Writing and Community

On Friday afternoon I flew to Prince George, where I had been invited to read as part of the 3rd annual John Harris Award. This was an honour, as John Harris is someone I admire, not only for his fine book of fiction, Small Rain (1989), but for his work as an educator and, because of his commitment to education, a reformer.

Shortly after my arrival I learned of a "poetry war" that has divided the city's writing community, a division not unrelated to the division that has always existed between the College of New Caledonia (where Harris and another senior member of the PG writing community, Barry McKinnon, taught for many years) and the University of Northern British Columbia, which opened its doors in the 1990s.

While it is not my place to describe this division (click here for an ex-pat's take), I do think it unfortunate that differences amongst writers often results not in an expanded conversation but the absence of conversation altogether. Hopefully someone in PG will publish an essay on just what these differences are and how they might be embraced and returned to the larger conversation that is writing and community.

In the meantime, congratulations to this year's recipient of the John Harris Award -- A. Warren Johnson -- and a thank you to Graham Pearce for inviting me.

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"Shadowplay" (1979)

Puppetry

"Every little movement you do makes a big difference."

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

The voice of Orson Welles.

Silhouettes

Sylvia Fellows is a silhouette artist.



Kara Walker is an artist who works with silhouettes.

(Lacanians take note of what Kara says at the outset: "A lot of my work has been about the unexpected, kind of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.")

A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

On the table before me lies a collection of paper I have saved this past year -- tissue paper, cardboard from shirts I have purchased, envelopes from India. Enough to make a collage.

In my hand is a pair of nose-hair scissors, while on my mind are the silhouette artists I remember from Disneyland, who, without looking, would cut from black paper your profile.