Here’s a few photographs I took of Jack Hodgins last week for an interview that ran in the Oak Bay News. I hadn’t seen Jack in a couple of years so it was great to have a few minutes to chat. His latest novel The Master Of Happy Endings is just out.
Category: Book Launch
High Ground Press (Theresa Kishkan and John Pass) have announced the publication of their Companions Series of poetry broadsheets. The series was launched at the Alcuin Society’s Wayzgoose Fine Print Fair in Vancouver last fall and are available now to libraries and collectors.
Twelve letterpress sheets feature poems by contributing poets written in response to poems they have chosen by their contemporaries or from the canon. The companion pieces are printed en face . Each sheet is signed and numbered by the contributing poet in a limited edition of 60 copies. Approximately 40 sets are available for sale at $150 CAD. Sets include title sheet, colophon and folder.
Most of the contributors’ poems make their first appearances in print in the Series.
Please see the prospectus attached for comprehensive information regarding contributors, typefaces, paper, etc.
The Companions Series: Prospectus
The Companions Series of broadsheets features poems by contemporary poets written in response to poems they have chosen by other poets, printed face to face on classic laid papers using High Ground’s treadle-driven Chandler & Price platen press. Most of the contributors’ poems make their first appearances in print in the Series. Sheets are signed and numbered by the contributors in limited editions of 60. Approximately 40 signed and numbered sets are available for purchase. Each Companions Series set includes 12 broadsheets, as specified below, with additional title sheet and folder.
1. William H. New’s Glossing Footnotes in response to John Clare’s Emmonsail’s Heath In Winter. Handset in Goudy Old Style and Spectrum.
2. Sue Wheeler’s Understory in response to Don McKay’s Stumpage. Handset in Goudy Old Style.
3. Lori Maleea Acker’s An Inner Regard in response to an excerpt from Wallace Stevens’s Things Of August. Handset in Goudy Old Style.
4. Theresa Kishkan’s A Version in response to Sappho’s Fragment 58. Handset in Cloister.
5. Joe Denham’s Abandoned Orchard in response to John Thompson’s Apple Tree. Handset in Goudy Old Style.
6. George McWhirter’s Good Friday, 2003. Driving West Into Point Grey in response to a selection from John Donne’s Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward. Handset in Cloister.
7. Russell Thornton’s A List in response to his translation of Juan Ramon Jimenez’s I Am Not I. Handset in Goudy Old Style.
8. Christopher Patton’s Via Negativa in response to an excerpt from Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXIV. Handset in Cloister.
9. John Pass’s En Route in response to Duncan Campbell Scott’s poem of the same name. Handset in Goudy Old Style.
10. Anik See’s Yes, Give Us Some in response to William Carlos Williams’s This is just to say. Handset in Spectrum.
11. Gillian Wigmore’s Vanderhoof Girls in response to Charles Lillard’s Vanderhoof. Handset in Goudy Old Style and Cloister.
12. Cornelia Hoogland’s After Meeting The Wolf, Red Arrives Home in response to an excerpt from David Harsent’s Marriage. Handset in Spectrum.
The Companions Series sets are available for purchase at $150 CAD. Some singles are available at $15 each. Contact: High Ground Press at 15211 Sunshine Coast Highway, Madeira Park, BC V0N 2H1. Ph. 604 883-2377 email: high_ground@sunshine.net
High Ground Press, run by John Pass and Theresa Kishkan from their home near Sakinaw Lake on BC’s Sunshine Coast, specializes in the letterpress printing and publication of poetry broadsheets and chapbooks in limited first edition. High Ground has published poems by many of Canada’s finest poets including GG Award winners Don Domanski, Don McKay, bp Nichol, Michael Ondaatje, John Pass, David Zieroth and Jan Zwicky. Its publications are held in the Special Collections of libraries in Canada and the US.
A lovely new chapbook from Nicole Markotic’s Wrinkle Press, The Lost Narrative of Mrs. David Thompson (edited by Robert Kroetsch).
Front cover view
Interior pages
Back cover view
Harbour Publishing will hold a book launch and a fund raiser at the Community Arts Council Gallery of Greater Victoria (1001 Douglas Street) on Friday November 27 at 7PM for the Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology, edited by Paul Vermeersch. Victoria’s Poet Laureate Linda Rogers will host the event and poets Susan Stenson, Peter Trower and Len Gasparini will read poems and reminiscences from the anthology. The event, and others like it across Canada, will help raise funds to preserve the late Al Purdy’s A-frame house as retreat for writers.
Paintings surround writer Will Ferguson as he signs copies of his latest book, the travel memoir Beyond Belfast, following a reading hosted by Munro’s Books at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
The ever helpful Rachel at Nightwood Editions had sent me a number of their latest books and I thought it was about time I brought them to your attention. Four poetry volumes and one novel for you to check out. Great also to read on their site the news (that I had completely missed) that Brad Cran is now Vancouver’s new poet laureate.
