Writing Archives - Page 4 of 6

October 26, 2011 Blog Posts, Writing

Sunday Afternoons @ Kogawa House

Writing for Social Change 2pm – 4pm

Joy Kogawa House 1450 W. 64th Ave. at Granville

Tara Beagan

Tara Beagan is a multi-talented and prolific young theatre artist, best known for her plays which have won numerous awards and nominations. A “proud halfbreed of Ntlakapamux (Thompson River Salish) and Irish Canadian heritage”, she is part of the new generation of Native artists creating ambitious work that is edgy, funny and very smart. Tara is currently artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, the oldest professional Aboriginal performing arts company in Canada. Sunday, October 30th

Betsy Warland

Poet. author and editor, Besty Warland has been writing on the cutting edge of feminist literature, and active in the feminist writing community for thirty years. Her poetry, and latterly her non-fiction, push the boundaries of genre and challenge the assumptions of culture. A mentor to many, Betsy is currently director of the Writer’s Studio at SFU. Sunday, November 6th.

Fauzia Rafiq

Fauzia Rafiq’s long-awaited novel, Skeena, was published in Punjabi in Pakistan in 2007, and in Canada last Spring. It is the story of a Muslim Canadian woman, written in Skeena’s own voice, which follows her journey from village, to Lahore, to Toronto and, finally, Surrey. Novelist Tariq Malik, a member of the Kogawa House Board , will host the event with me. Sunday, November 13th

Joy Kogawa – Book Launch

Sheena Wilson launches her collection of essays on the life and work of Joy Kogawa, Joy Kogawa, Essays on Her Works (Guernica). Wilson has contributed three articles and an extensive Kogawa bibliography to the book. Several of the writers will be present, as will Joy Kogawa. Sunday, November 20th.

Shirley Bear

Maliseet visual artist and writer Shirley Bear is from Tobique, New Brunswick. Her work is in many collections and in 2009 the Beaverbrook Art Gallery mounted a retrospective of her work. She is who also a writer who blurs the genres, and her book Virgin Bones – Belayak Kcikug’nas’ikn’ug, combines story, poetry, and prose. Shirley lived in Vancouver through the 1990s and was the Aboriginal Advisor at Emily Carr College. Sunday, December 4th.

October 19, 2011 Blog Posts, Writing

Writing for Social Change — Evelyn Lau

A tradition at Kogawa House is the reading series Writing for Social Change. This year I have invited six writers to join me in what once was the Kogawa family living room, to read and talk about their writing. I have not restricted myself to non-fiction, as I find writers working with documentary — actual characters and real events — in all sorts of genres.

I began with poet Evelyn Lau whom I first heard about in the late 1980s. I was on a train returning to Toronto from Ottawa after an appearance with other artists at a public session on cultural policy, sitting beside the representative of the Canadian Authors’ Association. Not yet brain-dead after a long day of talk, we chatted about our writing projects and the books we were reading. He waxed on with great enthusiasm about a very young writer who’d written a book about her life after walking out on her parents at the age of fourteen to live on the streets. He was going to ensure her book was published. The man was Fred Kerner to whom Evelyn dedicated her book, and Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid was the bestseller that launched her career.

She followed that with You Are Not Who You Claim which won the Milton Acorn Peoples’ Poetry Award given to courageous writers who, like Milton, challenge mainstream complacence. Two years later, in 1992, Oedipal Dreams was nominated for a Governor General’s Award making Evelyn the youngest nominée in the award’s history. And since then she has continued to push limits, court controversy, and to write stunning poetry.

I have always liked listening to artists in conversation with other artists; ever since I heard (and met!) James Baldwin in conversation with a small audience at a local bookstore when I was living in Italy in the sixties. So the readings I host are conversations, too. Evelyn read mostly from her 2010 collection Living Under Plastic, a title referring to Vancouver’s infamous leaky condos. These poems are about urban life, about death (her father, an aunt, several friends), about shopping malls, leaking buildings, and probably the trippiest poem you’ll ever read about mosquitoes. Seriously.

In Lau’s poetry, the nasty side of humanity is presented without fanfare or saving grace, yet with measured compassion. Even in her poem “The Pickton Trial” where she speaks of “the body’s memory of prostitution”, and depicts the universal experience of women living with terror in the shadow of indifference, she quotes the murderer saying “…once, I had a chance, for me, believe it or not…”

In between “sets” of readings, we chatted back and forth, and others leapt in with questions and comments. We discussed the sense of time in the writing of poetry versus prose, the business of writing about others, and what happens when you cross a boundary and make mistakes. Evelyn had a few tough questions for me on that one. So it was a great afternoon!

