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.

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.

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.