Yugumalleq: A film by MFA Candidate Kavelina Torres
Congratulations to MFA Candidate Kavelina Torres, whose short film Yugumalleq / Shades of Life will air in United States Indian Country and on PBS stations across the US on August 5th, 2018 at 4:30 pm PST (7:30 pm EST).
Kavelina Torres
Kavelina is a Sundance Native Film and an Alaska Native Playwright’s Program alumna. Her film, Yugumalleq, resides with First Nations Experience (FNX) for PBS television programming. Her play, Something in The Living Room, debuted in April 2018 Vancouver, BC, to raise funds for safe injection sites.
2018 New Shoots Anthology Launch
We can’t stop reading the anthology!
A fabulous time was had by all at the 2018 New Shoots Anthology Launch!
Every year the Creative Writing Department partners with the Vancouver School Board and we send MFA’s into secondary schools as New Shoots Mentors. From December to May, New Shoots Mentors work with students as they explore every genre of writing imaginable (and a few more). In June, we publish an anthology of the students’ work and celebrate their accomplishments at a launch party. This year we were joined by Jen Sookfong Lee and Wayde Compton.
Jen and Wayde read their work alongside the fantastic New Shoots students, as did two of our MFA Mentors, Meagan Black and Andrew Dasselaar. These writers brought their poems, fiction and nonfiction to life, cheering each other on, and we ate almost all the cake.
Wayde Compton (right) with our New Shoots Student readers
Thanks to all of the mentors, students, teachers, families and friends of New Shoots for coming out and making this event such a celebration!
To all new and returning MFA’s who live in Vancouver: in September we will be looking for New Shoots Mentors for 2018-2019… You’ll be hearing from us!
More pictures follow (photo credits: Olga Holin). Continue reading “2018 New Shoots Anthology Launch”
Jennifer Chen: Super
All eyes are on Beata Bell, descendent of the great Frances E. Shaw. Bets are placed on which amazing power she will inherit. Flight? Telekinesis? Super hearing? Only Beata Bell remains stubbornly, infuriatingly, and inexplicably normal. Sidelined, she must face the painful reality that she might never live up to everyone’s expectations. But the Super world can’t seem to leave her alone! When a new villain threatens the city, Beata is launched into a whirlwind of mystery, danger, and conspiracy. With a totally normal skillset, she must exhaust all her wits and courage to save her friends—and to survive.
Natalie Morrill: The Ghost Keeper
Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, this powerful, sweeping novel set in Vienna during the 1930s and ’40s centres on a poignant love story and a friendship that ends in betrayal.
In the years between the two world wars, Josef Tobak builds a quiet life around his friendships, his beloved wife, Anna, and his devotion to the old Jewish cemeteries of Vienna. Then comes the Anschluss in 1938, and Josef’s world is uprooted. His health disintegrates. His wife and child are forced to flee to China. His closest gentile friend joins the Nazi Party—and yet helps Josef escape to America.
When the war ends, Josef returns to Vienna with his family and tries to make sense of what remains, including his former Nazi friend who, he discovers, protected Josef’s young female cousin throughout the war.
Back among his cemeteries in Austria’s war-shattered capital, Josef finds himself beset by secrets, darkness and outward righteousness marred by private cruelty. As the truth is unearthed, Josef’s care for the dead takes on new meaning while he confronts his own role in healing both his devastated community and his deepest wounds.
The Ghost Keeper is a story about the terrible choices we make to survive and the powerful connections to communities and friends that define us. Here is a finely accomplished novel that introduces an exciting new voice to our literary landscape.
Shilo Jones: On the Up
In this wild, stylish, wickedly funny debut, Shilo Jones charts the journey of three players caught in a high-stakes property development–a dangerous and depraved game that plays out behind the veneer of everyday city life.
Jasminder is determined. Carl is blitzed. Mark is righteous.
Unfortunately, they’ve pitted themselves against one another and they’re throwing everything they have at the same condo development in North Vancouver. The Solstice deal promises what they want most for themselves–freedom, respect, status, wealth–and it is their chance to be truly “on the up.”