Saturday, October 22nd, 2011, Vancouver Mayor, Gregor Robertson will welcome Evelyn as the City’s Third Poet Laureate.

October 4, 2011 Blog Posts, Writing

My Favourite Vancouver

I moved into Kogawa House (pictured above) on September 15 and that evening a group of volunteers and friends of Kogawa House showed up for dinner. Bringing dinner with them! There to welcome me to Vancouver and the Marpole neighbourhood.

What has changed about Vancouver since my last long stay? All the indie bookstores I knew and haunted are gone, save the venerable Macleod’s Book down on Pender Street and Banyen Books in Kitsilano. Ditto the video rental places I used — Alpha Video on the Drive and even Videomatica. Old familiar mainstays I am glad to see again:the Kitchen Corner stores, Famous Foods, and 3 Vets where you can still get enamelware basins, dishes and pots.

But right now the Vancouver Film Festival is playing, and later in October the annual Heart of the City Festival takes place in the Downtown Eastside. This is one of my favourite places in Vancouver, actually. Not only because of the memory of the famous fish place called The Only which was located on Hastings near the Carnegie Centre at Main, but because of Chinatown and Strathcona and the vibrant arts community there. The Heart of the City Festival grew out of that, and my friend Terry Hunter’s Vancouver Moving Theatre which has been operating there for twenty years or more. The downtown eastside is not what you read about in the papers. Yes, there are poor and troubled folks living there, but it is a community and it works.

September 20, 2011 Blog Posts, Writing

In Residence At Kogawa House

In mid-September I began a three month residency at the family home of Joy Kogawa in Vancouver. Joy is a colleague and friend. We have both been active in the Writers’ Union, and we often meet on picket lines and rallies, at the St. Lawrence Market Book Fair or Word on the Street.

I well remember the year Joy brought the issue of Japanese redress to the annual meeting of the Union which I am proud to say passed a motion supporting the movement and calling on the government to accede to the demand for acknowledgment and redress. Some of the arguments pointed out that in addition to the economic, physical and psychological trauma, there was cultural damage inflicted by internment. And that this included the loss to all Canadians of the contributions many talented people, including writers, might have made but for the massive disruption to family life, community and education.

It’s a privilege for any writer to be given time and a place to write. The big bonus of being asked to do that at Kogawa House is the house itself which comes with a community. And with a mission — that being for us all to be mindful of the embedded injustices that still exist in Canadian society. For starters, I’ll be hosting the Writing for Social Change reading series, speaking with writers who are actively engaged in community, whose work crosses cultures and assumes difference. We’ll be announcing the line-up soon.

Meanwhile….check out Historic Joy Kogawa House at www.kogawahouse.com.

May 10, 2011 Article, Writing

“SUSAN CREAN ON ABORIGINAL THEATRE COMPANY NATIVE EARTH PERFORMING ARTS” IN THIS MAGAZINE

In This Magazine, May-June 2011.

"I joined the board of Native Earth Performing Arts, in Toronto’s Distillery District, several years ago, and quickly discovered the best perk of the office is watching a performance evolve through rehearsal. Seeing the actors figuring out their moves together, adjusting dialogue, and dissecting the meaning of the play, and then witnessing opening night when they fire the creation into life…is magic. No better word for it."

Read the article "Susan Crean on Aboriginal theatre company Native Earth Performing Arts" online here.

January 8, 2011 Article, Writing

“NATIONAL ARCHIVES BLUES” IN LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA

Literary Review of Canada, January-February, 2011.

"It does not take long to discover the great truth about archival work, which is, appearances to the contrary, that it is utterly absorbing."

This piece grew out of several visits to the National Archives of Canada in 2010. I was very troubled to discover archivists at their wits’ end and heading for the door, unable to assist researchers as they have in the past. New management has flat-lined the budgets for acquiring of private (non-governmental) papers, cut back on service, and embraced digitization as the one-stop answer to everything. The Canadian Association of University Teachers has since launched a campaign to save the archives.

Read the article National Archives Blues online here.

July 9, 2010 Article, Writing

“MILTON AND MICHEL” IN GEIST 77

In Geist 77, Summer 2010.

