The Pacific Festival of the Book 2009

AUTHORS AND ARTISTS AT THE PACIFIC FESTIVAL OF THE BOOK 2009

Some of the writers and artists at this years' Festival. More to come!

Mavis Andrews

Mavis Andrews is a freelance editor and book consultant with a strong background in graphic design and illustration. Her popular writing courses and workshops have been presented through Camosun College Continuing Education and several international writers conferences, as well as editors and writers associations and community education programs. A former editor of the Illustrator and of Focus on Women magazine, Mavis was also the VP of the Victoria School of Writing. She works with writers in a wide range of fields including children's literature, and is passionate about encouraging the development of individual creativity. Mavis has been a strong force behind PFB's Youth Anthology Publishing Project in the past year.

Ellen Arrand

Ellen Arrand is a published novelist and short story writer. Her stories have appeared in Grain, Room of One’s Own, and Waves. Her novel, Public Works, Private Souls (Beach Holme), was praised by Books in Canada as: “a book full of painfully won personal truth thet makes the reader blink with admiration.” This novel was also adapted for the stage, and was produced by Theatre Inconnu in 2004. Her play The Trutch Street Women was a finalist in the 2005 Canadian National Playwriting Competition.

Rhonda Batchelor

Rhonda Batchelor has worked in and around publishing as a writer, editor, publisher, bookseller and consultant since 1977. From 1990 to 1997 she and her late husband Charles Lillard operated Reference West, a literary press, publishing over 100 chapbooks of poetry and short fiction by some of Canada’s finest writers. After Charles’s death, Rhonda continued the series until 2000. Her own books include Bearings (Brick Books), Interpreting Silence and Weather Report (Beach Holme Publishers). Originally from Brantford, Ontario, Rhonda has lived on Vancouver Island since 1971 and holds a BFA from The University of Victoria. She is currently the Assistant Editor of The Malahat Review.

Noah Becker

Noah Becker is a multi-talented visual artist and jazz saxophonist. Mr. Becker appears on numerous recordings and exhibits his art internationally in galleries and museums. His art was featured in "How Soon is Now" opening in Feb. 2009 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Yvonne Blomer

Yvonne Blomer was born in Bindura, Zimbabwe but moved to Canada when she was two. Since then she has lived in Japan and England, cycled in Southeast Asia, France and Mexico. She has a Masters in Poetry from the University of East Anglia and a BA from the University of Victoria. Yvonne teaches courses in poetry and memoir between writing, travelling, cycling and being a mom. Her first book of poetry is A Broken Mirror, Fallen Leaf (Ekstasis Editions).

Brian Brett

Brian Brett is a poet, fictionist, critic, journalist, is the author of 10 books. He has been publishing since 1970. His acclaimed memoir /poetry diptych Uproar’s Your Only Music was released in 2004. There is also a CD of his ‘Talking Songs’ called Night Directions for the Lost. His forthcoming book is Trauma Farm: A Natural History of Living on the Land. He lives with his family on his farm on Salt Spring Island.

Kristi Bridgeman

Kristi Bridgeman is both an exhibiting visual artist and an illustrator of books for children, including the popular picture books The Sock Fairy, The Knot Fairy and the recent book with P.K Page There Once Was a Camel. Born and raised on the West Coast of Canada, she attended Emily Carr College of Art and now resides in Victoria, British Columbia. Actively involved with the environment, children and the arts, she is vice president of the Island Illustrator’s Society. Samples of Kristi Bridgeman’s work can be found at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Sooke Harbour House Gallery as well as the website: www.kristibridgeman.com.

Trevor Carolan

Born in Yorkshire, Trevor Carolan emigrated as a boy to British Columbia and was raised in the family building trade in New Westminster. He began writing for the city newspaper at age 17. After travelling Europe and India for three years he completed a M.A. in English at Humboldt State in California. He later worked in Alberta with the 15th Olympic Winter Games. He has published 13 books of poetry, fiction, translation, memoir, and anthologies. Active in Pacific Coast watershed issues, aboriginal land claims, and Asia-Pacific human rights campaigns, he served three years as elected municipal councillor for North Vancouver, then as a political columnist. He earned an interdisciplinary PhD from Bond University in Queensland, Australia in 2007, and now teaches English at University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C. beneath Kul-Shan, Mount Baker.

