Dennis E. Bolen

Friday afternoon. A quick break for lunch before pressing on to the Revue Stage for Event #44. I repair to a cozy little eatery not terribly far from the venue called Chez Nous for an excellent bowl of chili and an incomparable square of Torta Rustica. Love that Fontina cheese.

Having absorbed the lesson of the morning I elect to leave the car and walk back to the island. It’s solid rain now in October town. Johnston Street is like a tableau out of the Floating World–land of a thousand umbrellas. People seem in a hurry to get where they’re going.

I shake out my umbrella and enter the theatre. Haven’t been in here before. It’s a fine, small, intimate setting, a stage and a semi-circle of seating up shallow risers. It’s not quite a sell out but a good crowd is on hand at show time.

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During the Q&A at the end of Vancouver Seen, a Tuesday evening panel of Vancouver writers Dennis E. Bolen, Kevin Chong, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Jen Sookfong Lee, an audience member reiterated a couple of the questions from the description of the event in the Festival program. “What kind of literary community exists in Vancouver? What is the nature of relationships between writers?” He was probably hoping for a more substantive answer than what had emerged to that point. I’m interested in Vancouver writing, but I’d also been attracted to the event, in part, by the series of questions in the program. They’re interesting questions, not throwaways used to fill out a few lines of copy. Here are the questions, which I’ll attempt to answer — or at least mull over — based on what the authors read from their work, and on the ensuing discussion, moderated by Vancouver Magazine executive editor John Burns.

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Dennis E. Bolen

Where is your favorite place to write?

I favour no particular spot but I must say that a sparsely furnished (desk, chair, futon) bachelor apartment in the basement of a building close to the essential amenities (grocery store, greasy spoon, bar, bookstore) is the preferred locale.

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The Proust Questionnaire

The Proust Questionnaire is believed to reveal an individual’s true nature. We have asked 2011 Festival authors 16 questions inspired by the questionnaire in an attempt to uncover who they are…

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