An upstart from Lower Canada’s Shefford Township, John Rudolphus Booth arrived in roughhouse Bytown in the early 1850s with a wife, a child, and carpenter’s tools bought on credit. In the growing new capital of Canada, he built a storied empire on the river power and forests of the Ottawa Valley. Weaving conjecture with scant known facts, Jean Van Loon has created a verse narrative imagining his life. The poems speak in varied voices – of J. R. himself, family members, business associates, employees, visiting royalty and tavern wags – collectively evoking the man, the place, and the times with drama, insight, and vivid sensory detail.
Ellen Keith: The Dutch Wife
Amsterdam, May 1943. As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labour camp or—for a chance at survival—to join the camp brothel.
On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father’s expectations of wartime glory. But faced with a brutal routine of overseeing executions and punishments, he longs for an escape. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.
Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner’s ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave.
From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances.
Alumni Event with BFA Alumnus Morris Panych
UBC Creative Writing, UBC Opera Ensemble and UBC Theatre & Film present a special evening with director Morris Panych (BFA’77) and set designer Ken McDonald (BEd’72), the creative masterminds behind Vancouver Opera’s upcoming production of The Overcoat.
Join us for an intimate discussion and Q&A, moderated by Professor Emeritus Jerry Wasserman. Following the talk, enjoy drinks and canapés, and the chance to network with fellow alumni.
Event Details
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2018
Time: 6:30-8:30pm (program & reception)
Location: Frederic Wood Theatre, 6354 Crescent Rd, Vancouver
Advance registration required. Details here.
Genevieve Scott: Catch My Drift
Lorna always wanted to stand out, but her career as a competitive swimmer was cut short by a knee injury. Cara, her daughter, tries hard to blend in, but when she has to fill in for her brother at a school pageant, she is overwhelmed by terror. Lorna is vain about her ability to shut out distractions. Cara can’t control her scary thoughts. And while Lorna tries her best to move past life’s early disappointments, Cara picks at the cracks in her family’s story. Spanning two decades, Catch My Drift follows mother and daughter through life changes big and small, and reveals that despite our shared experiences, we each live a private story.
Jan Redford: End of the Rope
In the tradition of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, the gritty, funny, achingly honest story of a young climber’s struggle to become whole by testing herself on mountains and life.
As a young teenager Jan Redford runs away from a cottage where her father has just put her down for the zillionth time and throws herself against a 100-foot cliff face. Somewhere in that shaky, outraged kid is a bedrock belief in her right to exist, which carries her to the top. In that brief flash of victory, she sets her sights on becoming a climber.
Falling in love with climbing eventually leads to falling in love with the climbers in her tight-knit western Canadian climbing community. It also means that the people she loves regularly vanish in an instant, caught in an avalanche or by a split second of inattention. It almost crushes Jan when her boyfriend, the gifted climber Dan Guthrie, is killed. Instead of marrying Dan, she marries one of his best friends, a driven climber who was there for her when she was grieving and becomes the father of her two children. Not what either of them planned.
End of the Rope is raw and real. Mountains challenge Jan, marriage almost annihilates her, and motherhood could have been the last straw…but it isn’t. How she climbs out of the hole she digs for herself is as thrilling and inspiring as any of her climbs–and just as much an act of bravery.
https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/549023/end-rope#9780345812315
Writers in the Rereading Room
In collaboration with the UBC Creative Writing Program, the Belkin Art Gallery presents a reading and book signing featuring four acclaimed authors. Join us in the Rereading Room, a reconstruction of the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore (1973-1996), as we celebrate new books by UBC faculty members Amber Dawn, Kevin Chong, Maureen Medved and Timothy Taylor.
Tuesday April 3, 2018 – 4-6pm. Belkin Gallery, UBC.
Joelle Barron: Ritual Lights
Absorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure. Ritual Lights takes the reader on a journey through an underworld that is both familiar and uncanny, a space between death and life where one nourishes the other. Shadowed by the aftermath of sexual assault, Joelle Barron places candles in the darkest alcoves, illuminates mysteries, and rises again to an abundant Earth where the darkness is transformed into rich loam.
These poems follow the speaker through grieving and loss, heartbreak, repression, and discovery, seeking, never finding an answer, but finding meaning in the work of continuing. A meditation on trauma and identity, deeply vulnerable and reserved, funny and full of rage, Ritual Lights explores the sometimes messy and ugly, but always necessary, nature of survival.
MFA’s Reading Series ‘Locution’ hosts Indigenous Evening with Alicia Elliott and Katherena Vermette
Locution is a monthly reading series hosted by the MFA Creative Writing Program. This month’s event was a special Indigenous edition and welcomed amazing guest readers such as Katherena Vermette and Alicia Elliott. The host for the night was none other than Carleigh Baker. Other wonderfully talented readers included Molly Cross-Blanchard, Jessica Johns, Kavelina Torres and Samantha Nock. It was by far the best attended and most successful Locution event of the academic year and will take a long time to beat. Many Vancouver based writers came to support our Indigenous readers. Here is what some of our readers had to say about the event:
Kim Fu: The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore
From the award-winning author of For Today I Am a Boy, a gripping and deeply felt novel about a group of young girls at a remote camp—and the night that will shape their lives for decades to come.
A group of young girls descends on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, where their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets and camp songs by the fire. Bursting with excitement and nervous energy, they set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home.
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore follows these five girls—Nita, Kayla, Isabel, Dina and Siobhan—through and beyond this fateful trip. We see the survivors through the successes and failures, loves and heartbreaks of their teen and adult years, and we come to understand how a tragedy can alter the lives it touches in innumerable ways. In diamond-sharp prose, Kim Fu gives us a portrait of friendship and of the families we build for ourselves—and the pasts we can’t escape.
http://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443453592/the-lost-girls-of-camp-forevermore
Hiromi Goto Visits UBC Creative Writing Department
Hiromi Goto Reads her Poem “The Body Politic”
Hiromi Goto is a writer of poetry and fiction (full bio here) who visited our students here at the UBC Creative Writing Department in January.
She attended student workshops and gave a process-based lecture to our undergraduates that explored elements of poetry such as line break vs. prose poem, structure/form, rhyme, homonyms, metaphor, cadence, creativity/cliché, representational poetry vs non-representational. She also honored us by reading her poem The Body Politic, which she kindly allowed us to record and share with you. Here it is:
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