‘god of missed connections’ is Elizabeth Bachinsky’s third book of poems.
‘The Book Collector’ from Tim Bowling. An amazing looking cover.
Novelist and poet Laisha Rosnau with her new book of poems ‘lousy explorers’
The latest from Metis poet Gregory Scofield ‘Kipocihkan’. Kipocihkan is a Cree slang for someone who is unable to talk, a mute.
From Andrew Binks, his first novel ‘the Summer Between’
This in from Robert Wiersema, the Victoria writer has a new novella coming out, get your order in for the limited edition which sounds like a great deal:
Chizine Publications has announced the release, this fall, of The World More Full of Weeping, a new novella by Robert J. Wiersema, author of the bestselling novel Before I Wake.
To quote from their synopsis: “When eleven-year-old Brian Page disappears in the woods, the entire community of Henderson rallies around his family, sending searchers into the darkening forest. But what appears to be a simple nature walk gone wrong takes an ominous turn when his father Jeff is reminded that he disappeared into the same woods a quarter century earlier, an incident of which he has no memory. What secrets lie in the mysterious forest? Will Brian follow in his father’s footsteps, and emerge shaking into the arms of his family, or will he be claimed by the eternal twilight of the trees?”
The World More Full of Weeping will be published in two editions, both of which will include, in addition to the novella, a lengthy essay entitled Places and Names, describing how the town of Henderson came to be the recurring setting for some of Wiersema’s fiction.
(By the way, these are going to be beautiful little books, smaller than your average volume, with a gorgeous, haunting cover by Erik Mohr. It’s not a long book, probably about 120 pages — it is a novella, after all — but it IS a good one. )
The trade paperback edition of The World More Full of Weeping will be published in September, and priced at a very appealing $12.95. We’ll be carrying the book as regular stock, and, why yes, there will probably be a launch at the store, if we can get Wiersema to agree to it.
There will also, however, be a limited collector’s edition hardcover published later in the fall (with a very reasonable price of about $35).
This hardcover, which as a bonus will include The Small Rain Down, a previously unpublished short story also set in Henderson, will be published in November. It will be signed by both the author and the cover artist, and will be numbered. (The print run of the limited edition will be determined by the number of people who pre-order it between now and mid-August — once the pre-order period ends, no further copies will be printed. Ever.)
As a rule, ChiZine’s limited editions have only ever been available for direct order on-line. Through a special negotiation with the publisher, however, Bolen Books has arranged to have a limited number of these books available for in-store sale upon its publication.
If you are interested in purchasing this very limited edition, please pre-order it now via email to books@bolen.bc.ca.
Canadian writer Michael Ignatieff, also known in certain circles for being the leader of the federal Liberal party, was on hand for the afternoon book signing of his latest publication True Patriot Love at Victoria’s Munro’s book store. A huge lineup snaked through the store and outside and down the sidewalk as people waited for a chance to have their book signed.
Crowd waits outside Munro’s for their chance to get their books signed
A smile for the camera
Munro’s Books’ Jessica Walker and Jim Munro look on as Michael Ignatieff signs
The line up inside Munro’s
The Grande Dame of Canadian Letters, P.K. (Patricia Kathleen) Page, launched her latest book ‘You are Here’ , published by Hedgerow Press, with a book reading and signing at the Winchester Galleries Humboldt Street location in Victoria. The 92-year-old Page, who is especially noted for her poetry, has had nearly forty books published in genres including memoirs, fiction, non-fiction, children’s literature, written a libretto and is a noted painter under the name P. K. Irwin. She has two more books coming out in 2009.
P. K. Page waits for the reading to begin
Greeting friends and the press
Publisher Joan Coldwell from Hedgerow Press introduces the author
Reading from You are Here
An attentive crowd listens during the reading
Reading
The painting on the easel behind her is one of P.K.’s creations
Relaxing after the reading
Signing books
In 1969 photographer Gerry Deiter accepted an assignment to cover Beatle John Lennon and artist Yoko Ono as they spent a week in bed in a Montreal hotel. Deiter covered the entire week of the Bed-In For Peace but the photo essay ended up getting bumped from the magazine by a a breaking news story so the photographs were never published. The photos remained largely unsen until 2002 when Deiter started to exhibit them. The photographs started gathering more and more attention, culminating in an exhibition at the Royal BC Museum, a show that opened December 5, 2008. Just a few days later on December 9, Deiter suffered a heart attack and passed away.
The photographs might have disappeared from view again except for the efforts of Deiter’s friend Joan Athey who secured the rights to the images and has now compiled them in a book ‘Give Peace A Chance”. The book received an official launch in Victoria at Swan’s Hotel. More information can be found at www.peaceworksnow.com.
Joan Athey kicks off the book launch
Joan reads
Playwright and poet Charles Tidler gives a reading, a blow up of a Deiter photo covers a window
An overflow crowd listens and watches
The book