Filed under: Interview, Writers Festivals | Tags: 3 Incestuous Sisters, Alice Munro, Alma Lee, Arts Cuts BC, Arts Funding BC, Audrey Niffenegger, Billeh Nickerson, C.R. Avery, CR Avery, David Sedaris, Douglas and MacIntyre, Douglas Coupland, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Granville Island, Graphic Novels, Hal Wake, Ian Weir, IFOA, International Festival of Authors, Joseph Boyden, Leon Rooke, Lisa Foad, Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, Michael Turner, Poetry Bash, Publishers, Sal Ferreras, Seth, Sonja Ahlers, Tribute to Alice Munro, Vancouver International Writers Festival, VIWF, Zoe Whittall
The VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL WRITERS & READERS FESTIVAL IS COMING!
Read the post below and check the links while you listen to the podcast by clicking here.
In the earliest days of planning for Books on the Radio, when it was but a glimmer on the horizon, I knew that I wanted to interview Hal Wake about the Vancouver International Writers Festival. I’ve known Hal for a few years and we have many mutual friends and I’ve been a big fan of the work that he and his team have done to bring a fresh international group of writers to Vancouver every year.
This interview could have gone on for an hour and a half and we still wouldn’t have covered everything that the festival has to offer. I didn’t even get a chance to ask Hal about the Peter Mansbridge event!
That’s ridiculous and would be almost unforgivable had we not alighted on David Sedaris, Margaret Atwood, Audrey Niffenegger, Sal Ferreras and the Tribute to Alice Munro along the way.
So the festival is coming but it’s not all about percussive bandleaders and international heavyweight smackdowns.
The VIWF also features emerging talents like local beatboxing, wharf-dwelling, gravel voiced impresario C.R. Avery. The always charming Billeh Nickerson brings his McPoems (published by the excellent Arsenal Pulp Press) to town for a few events. Michael Turner is also making a few appearances in support of his new experimental novel 8X10.
And just when you thought that it was an unrelenting sausage party the VIWF drops the likes of Zoe Whittall, with her new book Holding Still for as Long as Possible, Lisa Foad with her short story collection The Night is a Mouth (note the Sonja Ahlers cover!) and local poet and unabashed Laurie Anderson fan, Elizabeth Bachinsky reps the legendary annual Poetry Bash in support of her new book of poems, God of Missed Connections.
And I’m only really touching the surface. You can pick up the festival programs at bookstores and libraries throughout the city or you can check it out online.
It’s going to be another great year and I look forward to seeing you there.
Filed under: Interview | Tags: Bold Face Names, Books on the Radio, Harper Collins, Harper Collins Canada, Interview, Shinan Govani, Shinan Govani Bold Face Names, Vancouver
This Thursday afternoon at an undisclosed location in downtown Vancouver I will be interviewing Canada’s finest disher of celebrity gossip turned wisecracking novelist, Shinan Govani.
Shinan is the National Post‘s “resident snoop, town crier and people watcher.”
According to Richard Johnson of the New York Post‘s legendary Page 6, “Shinan Govani works with bemused detachment in a bizarro world of fame whores and the truly famous, and he knows the difference. In Boldface Names, he plumbs the depths of the shallow party circuit, and finds humanity beneath the celebrity, and wisdom beyond mere wit.”
Shinan is in town to promote the launch of his new book, Bold Face Names, which, if the back cover copy is to be trusted, carries a narrative that sweeps “…from the beaches of Anguilla to the towers of Dubai, from LA to London to the social mines of Toronto…”
Social mines of Toronto?!!? Dear god help us all.
I just received my copy of the book and I’m going to burn through it this afternoon.
Stay tuned for hijinx.
Filed under: Enthusiasms, Imagination | Tags: Airports, Franz Kafka, The Onion, YouTube
Filed under: Copyright, Creative Commons, DRM, Enthusiasms, Imagination, Industry Change, Interview, Social Media, Support Independents
Mark Sigal at O’Reilly.com included a link to the Open Book: Toronto interview that I recently did with Book Oven‘s Hugh McGuire in his most recent O’Reilly Radar posting.
To be mentioned positively on the O’Reilly Radar is a huge enough honor but to be included in a piece about the revolutionary prospects of the forthcoming Apple tablet… well, that’s just beyond words.
Mr Sigal’s piece begins with this quote:
“It is August, 1927, and Al Jolson is industriously, unwittingly, engaged in the destruction of one great art form and the creation of another…In four short years, the ‘talkie’ will completely subsume the silent movie.” – from The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyman
Here’s what he had to say about our interview:
In “The Future of Publishing,” Sean Cranbury and Hugh McGuire do a beautiful job of getting to the it of what makes a book, a book.
They say that the primary thing a book has to do is “fulfill its promise as a transmitter/inspirer of ideas, art, thoughts, story, entertainment.”
Thanks again to Amy and Clelia at Open Book: Toronto for being so great. And to Hugh McGuire for being an amazing accomplice in this.
