Monday, November 26, 2007
The Writers' Show - Writers’ Show - 32 - Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Bill Schermbrucker, Alan Twigg
Eileen Delehanty Pearkes is the author of The Geography of Memory: Recovering Stories of a Landscape's First People, Sono Nis Press, and The Glass Seed: The Fragile Beauty of Heart, Mind and Memory, about her mother's Alzheimer's,Timeless Books, 2007. She writes regularly for ascent, a magazine described as "yoga for an inspired life." About the motivation behind The Glass Seed : "I sat down in an act of defiance to write something that I hadn't found anywhere else."
Topics: Cleya McDougall, editor at Timeless Books; Kootenay Bay Ashram; poet, thinker and activist Gary Snyder; Scar Tissue, by Michael Ignatieff; The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, by Barbara G. Walker. Eileen Delehanty Pearkes can be seen on YouTube.
Bill Schermbrucker is most recently a producer for The Writers' Show and instructor in the memoir, as well as fiction writer, jurist and book reviewer. Show #24. He discusses the fine line between fiction and memoir and the question of fiction and non-fiction.
Topics: Creative Nonfiction magazine, edited by Lee Gutkind; "A lie that tells the truth: Memoir and the art of memory," by Joel Agee, in the November 2007 Harper's Magazine, also available online if you're a member (about $20 a year).
BC BookWorld founder and publisher Alan Twigg talks to Bill Schermbrucker about his brain tumour and the book he wrote about it, Intensive Care: A Memoir, Anvil Press, 2002. He said, "I've always used writing as a way to think my way through things, and so it's as natural as breathing. My natural inclination, as soon as I could move my hands, was to ask for a piece of paper." Friend and publisher, Julian Ross.
Alan Twigg is the author of numerous books about Canadian writers, publishers, and BC literary history, including Thompson's Highway: The Literary Origins of British Columbia, Ronsdale Press. Full Time: A Canadian Soccer Adventure is forthcoming, Spring, 2008, from McClelland & Stewart.
Download MP3 of this EpisodeMonday, November 12, 2007
The Writers' Show - Writers’ Show - 31 - Patrick Lane, Katherine Gordon, Terry Glavin
Patrick Lane was awarded The Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence at the 2007 BC Book Prizes. In his continuing series on the memoir, Bill Schermbrucker (Show #24) interviews Patrick Lane at his home in B.C. about his book There is a Season, McClelland & Stewart. "I sat down one August," Patrick Lane says, "and chopped out 400 pages." Others mentioned include his editor -- if you're a writer, follow this link -- Dinah Forbes; poet Brian Brett; poet P.K. Page.
Lane's books include Go Leaving Strange, Syllable of Stone and Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast, edited with his wife, award-winning poet Lorna Crozier.
Katherine Gordon
The Garden That You Are, Katherine Gordon's latest book, explores the culture of gardeners through the lives and stories of eight gardeners who live within a square mile of each other in B.C.'s Slocan Valley. Freelancer Gordon is the winner of the 2007 non-fiction B.C. Book Prize for Made to Measure: A History of Land Surveying in British Columbia, also published by Sono Nis Press. Author photo credit: Carolyn Davey Photography.
Terry Glavin
In this portion of his interview with Eileen Delahanty Pearkes, Terry Glavin said, "We are also a species that has been naturally selected to desire the abundance and diversity of other forms of life. The great affection humanity has for things that grow up out of the ground, the enormous capacity that humanity has to extend the embrace of its empathy to include other forms of life is something very, very old and it persists, and it's one of the reasons why I end up so optimistic."
Terry Glavin is the author of eight non-fiction books, including This Ragged Place - Travels Across the Landscape and The Last Great Sea. He reads from Waiting for the Macaws.Take a look at Terry Glavin's blog.
Eileen Delehanty Pearkes is the author of The Glass Seed.
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