Categories
In The Newspapers

Poets And Authors Write The News

Israeli newspaper assigns 31 poets and authors to cover the news for one day.

Categories
In The Newspapers

Who’s That Canadian Writer?

Naomi Lakritz, in the Calgary Herald, has a column pointing out results from a poll showing that 50% of Canadians can’t name a Canadian author.

Categories
Canadian Festival

Canadian Writers’ Festivals

Fall is the season for the big Canadian Writers’ Festivals so here’s a list of what’s coming up. Today’s the last day for the Winnipeg Festival so you’ll have to start making plans for next year but there’s a lot more upcoming in October. Vancouver hosts the Writers & Readers event October 21-26 at the lovely Granville Island site. Calgary and Banff, as always, co-host Wordfest from October 14 – 19. Take a quick trip north from Calgary to Edmonton and take in the International Literary Festival there October 16-19.  In Ottawa from October 18-27 you can take in literary events at their International Writers Festival. Toronto puts on their event at Harbourfront where you can attend the International Festival of Authors October 22 – November 1. Lesser known events are the Surrey International Writers Conference October 23-26. Surrey is located just outside Vancouver so you can take in two festivals in the same area at the same time. For all you adventure types, armchair and otherwise, don’t forget the Banff Mountain Book Festival November 1-9, held in conjunction with a film festival. If that’s not enough start marking your calendar for next spring and the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival April 22-26, 2009.

Categories
Canada/USA Uncategorized

Border Line Ignorance

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has a great (small but slowly, slowly growing) section online on Northwest writers that includes a range of writers from novelist Tom Robbins to cartoonist Ellen Forney. Each piece has a sample of writing as well as a video of the writer speaking on a variety of topics.

Looking through the section always makes me realize how little Canadian and American literary communities and readers know about each other despite their proximity

If you know Jack Hodgins on Vancouver Island do you know Ivan Doig in Washington? If you’ve read Jonathan Raban’s sailing book Passage To Juneau, have you read Gary Geddes‘ Sailing Home or the classic west coast book Curve Of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet, all three a literary look at boating the coastal west?

If you live in Minneapolis who do read from Winnipeg? How about New Brunswick and Maine?

I’m sure the writer’s know each others names, or at least I hope they do but I don’t think readers often do. There are exceptions, Robbins and Raban are well known internationally but what about all the others?

A challenge, find an author you don’t who lives across your border and track down a book of theirs, order it in and give it a read. If you like their work invite them on up to give a reading in your town.

Categories
Photography

Miriam Berkely

A link and story from Eric Kisor’s The Reluctant Blogger after reading an interview with photographer Miriam Berkely in Eric Forbe’s Book Addict’s Guide To Good Books.

Berkely specializes in photographing authors and there are a lot of samples of her work on all the links. Check out the image of Stephen Hawking. In the Forbe’s interview Berkeley says of the Hawking photo ‘My favourite of Hawking was shot in a horizontal format, although when it was used for publicity for the first American edition of A Brief History of Time, it was cropped and sent out as a vertical image with a fair amount of its Cambridge background removed, and some publications published only Hawking’s smiling face, which was a very small part of the entire image.’

Categories
Uncategorized

As Good As Any Place To Begin

A is for Atwood, which is as good as any place to begin.

That’s her photograph at the top of this page. The other portraits are Peter Oliva (at left) and Wayson Choy.

I make a living as a photographer but am fascinated by the world of writing. All writing and all aspects although I probably read more non-fiction. A life in journalism may have something to do with that. I do read almost everything though, low brow or high brow, poetry and the sports pages, thrillers and essays, novels and memoirs.

Reading one text usually leads to several more. This morning, re-reading the late Matt Cohen’s memoir Typing, A Life In 26 Keys. a book I was reminded of while reading a story in an issue of Quill and Quire that mentioned publisher Patsy Aldana, Cohen’s wife. Cohen writes about interviewing Hugh Garner and I remember that I still haven’t read Garner’s classic Cabbagetown. Cohen talks about Morley Callaghan and, among other things, his famous connection to Ernest Hemingway. That reminds me that while I have my copies of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris, the book I regard as the third in the Paris trilogy John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse has gone missing from the bookshelves. From there I start wondering why Morley’s son Barry Callaghan has written about his house being burgled in both his essay collections and in his short story collections.

Maybe I just have problems staying on topic.

My interest in literature and authors led to a project photographing writers. Two books, each showcasing fifty writers, have been published by the Banff Centre Press. www.banffcentre.ca/Press. I also photograph books and anything connected with writing.

I enjoy photographing writers because while they are not without egos, they are not like many people connected to other arts such as TV and movies. They willingly agree to meet and be photographed even when they are ‘stars’. Margaret Atwood made time during a busy book tour to be photographed. The late Timothy Findley, photographed after a lunch that was a performance in itself, sent a note thanking the photographer for taking the time to take the images. That has never happened with a movie actor.

Photographing writers gives me an insight into the writing process, something that fascinates me.

I continue to photograph in the world of literature, maintaining a hope that the images will draw more people to the world of books. I hope this site will serve as a magazine of writing and writers, showcasing the best in photography and words.