| Vancouver author Douglas Coupland has a reputation for dredging up those stories and images where cultural elements intersect and become invisible to those who live immersed in them all the time. In other words, he makes it possible for us, the fish, to see some of the water that is everyday life.
His new book Hey Nostradamus! starts in the Vancouver suburbs with a school shooting reminiscent of the one at Columbine. Coupland then follows up on the imagined effects of the event – for the survivors, their parents and those they meet later in life – 15 years later. WordFest presents Coupland reading at the W.R. Castell Central Library, in the John Dutton Theatre, on Wednesday, September 17 at 7:30 p.m.
Coupland, a designer and generally savvy person, naturally has a tastefully sleek Web site (www.coupland.com) with sparse jazzy music and animations. If you go there you’ll find a link to a fiction contest, judged by Coupland, which asks for 1,000-word stories inspired by a set of images posted at the contest site. The images are all faces, because according to Coupland, "Faces are always good when you’re thinking up stories, I think." Nothing on the site says Canadians can’t enter this U.K. contest. The prize is a cool £1,000.
Calgary’s Pamela Klaffke has been not just diagnosing, but living pop-culture trends for years now. This week the self-confessed shopping addict launches her new book Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping at McNally Robinson on Thursday, September 18 at 7 p.m. Also at McNally-Robinson, Kerri Sakamoto reads from her new novel One Hundred Million Hearts. Sakamoto, who won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for The Electrical Field, reads on Monday, September 15 at 7 p.m.
After a summer hiatus, author readings at Pages on Kensington also return. On Thursday, September 11 at 7:30 p.m., you can go upstairs at the bookstore to hear Vancouver’s Claudia Casper read from her new novel The Continuation of Love by Other Means, along with Calgary’s Wade Bell, who presents his short-story collection The Destroyer of Compasses. Pages readings are traditionally at the bookstore; however, short-fiction writer Art Norris breaks the tradition when he reads from his stories about "the suburbanization of an agricultural district in the foothills of Alberta" (speaking of trends). Norris will read in the new Auburn Saloon at Centre Street and Ninth Avenue S. (under the Calgary Tower) on Monday, September 15 at 7:30 p.m.
Arsenal Pulp Press is strutting and beating its chest with pride over Calgary poet Sheri-D Wilson’s success at the Heavyweight Championship of Poetry, held at the annual Bumbershoot Festival of the Arts in Seattle. In a poetry performance showdown against New Orleans-based Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu, who was the overwhelming favourite, Wilson triumphed in a unanimous verdict from both judges and audience. Now watch for a steep U.S. tariff on Canadian poetry. |
Copyright ©2003 FFWD. All rights reserved.