Paul Chadwick

Paul Chadwick has worked widely as an artist and writer for comic books, with collaborators like Ron Randall, Doug Wheatley, Alan Moore, John Bolton, Harlan Ellison, Jan Strnad, Randy Stradley, Archie Goodwin, Brian K. Vaughan, Ken Steacy and others. He’s most noted for his award-winning series Concrete, about a thoughtful man stuck in a brutish, rock-coated body. You'll find more information about Paul Chadwick on the workshop page.

Jim Christy

Jim Christy is a writer, artist and tireless traveller. The author of twenty books, including poetry, short stories, novels, travel and biography, his travels have taken him from the Yukon to the Amazon, Greenland to Cambodia. He has covered wars and exhibited his art internationally. Raised in inner-city Philadelphia, he moved to Toronto when he was twenty-three years old and became a Canadian citizen at the first opportunity. His most recent novel is Nine O’Clock Gun (2008), part of the Gene Castle, Private Eye series set in Vancouver. A resident of British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast for many years, he currently resides in Toronto.

Mike Doyle

Mike Doyle has written numerous books of poetry, as well as books on William Carlos Williams and James T. Baxter, a biography of Richard Aldington, plus critical essays on Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D. and others. In Paper Trombones Doyle shares musings on poetry – his own and others’ – drawn from informal journal notes of the past thirty years. Born in London of Irish descent, Doyle lived in New Zealand before moving to Victoria, BC. As a poet and academic on three continents, Doyle recalls fascinating encounters with prominent literary figures – from Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to Basil Bunting, Anne Sexton, Robert Creeley, James Wright, Robert Bly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Woodcock and various Canadian poets.

Jan Drabek

Jan Drabek is the author of six novels including the acclaimed Report on the Death of Rosenkavalier (M & S). His memoir of early years, Thirteen, was published by Caitlin Press. Born in Czechoslovakia, Jan Drabek returned there in 1990 to teach English, and ended up an ambassador under president Vaclav Havel. A memoir of that time, His Doubtful Excellency, was published in 2006. He now lives and writes in Vancouver, BC.

M.A.C. Farrant

Born in Sydney, Australia and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine collections of satirical and humorous short fiction. As well, a novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years, was published by Greystone Books/Douglas & McIntyre in 2004. Farrant has taught fiction workshops in Canada and Australia. She was a visiting writer-in-residence at Macquarie University in Sydney. A full-time writer currently residing in Sidney, B.C., she also reviews books for the Vancouver Sun and the Globe & Mail. An active promoter of literary arts, she is the co-producer and host of the Sidney Reading Series. Talon Books will publish Down the Road to Eternity--New & Selected Fiction in the Fall of 2009.

David Ferguson

David Ferguson is a contemporary artist working in dance, film, and new media. As a Founding Artistic co-Director of Suddenly Dance Theatre Society in Victoria, B.C. (1992-present) David has been a producer/curator of numerous collaborative, multi-media projects and dance productions, including the recent M Award winning 9th Romp! Festival of Independent Dance

Gareth Gaudin

Gareth Gaudin is a Victoria cartoonist who committed himself to drawing one cartoon per day every day for the rest of his life. So far, five years into this art project, he hasn't missed a day yet. He compiles his on-going serialized daily graphic novel in books and comics called The Magic Teeth Dailies. Conveniently, he also co-owns Legends Comics & Books in downtown Victoria where he sells his wares.

Gary Geddes

Gary Geddes has written and edited over thirty-five books, including seventeen books of poetry, as well as fiction, non-fiction, drama, translation, criticism and anthologies. His work has been translated into five languages. Geddes is known as one of Canada’s best political poets, having been singled out for this honour by literary critic George Woodcock in the late 1960s, whose claim graced the back cover of many of Geddes’ books. Geddes has explored human rights issues in places such as Chile during its dictatorship, in Nicaragua during its civil war, and in Palestine and Israel after the Oslo peace accord. Currently he lives on Vancouver Island, dividing his time between Victoria and French Beach.

Tim Gosley

Tim Gosley is a Victoria-raised, Toronto-based puppet artist. He studied theater at the University of Alberta, earning a BFA in acting. He soon shifted to puppeteering, and in 1981, he was one of several Canadian artists who trained with Richard Hunt to appear on Fraggle Rock. In 1987, he landed his first major Muppet character, Basil the polar bear, who he would play for nine seasons on Sesame Park, the Canadian Sesame Street. In 2003, he won a Gemini for best preschool puppet performance. In his 30 years of puppetry, he has written and performed a wide variety of puppet shows in both Canada and abroad, particularly Germany. Works included a one-man show The Ugly Duckling, a shadow-puppet performance of The Musicians of Bremen, and a shadow puppet performance of Faust. His work Living Collage reflects on Robin Skelton the man, poet, and witch, utilizing video, light, and egg puppets with spoken word and music from Skelton’s own 78 rpm collection.