"Milton was a wordsmith of flair and stamina. A great poet, but also a great prose stylist, a sharp political analyst and a speaker of Homeric proportions. It took just one experience—of the poet reading his own work, or the revolutionary reading the Riot Act—to appreciate the erudition behind the argument, and the spell of the imagery."

Michel Lambeth's photo of Milton Acorn brings back memories of dancing, love poetry and a revolution. Read Susan Crean's article Milton and Michel online here.

November 8, 2009 Art Exhibition Catalogue, Writing

“N’TOW’WIK’HEGAT (SHE WHO KNOWS HOW TO MAKE IMAGES)”

In Net wikuhpon ehit — Once there lived a woman, The Painting, Poetry and Politics of Shirley Bear, Curator, Terry Graff. Fredericton: Beaverbrook Art Gallery, 2009.

"To know Shirley Bear is to experience her language, the Wabanaki language spoken by the First Peoples living in the valley of Wulustook (the Saint John River) and the community known as Negootkook (Tobique First Nation) where Bear was born and raised."

In 2009 the Beaverbrook Gallery in Fredericton honoured visual artist and writer Shirley Bear with a retrospective exhibition called Net wikuhpon ehit — Once there lived a woman, The Painting, Poetry and Politics of Shirley Bear. It was curated by Terry Graff who asked me to write this essay. I met Shirley when the PEN International Congress was held at Harbourfront in Toronto in 1989 and I was chair of the Writers in Prison of PEN Canada. As we had access to the York Quay Gallery at Harbourfont along with other rooms, the WIP Committee invited Shirley to open Changers: A Spiritual Renaissance there. Changers was a touring exhibition of contemporary Indigenous women’s art organized by the National Indian Arts and Crafts Corporation and curated by Shurley. The artists were Rebecca Baird, Shirley Bear, Rebecca Belmore, Ruth Cuthand, Freda Diesing, Faye HeavyShield, Glenna Matoush, Shelley Niro, Alanis Obomsawin, Jane Ash Poitras, Joane Cardinal-Schubert.

Download a PDF version (897Kb) of “N’tow’wik’hegat (She who knows how to make images).”

November 8, 2009 Anthology, Writing

“BOTH SIDES NOW: DESIGNING WHITE MEN AND THE OTHER SIDE OF HISTORY”

In Response, Responsibility, and Renewal — Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey. Eds., Gregory Young-Ing, et al. Ottawa, Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2009.

"Along with the narrative about the founding of Canada by both the French and the English came the notion—preached by the likes of Emily Carr and Marius Barbeau, as well as D.C. Scott—of Aboriginal culture constituting Canada’s ancient past, the prehistory upon which the modern nation could be built and with which an authentic Canadian culture could be fashioned.... The story of Canada I was raised on, thus, denied the connection between assimilation and appropriation, between the past and the present."

For several years I worked on the issue of Traditional Knowledge with Greg Younging who was a founding co-chair of the Creator’s Right’s Alliance in 2002 along with Michel Beauchemin and me (representing respectively Indigenous Peoples, Quebec and Canada). Greg was an editor of the second volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s anthology called Response, Responsibility, and Renewal — Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey, and following a conversation we had in Toronto about the non-involvement of Canadians who are not directly implicated in the residential school tragedy (ie. the State, the churches, the victims, and the individual perpetrators of abuse who happened to get caught) he suggested I write something. The third volume looks at “Cultivating Canada — Reconciliation through the lens of Cultural Diversity" and also makes the point that reconciliation is everyone’s business.

Download a PDF version of the essay "Both Sides Now: Designing White Men and the Other Side of History."

April 8, 2008 Article, Writing

“RIEL’S PROPHECY – THE NEW CONFIDENCE OF ABORIGINAL THEATRE”

In The Walrus, April, 2008.

“My people will sleep for one hundred years. When they awake, it will be the artists that give them back their spirit.” — Louis Riel.

I spent ten fabulous years on the board of directors of Native Earth Performing Arts, the country’s oldest professional Indigenous performing arts company. During that time I saw the creative process at work and close-up, and witnessed the evolution of many plays and performances from gleam in the eye to full scale production. This article chronicles the evolution of Indigenous theatre work in recent years, and profiles some of the extraordinary artists behind it.

Read Riel’s Prophecy: The New Confidence of Aboriginal Theatre online here.