, showcasing readers in Vancouver and the books they love most.   Adam is an actor, director, and arts journalist. You may also know him from CiTR’s Arts Report, which he hosted from 2010 to 2012.  Adam is currently working on a theatrical project, which he conceptualized, called ‘The Closer Variations’ – inspired by ‘Closer’ the play and Hollywood movie. It’s produced by SHIFT Performing Arts, and if you missed the show last week at the Carousel Theatre, you can catch it at the Evergreen Cultural Centre on April 21st. Be sure to check it out! For more info see ShiftArts.ca.

What are you reading right now?

City of God by Paulo Lins. The film version blew my mind when I first saw it in 2004 and sparked in me a love-affair with all things Brazilian. I have to say though, the translation from Portuguese struggles to keep up with Lins’ meandering poetic style and his heavy reliance on street slang in his dialogues. Imagine translating gangsta rap lyrics into Latin and you’ll understand the challenge.

Photo by Maegan Thomas

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

If you’ve been in Vancouver for any amount of time, Megaphone Magazine isn’t new to you. You’ve seen it in the hands of street vendors, you’ve seen it here on V.I.A. a few times (most recently in our Print Matters article profiling them) and hopefully you’ve actually bought a copy and enjoyed it.

Last year I shared the story of Voices of The Street Volume 1 which was a perfect-bound edition that featured writing, poetry and prose from Megaphone’s community writing workshop program, which is run in treatment centres, social housing buildings and community centres in the Downtown Eastside and downtown Vancouver. Megaphone vendors happily managed to sell out that first issue, and I’m very happy to let you know that the most recent one (pictured below) is about to be released and it is nothing short of fantastic.

Vancouver Book Award winning author, Michael Christie, is quoted in the foreward saying that this writing program is invaluable in that encourages people in recovery to speak and to grow, so I figured I’d let you know about how this book also affected me, the reader.

The writing program is meant to affect people in treatment, and to help them through it, and I have absolute confidence that it does in a major way. But it also affected me in a big way. I just finished reading it cover to cover and the amount of raw emotion and truth that’s contained within it’s pages is at first a little overwhelming, then heartening and in the end incredibly hopeful. You’ll read real stories from people overcoming their own personal hurdles and, much like Michael Christie’s work in his book The Beggar’s Garden, in the end you will walk away being reminded that they are human and that they are a lot like you. And that they are you.

Buy a copy of Voices On the Street off of a street vendor later this week when it comes out, or if you’re interested head out to the Waldorf this coming Thursday when they’re doing their release for the issue at an event where some of its authors will be doing readings. Details HERE.

The Vancouver Book Club’s Spring Selection is Rob Taylor‘s poetry collection The Other Side of Ourselves and to get you into the right frame of mind we’re running a photo contest in the weeks leading up to the April 29th event.

Scroll down to the bottom of the post to read this week’s poem and find out how you can enter.

Last week’s poetry prompt was “Advent” Although it is a seasonal poem, many people still found plenty of inspiration for photographs.

“Silent Eye” by David Jez

“To Open” by Tara Lowry

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

	Read All Over celebrates the bookworm in all of us, showcasing readers in Vancouver and the books they love most.
	Karyn Huenemann is an educator in the areas of Canadian and Children’s literature, as well as a freelance writer, world traveller and Steampunk enthusiast. She is currently the Project Manager, Canada’s Early Women Writers at Simon Fraser University.

What are you reading right now?

I have recently re-read A Wrinkle in Time, in honour of its 50th anniversary this year, and have posted a review on my children’s literature blog, That Which Matters. I am also reading Outside the Box, a biography of Canadian radio and journalism personality Mona Gould. I tend to have one book that I HAVE to read (Outside the Box) and one that I WANT to be reading, on the go. I am about to move on to Blackdog by KV Johansen, one of my favourite Canadian authors. It is, she claims, an “adult” book. I have loved her Children’s and Young Adult literature, and look greatly forward to Blackdog.

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

The Vancouver Book Club’s Spring Selection is Rob Taylor‘s poetry collection The Other Side of Ourselves and to get you into the right frame of mind we’re running a photo contest in the weeks leading up to the April 29th event.

Scroll down to the bottom of the post to read this week’s poem and find out how you can enter.

