Welcome to the Prefaces & Afterwords, Q&A interviews with authors. Watch this space for our conversations with writers who will be featured in upcoming events.
On Thursday, prominent Canadian YA authors Kenneth Oppel, Arthur Slade, and Richard Scrimger were greeted by a packed house of local school kids and field trip chaperones for the event Stars Aligned. Each read from their latest works before answering questions from an enthusiastic audience.
Richard Scrimger expertly played the dual role of moderator and panelist. He read from his latest novel, Ink Me, part of the recently released Seven series featuring seven works by seven different authors. Arthur Slade read from his recent novel, Island of Doom, the fourth book in the Hunchback Assignments series.
Kenneth Oppel read from his most recent book, Such Wicked Intent, second in the Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein series. The book was inspired by Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, a favourite book of Oppel's, with its search for the elixir of life and raising ghosts and demons. "I love writing period settings and period characters," said Oppel. "I actually like the way people talk in the past – there was an eloquence and a richness of vocabulary."
How’s our writing doing, forty years after the publication of Margaret Atwood’s seminal book, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature?
That was the question put to a Saturday-morning panel made up of Atwood, her partner Graeme Gibson and a clutch of other opinionated, high-level writers and publishers from out of town. The Granville Island Stage was packed.
A cold wet morning, and a Sunday at that, assuages not the hunger and thirst for literature, I was thinking, entering the Improv Centre, this new-ish venue I haven’t seen before. It’s good. Set up kind of like a bistro or little café, with chairs and little round tables, but with bleachers on one side for more seating, and of course a stage on the other. I find a nice corner table where, it is to be hoped, I can nod off without anyone the wiser. Kidding! Never been a great morning person. A sentence fragment from a famous novel ke
When Tess Gallagher met the short-story writer Raymond Carver at a writers’ conference in the late 1970s, he inscribed the book she handed him “To my little pal Tess.” He was six-foot-two, she just five-foot-four.
But the following year, when they fell in love and began to live together, it became clear that she was the stronger, tougher person.
“He was a soft-spoken man, very shy,” Gallagher, a poet, essayist and story writer from Port Angeles, WA, told Writers Fest artistic director Hal Wake at a festival event Saturday.
The Saturday morning Vancouver weather was a mix of dark and light. Hail and rain in the early hours gave way to dissipating clouds, splotches of puffy white and lovely patches of clear blue.
The same shades of darkness and lightness were experienced by the attendees of Why Do We Do The Things We Do at Studio 1398. And though the content was seriously serious it was a pleasant morning spent with dark material.
“The Vancouver Writers Fest is the best of the large festivals, with a busy combo of panels, readings, one-to-one interviews as well as poetry jams and a mix of invitees from all over the world.”
On Thursday, prominent Canadian YA authors Kenneth Oppel, Arthur Slade, and Richard Scrimger were greeted by a packed house of local school kids and field trip chaperones for the event Stars Aligned. Each read from their latest works before answering questions from an enthusiastic audience.
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