TERRY GLAVIN

Biographical Statement
Terry Glavin is a British Columbian journalist, author and conservationist. He is also the editor of Transmontanus Books, a series that brings together new and emerging writers with established essayists, poets and historians, in explorations of the relationship between landscape and the imagination west of the Rocky Mountains. Terry has worked as a reporter, columnist, and editor with the Em>Vancouver Sun, the Georgia Straight and the Globe and Mail, but he is perhaps best known for his award-winning magazine journalism and his many books.

His most recent major work, The Last Great Sea: A Voyage through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean, won the Hubert Evans non-fiction prize. Terry's essays about fishing communities, marine ecology and aboriginal life have earned him a dozen major writing awards over the past ten years.

His books include A Death Feast in Dimlahamid, This Ragged Place —Travels Across the Landscape, and A Ghost in the Water.

Personal Connection
First memory: Sitting on the floor in the corner of the kitchen of our ramshackle three-room house on Griffiths Avenue in Burnaby, captivated by the strange and beautiful voice of Mr. Bing, who was having tea with my mother at the kitchen table. We were poor Irish immigrants. Mr. Bing was our landlord. He was a big-hearted man in a blue greatcoat and a Homberg hat who visited us on the first of every month in his shiny Studebaker. It was from Mr. Bing that we learned how to make our way through the peculiar new country we'd found.

First glimpse of the magic landscape: When I was 25, Carl Leon was the chief of the Katzie band, a logger in a John Deere baseball cap. He pointed out the cave where the Thunderbird once lived, a place beside a sawmill near the foot of Bonson Road in Pitt Meadows where Swaneset's sky-wife emptied oolichans from her dowry box into the river, the pass between two mountains where a mysterious tribe of small people used to paint pictures on rocks, and the bend in the Coquitlam River where an old woman was once seen walking along the riverbottom, her long grey hair streaming behind her.

First certainty I had finally arrived: Octoberfest, 1981, Queensborough Community Centre. Everybody loved the bratwurst but nobody was dancing to the oompapa music. The DJ was Chinese. He asked if anybody had any better German records. There were Sikhs, Japanese, Ukranians, and some others; unfortunately, no Germans at all. But somebody found some old Elvis records in a box, so everything worked out fine.