WHISTLER WRITERS FESTIVAL TO RETURN, OCTOBER 14-16 2010
WHISTLER WRITERS FESTIVAL TO RETURN, OCTOBER 14-16 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 19 2010 Whistler, BC – Thanks to funding support from the Resort Municipality of Whistler and the Writers Union of Canada, a new partnership with the Vancouver International Writers Festival, and a vocal outcry from supporters and fans after it was announced the 2009 event would be the last, the Whistler Writers Festival will return this year with an all-star line-up of guest authors.
Despite a toughening funding climate, (the Whistler Writers Group was “highly recommended” to receive grant support from the Canada Council for the Arts, but unfortunately, there is no money available), the volunteer crew behind the nine-year old event rallied, buoyed by a sell-out reading event in May featuring Lawrence Hill, and a new partnership with the Vancouver International Readers and Writers Festival which has enabled the Whistler event to bring the biggest literary names to town.
Brian Brett will also spend the fall in Whistler as the 5th writer-in-residence to be hosted at the Station House on Alta Lake (where the Whistler Arts Council hosts its Art Workshops on the Lake).
The all-star line-up of guest authors, poets, short-story writers, digital media mavens and journalists offers plenty of summer reading fodder. Here is the Vicious Circle’s late-summer reading wish list, inspired by the 2010 Whistler Writers Festival line-up.
Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm champions the fate of rural Canada, the small farm and the simpler life on offer with what JB McKinnon calls “the fearless tongue of a gumboot poet offering romance of a different kind: a hard-earned love of chaos, the absurd, and beauty gilded with sorrow.” The 2009 book won the Writers Trust of Canada Non-Fiction prize, the BC Booksellers’ Choice Award, and was voted a top 100 book for 2009 by Amazon, the Globe and Mail and the Times Literary Supplement. www.dmpibooks.com/book/trauma-farm
Kate Pullinger won the 2009 Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel of historical fiction The Mistress of Nothing inspired by the real-life Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon, toast of Victorian London society who exiles herself to Egypt to manage tuberculosis, and embarks on an exotic new life, that her maid, the narrator, Sally Naldrett becomes immersed in. www.katepullinger.com
Kathy Page’s newest novel, The Find, drops a dinosaur hunting adventure into remote British Columbia, when paleontologist Anna Silowski makes an extraordinary discovery, and enters what Fred Stenson calls “a love story of the rarest kind: one with something new to say.” www.kathypage.info/
In September, Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds launch Breakfast at the Exit Café: travels through America, a he-said, she-said account of road-tripping through America that they wrote partially during their stint in Whistler as the 2009 Whistler Writers in Residence. www.breakfastattheexitcafe.com/about/
Also this fall. Whistler writer, Leslie Anthony follows his study of snake-lovers with an expose on another obsessive subculture, ski-bums, with The White Planet. If skiers’ innate irreverence didn’t preclude them having a holy book, then this would be it. www.dmpibooks.com/book/white-planet
Launching this week (at the Railway Club in Vancouver, 7pm, July22) is Jenn Farrell’s story collection, The Devil You Know, an arresting volume of short fiction mapping the terrain of sex, love, birth and death, of working class family dramas boiled down to the bone. “Quick and mean as a Virginia Slim and bright and harsh as a Rexall at midnight. Refreshingly honest, impeccably written.” says Elizabeth Bachinsky. www.anvilpress.com/Authors/jenn-farrell
Russell Wangersky, whose 2008 non-fiction book about the trauma of working as a volunteer firefighter, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, won three major awards, follows it with his new novel, The Glass Harmonica. When retiree Keith O’Reilly witnesses the murder of his neighbour by a pizza delivery man one night during a snowstorm on the usually quiet McKay Street, the neighbourhood secrets begin to crack open www.theglassharmonica.com/
Patricia Young has released a new collection of poetry, An Autoerotic History of Swings, opens with quotations from a Victorian study on sex, and ends with the voice of God, in this “dervish of a book, whose images in quantity and variety rival those adorning Indian temples that deify and celebrate physical human love” (Michael Kenyon). Two-time Governor General’s Award-nominee, the award-winning poet lives in Victoria, BC, Young has authored nine books. www.patriciayoung.ca
Vancouver Island poet, Terence Young’s 2006 collection, Moving Day, warns of the dangers of forgetting one’s history. “Young approaches his writing as he approaches life,” writes Leah Rae of the collection, “with generosity of spirit, a powerful sense of humour and a keen eye. The house in this book is a place where the possibilities of love are ‘like the sound of a window giving way/under the weight of a shoulder.’” www.abcbookworld.com/view_author.php?id=5391
Full details of the Whistler Writers Festival 2010 program will be released in August 2010. The Festival will take place October 14-16 2010, the week preceding the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival. Please click the Event tab for the latest information on the festival.
The Vicious Circle (Whistler Writers Group) www.whistlerwriters.wordpress.com
Stella Harvey, Tel: 604 932 4518, Stella25@telus.net www.theviciouscircle.ca
