The free lectures are presented by SFU Public Square in partnership with SFU Continuing Studies.
NEW SERIES
Summer Writes: Urban Tales
Join us to celebrate summer, writing, and the imaginative challenges of city life with award-winning writers.
All conversations take place from 7 to 9 pm at SFU Vancouver’s Vancouver campus. Four hours of workshops will follow the lectures.
Lectures
Wednesday, August 7, 2013, 7–9 pm
City Centre: A Poetry Reading and Conversation About Life in Urban Vancouver
Vancouver’s poet laureate, Evelyn Lau
in conversation with Daniela Elza
Whether it's the seemingly perpetual rain outside the window, the cement high-rises on the street, or the mountains in the near distance, Vancouver's dramatic landscape, mixed architecture, gloomy weather, and diverse population affect each of its artists in different ways.
Join Vancouver's current poet laureate, Evelyn Lau, for a poetry reading and conversation about how her hometown has shaped her poetry, her writing, and her viewpoints on life.
This lecture is free. Seating is limited, so reserve your seat today.
Workshops
Thursday–Friday, August 8–9, 2013, 1–3 pm
City Centre: Exploring Urban Themes through Poetry
with Fiona Tinwei Lam
Using your home to inform your writing is a key component in creating effective poetry. Join Fiona Lam, an award-winning poet, for a two-day workshop to explore how to incorporate the influences of your city into your poetry.
A number of city-themed poems and passages by well-known writers will serve as a starting point for you to explore your experiences of—and reactions to—our urban environment. They may include delving into aspects of Vancouver's history, landscape, residents, or specific events.
$120 + tax
Wednesday, August 14, 2013, 7–9 pm
Going Places: A Writerly Perspective on Travel
Short-story writer Marina Sonkina
in conversation with a local writer
What’s the allure of travel? Is it the opportunity to satisfy an instinctive curiosity about other cultures and lifestyles? Or does it help us run from an old identity by inventing a new one among strangers and in remote places?
When travelling, we find ourselves on a curious border, sharing a new way of life temporarily, but remaining outsiders. It is this duality that liberates us, giving us the freedom to see through fresh eyes. If art is about seeing the world from an unexpected perspective, then travelling is a perfect tool to enhance this vision. The writer also takes this experience home, discovering the new in the familiar.
Using her own experience, Marina Sonkina will also reflect on the curse and the cure of changing continents and languages for the creative writer, who, against all odds, wants to remain true to her art.
This lecture is free. Seating is limited, so reserve your seat today.
Tuesday and Thursday, August 20 and 22, 2013, 6:30–8:30 pm
Going Places: Writing as Adventure
with Marina Sonkina
Going on a journey is always a great adventure in literature and in life. We will examine what writing about travel offers us, whether we are setting out to explore familiar or exotic locales, or whether we travel only in our imaginations. You'll recall and reflect on a travel experience you’ve had and frame it within a narrative that captures its compelling power and inner interest.
Two essays will guide us on our journey: William Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey” (1822) and Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930).
$120 + tax
Wednesday, August 21, 2013, 7–9 pm
Personal Tales: How a Country Boy Became a Poet
George Bowering, a poet
in conversation with Wayde Compton
Simultaneously both a rural (in origin) and urban (in mid- and late career) writer, George Bowering will discuss how his youth in British Columbia’s small-town interior has influenced and vexed his writing. Bowering’s vast repertoire of books includes just about all forms that live: poems, stories, essays, novels, criticism, memoir, and so on. But in many of these works, which move from the province’s interior to its coast, from city to city in Canada, and from continent to continent, a poet’s mind and a small-town boy’s eye endure—even where they are crossed out or re-combined with other thoughts and views. Hear Bowering speak about the assemblage of himself as a writer, in and out of place.
This lecture is free. Seating is limited, so reserve your seat today.
Friday–Saturday, August 23–24, 2013, 1–3 pm
Personal Tales: Form and the Narrative Essay
with Wayde Compton
These workshops will walk you through the varying purposes and styles of the curious beast called the “personal narrative essay.” Sometimes it is a memoir that gestures at being a criticism. Sometimes it’s a formal essay that transforms into anecdote and back again into an essay. Sometimes it’s history, poetry, monologue, or travel writing in part or all at once. “Non-fiction” is the least helpful description of any form of writing around, yet it may, for that reason, also be the most transformative mode of expression.
You'll bring to the lecture two physical objects that are important to you (or photographs of the objects if they are too large to bring with you): one that you’ve owned for a long time, and one that you’ve recently acquired. Come prepared to develop the story that either object is asking you to tell.
$120 + tax