Stephen Henighan

Stephen Henighan is the author of three novels, three short story collections and four books of essays and travel memoirs. His short stories have been published in more than 30 magazines and anthologies. He is a columnist for Geist magazine.

Walter Hildebrandt

Born in Brooks, Alberta, Walter Hildebrandt is known as both a poet and historian. A consultant on Aboriginal treaties, he is co-author of The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7 and The Cypress Hills: The Land and Its People, and author of Views From Battleford: Constructed Visions of an Anglo-Canadian West. Finding Louis O’Soup, his fourth book of poetry, was published in 2008. His previous volume, Where the Land Gets Broken, received the Stephen G. Stephensson Award for Poetry in 2005. Director of the Athabasca University Press, Walter Hildebrandt currently resides in Edmonton.

Pauline Holdstock

Pauline Holdstock writes novels, short fiction and essays. Her books have been published in the U.K, the U.S., Brazil, Portugal, Australia and Germany, as well as in Canada. Her recent novel, Beyond Measure, was a finalist for the 2004 Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Canada and Caribbean Region. It won the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction in 2005. Her most recent work is the novella The World of Light Where We Live, winner of the Malahat Review 2006 Novella Contest. She also writes non-fiction.She was the winner of the Prairie Fire Personal Journalism Prize, 2000. Pauline has taught at the Victoria School of Writing and at the University of Victoria. She was on the faculty of the Banff Centre Wired Writing Studio, 2006/7.
Check out paulineholdstock.com/

Roy Innes

Roy Innes is a retired eye physician and surgeon. His early penchant for the arts, buried for years in the world of science, was rekindled upon retirement. At that time, he enrolled in the Humber School for Writers program and, under the mentorship of literary notable Olive Senior, wrote his first novel, Murder in the Monashees, which was released in 2005 to excellent reviews. Equally at home in the city or the wilds, Innes is an avid hunter, a lover of classical music, and, belied by his skinny frame, a gourmand. He lives on BC’s lush Gabriola Island with his wife, Barrie, and his daughter’s cat. The second installment of the Corporal Blakemore mystery series, West End Murders, was released in May 2008.

Joanne Kyger

Joanne Kyger’s work reveals her as one of the major experimenters, hybridizers, and visionaries of poetry. Kyger’s love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consiousness-expansion and lesson, but always in the realm of every day. After finishing school at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Joanne Kyger came north to San Francisco in 1957 where she informally studied with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer and participated in the San Francisco Renaissance of writers & poets. She also met many of the writers of the newly defined "Beat Generation." She went on to spend four years in Kyoto and India, before returning to California. Further travels took her to Europe and New York City before she settled on the coast north of San Francisco. She has published over 20 books of poetry. She teaches summers at Naropa University’s Writing Program and at New College of San Francisco. She was a winner of the National Poetry Series in 1983 for her book Going On. Her most recent book is About Now: Collected Poems from the National Poetry Foundation in 2007.

Light Sweet Crude

Light Sweet Crude is a folk rock band who perform songs written by Canadian poets Leonard Cohen and Linda Rogers. Their new album Ruin and Beauty features songswith lyrics by Linda Rogers, music by Chris Trygg. Band members are Chris Trygg, vocals, Jake Glabraith, bass and pedal steel, Rick van Krugel, mandolin, Andy Graffiti, drums, and Richard Baker, lead guitar.

Tim Lilburn

Tim Lilburn is a poet, and essayist, and the author of six books of poems, including Kill-site, To the River, and Moosewood Sandhills. He has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award in Literature twice: in 1989, for Tourist to Ecstasy, and in 2003, when he received the award for Kill-site. He is the author of the essay collection Living in the World as if It Were Home, a book of essays on ecology and desire, and the editor of, and a contributor to, two influential essay collections on poetics, Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. In addition to the Governor General’s Award, Lilburn’s work has received the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, and the Saskatchewan Nonfiction Award. He is currently at work on a new collection of essays, tentatively entitled Going Home: a Philosophical Poetics.

Miles Lowry

Miles Lowry lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada where he is Artistic Co-Director for Suddenly Dance Theatre. Lowry’s cinematic poem Opium, based on French poet Jean Cocteau, was produced for Canadian television and selected for the 2007 Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City. A short film, Aisling - We Saw a Vision, was recently produced for Bravo!fact. Author of five previous books of poetry, he is also known as a painter, sculptor, photographer and theatrical designer. His work is seen in a wide variety of exhibitions, performances and publications.

