Anakana Schofield

The Proust Questionnaire is believed to reveal an individual’s true nature. We have asked Incite authors 17 questions inspired by the questionnaire in an attempt to uncover who they are…

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Succeeding at knitting and reading simultaneously, while my 12 year old son is on the other couch crunching chips and immersed in a book. Outside a storm is happening that we periodically comment on to each other.

What does your ideal day look like?
It would start with a bit of gymnastics, involve a long supine stretch of reading, followed by Grandma Suzu's Japanese dinner, or my partner Jeremy's best cooked egg, some cups of tea with friends, a bit of scribbling that makes perfect sense and needs no changes, interspersed with receiving my mother's funny phone texts and would end with a bout of either knitting or sledge hockey. There would be 136 hours in one day.

What is your greatest extravagance?
Books, cardigans, books for my son, and teabags.

What possession would you be heartbroken if you lost?
I recently mislaid Phylis Bowman's self published history of the railway in Prince Rupert and was pretty distraught for 2 days.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
It's a toss up between complete ineptitude at cooking and my kidney that periodically misbehaves.

What childhood fear has followed you into adulthood?
Mortality.

Do you take comfort in darkness or light?
Both. But more darkness because it's snuggly.

Do you remember your dreams?
No, only patchy flashes and  it regularly frustrates me.

How do you collect snippets of observations and ideas that come to you unexpectedly?
Sadly I don't. I think I do. I am sure I do. Then I can never recall them.

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Stephen Osborne, Anakana Schofield, Daniel Francis, and Jean Barman

In my previous post I considered the role writing can play in self-definition, and in the often fraught question of identity. One way of framing the event I attended on the final day of the Writers Festival is that it extended these same concerns to the city of Vancouver and its citizens.

Vancouver 125 Legacy Books gathered the members of an advisory committee responsible for deciding, earlier this year, which out-of-print Vancouver books — local classics — should be republished in a project jointly undertaking by The Association of Book Publishers of BC and the Office of Vancouver’s Poet Laureate Brad Cran, and partially funded by the City of Vancouver. The committee members were historians Jean Barman and Daniel Francis, writer, editor and publisher Stephen Osborne, and writers Anakana Schofield and Michael Turner. Turner acted as moderator for the event because, as he told the audience, none of his suggested books made the final cut, although he was “pretty happy with the process” and the final results. (Maxine Gadd’s Lost Language: Selected Poems was one of Turner’s suggestions.) Cran, who just completed his tenure as city poet laureate, was in the audience and added some comments during the Q&A.

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