Write Here Readers Series

Explore writing from the North Island with NIC’s Write Here Readers Series and discover a region rich in stories and storytellers.

This year, our Readers Series welcomes readers and authors together to think about locality as both specific and universal. We invite you to consider our North Island home as an important and valuable literary stage.

Attend this exciting series of free lectures, launches and intimate literary discussions, where you'll enjoy writers of national significance and writers from our own back yard. Join us at one or all of the Write Here Readers Series’ upcoming events, and discover stories that celebrate the people and places that make the North Island unique.

Kim Bannerman

When: Wednesday, September 21
Wine and cheese reception at 7:00 pm, reading to follow at 7:30 pm
Where: Stan Hagen Theatre, Comox Valley campus

Immerse yourself in a night of the Comox Valley’s most twisted, wicked fiction yet. Don’t miss Kim Bannerman as she reads from her up-and-coming novel, Bucket of Blood, at this free launch.

Part BC history, part gothic murder mystery, Bucket of Blood is a grim journey through loss, self-discovery, redemption, and vengeance that will surely horrify the faint of heart.

Kim Bannerman’s stories have appeared in publications worldwide. She has three published novels: The Tattooed Wolf (Double Dragon, 2004), The Wolf of Gilsbury Cross (Double Dragon, 2006), and The Fire Song (Fox and Bee, 2011). Her fourth novel, Bucket of Blood, will be available in September 2011.

Bill Gaston and Dede Crane

When: Thursday, October 27
Reading at 7:30 pm
Where: Stan Hagen Theatre, Comox Valley campus

Bill Gaston is the author of several much-praised story collections and novels, including Sex is Red, The Good Body, Mount Appetite, and Sointula, and is the recipient of many prizes and accolades. In addition to his Giller Prize nomination in 2002, he was the inaugural recipient of the Timothy Findley Prize, awarded by the Writers' Trust of Canada to a distinguished male writer for a stellar body of work. He lives with his wife, writer Dede Crane, and family in Victoria, British Columbia.

Dede Crane is the author of several novels including the nationally acclaimed Sympathy, which was a finalist for the Victoria Butler Book Prize, and the teen novel The 25 Pains of Kennedy Baines. Her most recent books are The Cult of Quick Repair, a collection of stories and (as co-editor) Great Expectations, a collection of essays about the experience of giving birth. Her first published story was short-listed for the CBC Literary Award, and she has since published stories in numerous literary journals, as well as reviewing books for The Globe and Mail, The Shambhala Sun, and The Times-Colonist.

Joe Denham, Kirsty Elliot, and Carol Neufeld

When: Thursday, November 24
Reception at 7:00pm, reading to follow
Where: Comox Valley Art Gallery

Joe Denham is the author of two poetry collections, Flux (2003) and Windstorm (2009), and one novel, The Year of Broken Glass (2011). His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry and Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets. He lives with his wife and two children in Halfmoon Bay, BC, and works as a commercial fisherman throughout coastal British Columbia.

Kirsty Elliot was accidently born in England because she’s Scottish. Her mom was a midwife and her Dad was a chemical engineer. She lived in Carnoustie until she was three and then moved to the Bahamas until she was seven. Life was all glass bottom boats and swimming all day until her dad was recruited by a nuclear power plant in Ontario. She spent the rest of her childhood in Inverhuron and then she thinks she went to high school in Port Elgin but she’s kind of blocked it out. She attended Trent University until a global cycling addiction prevented her from finishing her Native Studies degree. She spent a decade living in the Yukon and Northwest Territories before moving down south to caretake a dreamy, private island. She spent three years living all alone in a house that floated in the ocean and looked like a walnut that fell from outer space. It was here that the poems in True (Leaf Press, 2011) began to make themselves known. She now lives with her husband and their two children on Lasqueti Island where they cleared some land, dug some ponds, made a garden and built a cute little plastic shack. They just spent their fourth winter all together in the plastic fantastic. So please buy this book. Hell, buy two.

Carol Neufeld, a Comox Valley-based poet, will be reading from the unpublished collection “Refugia”. This collection explores what it has meant to be human in the Comox region over the last ten thousand years. Her published works include Drums & Colours (2002), People of the Book (1999), The Country Where Love Begins (1998), and Gusting to Ninety (1996). Her poems have been read and published internationally; commissioned for CBC radio; as video at Visible Verse, Pacific Cinématheque; performed at the Campbell River Writers Festival, Words on the Water; performed at the Sointula Writers Festival; and performed in Ireland. She is an alumnus of the Banff Centre Writing Studio and has an M.F.A. in creative writing.

Jan Zwicky

When: Thursday, December 1
Reading at 7:00
Where: Stan Hagen Theatre, Comox Valley campus

Jan Zwicky’s newest poetry collection is Forge, which has just been released from Gaspereau Press. Other collections include Wittgenstein Elegies(Brick Books, 1986), The New Room (Coach House Press, 1989), Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (Brick, 1998) which won the Governor General’s Award in 1999, Robinson’s Crossing (Brick, 2004) which won the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences (Gaspereau Press, 2005). Her books of philosophy include Lyric Philosophy (UTP, 1992; second edition, Gaspereau, forthcoming), Wisdom & Metaphor (Gaspereau, 2003, 2nd ed, 2008), and Plato as Artist (Gaspereau, 2009). Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.

Zwicky has published widely as an essayist on issues in music, poetry, philosophy, and the environment. She has taught creative writing at the University of New Brunswick, led numerous workshops, taught in the Writing Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and lectured widely in North America and Europe. She has taught philosophy at a number of North American universities, most recently, the University of Victoria. She is also a violinist, with a strong interest in baroque performance practice. Since 1986, she has edited poetry for Brick Books. A native of Alberta, she now lives on Quadra Island, off the west coast of British Columbia.

Gary Geddes

When: Wednesday, January 11th
Reading at 7:30
Where: Stan Hagen Theatre, Comox Valley campus

Gary Geddes has written and edited more than forty books and won a dozen national and international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Lt.-Governor's Award for Literary Excellence (BC), and the Gabriela Mistral Prize from the government of Chile.

Gary Geddes has written a much-anticipated book called Drink the Bitter Root: A writer’s search for justice and redemption in Africa, based on his trauma and human rights interviews with victims of violence in Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Somaliland.

Garry Thomas Morse

When: Wednesday, February 15th
Reading at 7:30
Where: Stan Hagen Theatre, Comox Valley campus

When: Thursday, February 16th
7:30 pm
Where: Mt. Waddington Region, location to be announced

Garry Thomas Morse is the author of Transversals for Orpheus, Streams, Death in Vancouver, and After Jack. In 2008, he received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist. His current book Discovery Passages (Talonbooks) is the first collection of poetry about the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) First Nations. His sixth book (and second book of fiction) concerning surrealist and speculative genres will be available from Talonbooks in the Fall of 2012.

Andrew Findlay

When: Wednesday, March 14th
Presentation at 7:30 pm
Where: Trades Building, Room 101, Comox Valley campus

Andrew Findlay is an award-winning journalist and photographer with a home base on Vancouver Island. Magazine and newspaper assignments have taken him to lands and cultures as diverse as the Great Bear Rainforest of B.C. in search of coastal wolves, the remote mountains of northwestern Guatemala by mountain bike and the frozen ice hockey ponds of northern India.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.