Al Maclachlan

Journalist, documentary writer/director and music video director Al MacLachlan has written for the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun and the Georgia Strait. After studies at Concordia University (Fine Arts) and Seneca (Film and Television) and wide travels in Europe and Mexico, Al MacLachlan now resides in Gibsons, BC. After the Funeral, his first novel, was published in 2006.

Rhona McAdam

Rhona McAdam studied in Edmonton during the 1980s where she witnessed the birth of the Writers Guild of Alberta. She returned to Victoria in 2002 after living in England for 13 years, during which she immersed herself in the poetry world of London. She spent 2007 in Italy studying food culture at Parma, Italy. Her fifth and most recent poetry collection is Cartography (Oolichan).

David Meltzer

One of the key poets of the Beat generation, David Meltzer is also a jazz guitarist and Cabalist scholar and the author of more than 50 books of poetry and prose. 2005 saw the publication of David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer (edited by Michael Rothenberg) which provides a current “overview” of Meltzer’s work. Meltzer’s Beat Thing (La Alameda Press) is his epic poem on the Beat generation. Meltzer’s other books include No Eyes, poems on Lester Young, and a book of interviews, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (City Lights Books). Meltzer teaches at the New College of California in the Poetics Program which was originally founded by Robert Duncan. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Hans Plomp

Hans Plomp was born in Amsterdam in 1944. After his studies he became a teacher, but he gave up regular jobs for good when his first novel De Ondertrouw (The Banns Are Up) was successful. He took an active part in the playful Dutch Provo Revolution of the Sixties, which made Amsterdam one of the hippest places on the planet. Hans Plomp has traveled extensively, especially in India, where he spent five years. In 1982 he toured the U.S. with a group of Dutch poets, performing with Anne Waldman, Diana di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Amiri Baraka, Ira Cohen and many other kindred artists. He has published novels, short stories, poetry and essays. His book Tantric Picnic: Tales of India is being launched at the Pacific Festival of the Book.

Robert Priest

Robert Priest is the author of fifteen books of poetry. His most recent book is Reading the Bible Backwards. He won the Acorn People’s Poetry Award for his now classic Mad Hand (1988). In his alias as Dr. Poetry he wrote and performed thirteen segments for CBC radio’s spoken-word show Wordbeat. As a songwriter, he co-wrote the number one hit, "Song Instead of a Kiss," for Alannah Myles. His Aphorisms have already appeared in The Farmer’s Almanac, and Colombo’s Canadian Quotations. His musical play Minibugs and Microchips received a $25,000.00 Chalmer’s Award. Both of his books of poems for children, Daysongs Nightsongs and The Secret Invasion of Bananas are on the CBC’s recommended reading list. As a teacher/workshop leader he has been described as “Ontario’s most popular poet in the schools” by Today’s Parent Magazine. He is also a highly respected journalist for Toronto’s weekly Now magazine.

Harold Rhenisch

Harold Rhenisch was born in Penticton, B.C., in 1958. He holds a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, has spent many years working on orchards, nurseries, and vineyards in the Okanagan Valley, and currently lives at 108 Mile Ranch, on the Cariboo Plateau. He is a poet, an arts columnist, and was the publisher of The Milestones Review, a book review quarterly. For nearly thirty years, Rhenisch has striven to create an authentic literature for the silent rural parts of Canada, to place their images and dialects on an equal footing with those of the modern urban world. At the same time, he has been a student of Ezra Pound, post-modern German literature and trickster mythology.

Janet Marie Rogers

A Mohawk writer from the Six Nations territory in southern Ontario, Janet was born in Vancouver British Columbia January 29th 1963. She began her creative career as a visual artist, and started writing in 1996. Since then, she continues to stretch her abilities as a writer working and studying in the genres of poetry, short fiction, science fiction, play writing, spoken word performance poetry and video poetry. Her first book is called Splitting the Heart.

Linda Rogers

Canadian People’s Poet for the year 2000, Linda Rogers is currently the Poet Laureate for Victoria. The grandmother of four writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her latest novel is The Third Day Book, second in The Empress Trilogy.