Filed under: Imagination, Support Independents | Tags: Ernesto Priego, Geof Huth, Never Neutral, Poetry, Video Poetry, Visual Poetry, YouTube, YouTube Poetry
I only know about this great poem because I follow him, Ernesto Priego, on twitter. Further evidence that twitter is not a vacuous hole of suburban non-sense (all the time).
Check out Ernesto’s blog, Never Neutral, for more poetic experiments involving technology, text and comix.
The visual poet is the person who sees text where others see words, the visual poet is the one for whom words are not invisible portals toward meaning but concrete structures that harbor meaning, the visual poet is the person who loves the letter and the structures of sequences of letters over the word.
Filed under: Industry Change, Interview, Support Independents | Tags: 48 Hour Interview, Amy Logan Holmes, Book Oven, Book Publishing, BookCamp Toronto, BookCamp Vancouver, Clelia Scala, DRM, Fall Magazine, File Sharing, Future of Publishing, Hugh McGuire, Librivox, Librivox.org, Montreal, Open Book Toronto Magazine, Open Book: Toronto, P2P, P2P File Sharing Networks, Piracy, Publishing, Sean Cranbury, Toronto, Vancouver
Sometime around the middle of August I got an email from Amy Logan-Holmes at Open Book: Toronto asking whether I would be interested in participating in something called the 48 Hour Interview that would run in their Fall Issue.
She described it as an email exchange or co-interview between two people working within the books/publishing industry. The participants are free to discuss whatever they like provided that the ‘interview’ occurs within 48 consecutive hours and, I suppose, is at least tangentially related to the business at hand.
So I’m thinking, “Ok, that sounds doable. I wonder who she’s going to pair me up with?”
And, of course, it was Hugh McGuire, co-creator of Book Oven and Librivox.org. Organizer of BookCamp Toronto and well-coiffed confidante of the Digital Literati.
No pressure, right?
None.
It was a great, if somewhat long, interview that really dug into some key issues facing the evolving – convulsing? – book publishing industry today.
The whole thing was edited and punched into shape by the very talented Clelia Scala. Many thanks to Hugh and everyone at Open Book: Toronto.
For an example of something that I wrote for the interview that may or may not be interesting, please click the little red (more…) button below.
Filed under: Music, Support Independents | Tags: Chris Walter, Cobalt, Cobalt Tavern, GFY Press, Punch the Boss, Punk, Punk Books, Subhumans, Vancouver, Vancouver writer
Come celebrate the launch of Chris Walter’s new book, Punch the Boss, on the final night for the legendary Cobalt, Vancouver’s finest current punk venue.
September 26th featuring the Subhumans, Alcoholic White Trash and Speckled Jim. The Books on the Radio crew will be there!
If you don’t know where the Cobalt is… ask around.
Filed under: Art, Imagination, Support Independents | Tags: Angels in the Angles, Art Exhibition, Atsui Gallery, Bachelor Machines, Christian Bok, Concrete Poetry, Donato Mancini, Marina Roy, Mechanical Brides, Poetry, Poets, Steve Calvert
Books on the Radio is happy to support this amazing exhibition of concrete poetry curated by Steve Calvert.
Featuring the incredible & beautiful work of Donato Mancini, Christian Bok and Marina Roy you can check out the exhibition at the Atsui Gallery from October 9 – November 3.
Check out the Bachelor Machines/Mechanical Brides site for more details.
As artists adapt to the growing insecurity of our national institutions, creative communities are presured to galvanize and grow stronger, more independent, industrious, and interdependent, developing means of production and trading networks in cultural and cosmopolitan pockets far and wide. In the absence of federal support, producing autonomously, even anonomously, we work for a future milieu which does not yet exist. Rushing in to fill the vacuum, exchanging ideas with a non-linear, open source, transhistorical temperment, we braid our conceptualizations beyond translation, openly hostile to that trust which has forsaken us… this utopia has been dreamed before.
Filed under: Interview, Support Independents | Tags: Books on the Radio, Brick Books, Canadian Poet, Canadian Poetry, Chris Hutchinson, Kelowna, Poet, Poetry, Telepathy
Books on the Radio has finally launched!
The first interview was conducted in the front room of the temporarily empty Kelowna home of poet Chris Hutchinson.
During the interview we discussed telepathy, Henry Miller’s the Tropic of Cancer, Sharon Thesen, institutionalized poets and John Coltrane.
Chris’ new book of poems is called ‘Other People’s Lives‘ and is published by Brick Books. You can purchase a copy at any quality independent bookstore.
You can listen to the interview by clicking this link.
Filed under: Interview | Tags: Books on the Radio, Brick Books, Canadian Poetry, Kelowna, Other People's Lives, Poet, Poet Interview, Poetry
The first Books on the Radio interview is ready for broadcast.
This past weekend I interviewed Chris Hutchinson in his new home in Kelowna, BC. We discussed Kerouac, Coltrane and telepathy among many other things.
The interview is broadcast on CJSF 90.1FM at 1pm on Wednesday and I will podcast it here with an extended introduction on the day
books on the radio 