Over the course of a week, the trio vie for their piece. But there are complex personal obstacles standing in the way for each. Jasminder Bansal, an aspiring journalist with a powerful ambition and a family connection to gangland violence, is playing a dangerous game to get the information she needs from a slick property lawyer with links to an international criminal boss. Carl “Blitzo” Reed, co-founder of an ecological investment firm, has a wildly distorted sense of reality and a morally questionable connection to the property. Mark Ward, a veteran of the Afghanistan War with a strong conscience, is barely coping with the effects of PTSD, but he’s forced to call on the skills he has learned as a soldier in order to repay a debt to his criminal brother, Clint. Jasminder, Blitzo, and Mark use anything at their disposal to pursue their goals, and no one is left untouched: speculators, government officials, realtors, activists, builders, day-labourers, investors, lawyers–not even a potbellied pig.
On the Up introduces Shilo Jones as a writer with a singular voice. Here he gives us a raucous, biting satire, packed with bleak humour, outrageous characters, and pathos, that shows us what can happen when greed, desperation, will, loyalty, and an insatiable desire for status collide.
Sarah Selecky: Radiant Shimmering Light
A sharply funny and wise debut novel about female friendship, the face we show the world online and letting your own light shine, from the Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted author of This Cake Is for the Party.
Lilian Quick has looked up to her cousin Florence her whole life. Florence is everything Lilian is not—brave, confident, quick to find adventure and American. The women have been out of touch for years due to a family rift, but Lilian, childless, single and self-employed as a pet portraitist, has been watching Florence for years. Florence is now Internet-famous as Eleven Novak, the face of a compelling new feminine lifestyle empowerment brand.
When Eleven comes to town as part of her sales tour, she offers Lilian a place at the Temple, her Manhattan office. Despite twenty years of silence, Eleven welcomes her long-lost cousin with open arms, and the two women begin a new relationship. Lilian quickly enrols in the Ascendency, Eleven’s signature program: an expensive three-month training seminar on empowered leadership, spiritual awakening, and sales and marketing. Eleven is going to help her cousin rise up to be her highest self: confident, affluent and self-actualized.
Lilian’s sensitive, artistic nature is stretched by the work she does in the Ascendency, and pushed even further by her cousin’s careful life coaching. In just three months, Lilian’s life changes drastically and becomes everything she’s dreamed of. But is it everything she wants? And can she trust everything Eleven says?
http://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443455671/radiant-shimmering-light
Amy Stuart: Still Water
From the Globe and Mail bestselling author of Still Mine comes a new thriller featuring Clare and Malcolm, this time on the hunt for a missing mother and son in a town that is drowning in deception—Clare may be in her gravest danger yet.
HOW DO YOU FIND THE TRUTH IN A TOWN FULL OF SECRETS?
Clare has to find them.
Sally Proulx and her young boy have mysteriously disappeared in the stormy town of High River. Clare is hired to track them down, hoping against all odds to find them alive. But High River isn’t your typical town. It’s a place where women run to—women who want to escape their past. They run to Helen Haines, a matriarch who offers them safe haven and anonymity. Pretending to be Sally’s long-lost friend, Clare turns up and starts asking questions, but nothing prepares her for the swirl of deception and the depth of the lies.
Did Sally drown? Did her son? Was it an accident, or is their disappearance part of something bigger?
In a town where secrets are crucial to survival, everyone is hiding something. Detectives Somers and Rourke clearly have an ulterior motive beyond solving the case. Malcolm Boon, who hired Clare, knows more about her than he reveals. And Helen is concealing a tragic family history of her own. As the truth surges through High River, Clare must face the very thing she has so desperately been running from, even if it comes at a devastating cost. Compulsively gripping and twisty, Still Water is a deep dive of a thriller that will leave you breathless.
http://www.simonandschuster.ca/books/Still-Water/Amy-Stuart/9781476790459
Jen Neale: Land Mammals and Sea Creatures
Almost immediately upon Julie Bird’s return to the small port town where she was raised, everyday life is turned upside down. Julie’s Gulf War vet father, Marty, has been on the losing side of a battle with PTSD for too long. A day of boating takes a dramatic turn when a majestic blue whale beaches itself and dies. A blond stranger sets up camp oceanside: she’s an agitator, musician-impersonator, and armchair philosopher named Jennie Lee Lewis — and Julie discovers she’s connected to her father’s mysterious trip to New Mexico 25 years earlier. As the blue whale decays on the beach, more wildlife turns up dead — apparently by suicide — echoing Marty’s deepest desire. But Julie isn’t ready for a world without her father.
A stunning exploration of love and grief, Land Mammals and Sea Creatures is magic realism on the seaside, a novel about living life to the fullest and coming to your own terms with its end.
https://ecwpress.com/products/land-mammals