Michael Rothenberg

Michael Rothenberg is an American poet, songwriter, editor, and active environmentalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He moved to California in 1976, where he began “Shelldance Nursery,”an orchid and bromeliad nursery. In 1989, Rothenberg and artist Nancy Davis began Big Bridge Press, a fine print literary press, publishing works by Jim Harrison, Joanne Kyger, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen and others. Rothenberg is editor of Big Bridge, a webzine of poetry. He is also co-editor and co-founder of Jack Magazine. His books include Unhurried Vision, Paris Journals, What The Fish Saw, Nightmare Of The Violins, Man/Woman w/Joanne Kyger, and Favorite Songs. In 1990 Rothenberg began writing songs, and his songs have appeared in films by Hollywood Pictures, Shadowhunter and Black Day, Blue Night.

Stephen Scobie

Stephen Scobie is a Canadian poet, critic, and scholar. Born in Carnoustie, Scotland, Scobie relocated to Canada in 1965. He earned a PhD from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver after which he taught at the University of Alberta and at the University of Victoria, from which he recently retired. Scobie is a founding editor of Longspoon Press, an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada, and the recipient of the 1980 Governor General’s Award for McAlmon’s Chinese Opera (1980) and the 1986 Prix Gabrielle Roy for Canadian Criticism.

Howie Siegel

Howie Siegel was born in Brooklyn and raised in Los Angeles. He graduated from UCLA and moved to British Columbia in 1972 where he co-founded Pagliacci's Restaurant in Victoria in 1979. He has 4 children, Solomon, Rose, Malka and Harry. And a dog, Maidel. And a girlfriend, fiancée, partner, co-star; the redoubtable Janet Rothman. Before Play, published in 2008, is his first play.

Joan Thornborrow Steacy

Joan Thornborrow Steacy has explored many areas of expression in the visual arts, including drawing, painting, sculpture, theatrical production, multi-media, and digital image processing. Her commercial work as a digital painter for children's' books, comic books, and graphic novels has been published in the United States and Japan. She wrote and illustrated her first storybook, titled "So, Thats That!" a biographical tribute to her father. She currently teaches at Island Blue, and is working on a creative non-fiction graphic novel about her years at OCAD in the late seventies.

Ken Steacy

Ken Steacy is a Canadian comics artist and writer best known for his work on the Comico comic book series of Astro Boy and Jonny Quest, as well as his graphic novel collaborations with Harlan Ellison (Night and the Enemy, 1987) and Dean Motter (The Sacred and the Profane, 1987). In 1990 DC Comics published Steacy’s Tempus Fugitive. Since 2004 Steacy has been running a publishing company called Ken Steacy Publishing, an on-demand imprint dedicated to connecting graphic creators of the past, present, and future directly with their audience.

Charles Tidler

Charles Tidler's stage plays have had productions throughout Canada, across the United States, at the Edinburgh Festival, and in London's West End. Achievements include two National Radio Awards, a Chalmers Outstanding PlayAward, Canada Council and B.C. Arts Council awards, and a Governor General's Award nomination in drama. He is also an award-winning poet and a spoken jazz artist. His first novel, Going to New Orleans, was published in 2004. The father of two sons, Charles makes his home in Victoria. A collection of poetry, Straw Things: Selected Poetry and Song, 1963-2007, was published in 2008.

Tongues of Fire

Tongues of Fire is a Victoria-based poetry collective committed to the art of spoken word/performance poetry among other forms of literature. They are diverse in background, writing style and lifestyle. As a collective they strive to make poetry more accessible, inclusive and entertaining. Check out http://www.tonguesoffire.ca/index.html

Peter Trower

Peter Trower was born in St. Leonard’s on Sea, England in 1930 and came to Canada in 1940. He worked for 22 years as a logger. Writing professionally since 1971, he has published three novels to date, more than ten books of poetry and numerous articles. His collection of logging poems Chainsaws in the Cathedral was selected to the BC Millenium Book Award. In 2002 he was awarded the B.C. Gas Lifetime Achievement Award for his work. He lives in Gibson’s, B.C. His most recent book is Hellhound & Other Stories, published in 2008.

David Watmough

Naturalized Canadian, David Watmough has been shaped and nourished by a Cornish background as well as years in London, Paris, New York and San Francisco. All his novels, short stories, plays and poems, however, have been written on Canada’s west coast during the past 45 years. Geraldine, his eighteenth book and thirteenth fiction title, was published in 2007 by Ekstasis Editions. In 2008 he published a book of poems, Coming Down the Pike: Sonnets.

Jordan Zinovich

Jordan Zinovich has published seven books, including the novel Gabriel Dumont in Paris and The Company I Keep, a volume of poetry. His work has been translated into French and Dutch, with radio performances in New York and Amsterdam. At present he is a senior editor with the Autonomedia Collective, one of North America’s most notable underground publishing houses.

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