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.
More >>
Digg
Facebook
Twitter