Last week’s poem “The Horse Grazes” was a short and lovely piece about horses and rope and holding on. It inspired some of you in really interesting ways.

“Grazing Shadows” by Tara Lowry“Tethered” by Tara Lowry …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Read All Over celebrates the bookworm in all of us, showcasing readers in Vancouver and the books they love most. Lyndl Hall is an artist living and working in Vancouver. One winter afternoon we sat around in her warm, cozy apartment and talked books and literature and theory until our cheeks flushed deep with that joy you share when you meet a true book lover. Her library is, like Lyndl herself, small, and eclectically perfect.

On my nightstand:

Home is the Sailor by Jorge Amado
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
Dreams by Olive Schreiner

What’s next on your list?

The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness. I also have a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield that I want to try. But if I can’t get into either, I usually go to a used bookstore and scan for Penguin paperbacks from the early 1950s to about 1970-ish. Or there is a series of South American literature translations that Avon Bard started publishing in the 1970s – they have white spines and really distinctive covers. I’ve never been disappointed with either. I’m always finding new authors that have been forgotten by the more mainstream consciousness.

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

	Print Matters is a celebration of the printed form and all the awesome local people who bring it to you: literary journals, publishers, magazines, hand presses, and independent booksellers.
	This week we look at Heavenly Monkey, a letter press imprint started in 2000 by Rollin Milroy. Operating out of his backyard studio in East Van, Milroy has produced 2 dozen titles “for people interested in contemporary applications of traditional book crafts.”

When meeting Rollin Milroy for the first time it’s difficult not to bring up the question of how his imprint, Heavenly Monkey, got its name. An Internet search doesn’t bring one closer to the answer, other than to make a suggestion on where you might find it.*

As Milroy says, the answer is not nearly as interesting as the question.

“When people ask the question they have all kinds of scenarios in their mind and it’s much more fun for them, I think, to leave them with their scenarios than to give them the answer because it’s really not that interesting, really. It’s something that came to me. It struck the kind of tone I wanted to strike, which was there are an awful lot of people who get into this, who are very, very serious, and name themselves something very, very serious. And I think it’s good to take what you do seriously but I’m not a big fan of people who take themselves too seriously. So I wanted something that would really stand out in a booksellers catalogue, that didn’t fall into the same trope.”

The name also captures the spirit of the books that he publishes.

“They are, they can be, playful. They certainly are not attempting to follow the traditional path a lot of fine press, which is a phrase I hate. A lot of fine press is very backward looking.”

Looking at its back catalogue one can see that Heavenly Monkey is anything but backward looking. While many fine presses choose older, more popular, texts as their source material, knowing that what they produce has a dedicated audience, HM’s inspiration comes from a diverse selection of writers, artists, and even other bookmakers. A 15th century type designer, H.P Lovecraft, and Barbara Hodgson, among others, can all be found within the pages of a Heavenly Monkey project. Right from the start, Milroy had no intention of doing what was expected of a fine press.

“I don’t really see the value to that. One reason (other presses) do it is that the material is free; they don’t have to deal with anyone living regarding copyright and all that kind of stuff. Another reason is that a lot of people who buy these things don’t really have a very highly developed sense of their own personal taste. They buy what is safe. You can buy any of the classics and know that it is a classic piece of literature, how much could they have messed it up? But to look at something where maybe you don’t know the author, you don’t know the text, you don’t know much about anything and to have to rely entirely on your own taste as a collector, there aren’t a lot of people out there with the courage to do that.

“A lot of people who do what I do aren’t book collectors. They love printing. They love playing with type. But they don’t spend a lot of their own money on books. They’re not collectors. They don’t spend hundreds of hours in bookstores. They don’t know a lot of booksellers. They don’t know that side of the business.”

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

The Vancouver Book Club’s Spring Selection is Rob Taylor’s poetry collection The Other Side of Ourselves and to get you into the right frame of mind we’re running a photo contest in the weeks leading up to the April 29th event.

Scroll down to the bottom of the post to read this week’s poem and find out how you can enter.

Wow. Last’s week’s poem “Creation Stories” generated a lot of interesting imagery.

Photo by Matthew Lawless

“An Ocean Apart” by Raoul Fernandes.

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>