Harbour Publishing's founder Howard White will be attending The 6th Annual Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival July 18th and 19th.

On July 18th, Howard will present a Solo-Session to an intimate audience from 3:15-4:15pm, then at 7:30pm he will join the ensemble discussion entitled "Urban, Suburban, Rural" , hosted by CBC's Sheryl MacKay. Finally, on Saturday July 19, Howard will be leading a Writing BC Stories workshop from 9:30-12:30pm.

Nightwood Editions' Elizabeth Bachinsky will also be participating in the festival. Elizabeth will present a Poetry and Vocal Techniques workshop, a solo session, and she will also join the "Urban, Suburban, Rural" discussion.

Tickets and registration forms are available at: http://www.denmanwriters.com/Registration_Tickets.html

The Festival will feature a line-up of wonderful writers and a non-stop weekend of literary delights. The Festival offers a variety of workshops offered by renowned teachers, lectures from some of the most insightful and interesting writers in Canada, as well as the opportunity to rub shoulders, share a drink, or eat lunch with authors you’ve wanted to meet for years.

Meet renowned broadcaster and author Rafe Mair at a book signing for his newest collection of essays, What the Bleep Is Going On Here? . Mair will be at Chapters Metropolis, 4700 Kingsway in Burnaby, on Saturday, July 26 from 2:00-4:00pm.

In this thought-provoking book, Mair castigates lawyers for cashing in on the compensation to aboriginals in the residential schools, slaps the wrists of stockbrokers who are creaming their profits even as their clients go broke and weighs in on football-team owners who expect taxpayers to pay for their playpens. He has the temerity to propose knocking down a few more trees in Stanley Park so that people can actually walk between them, and establishing new rules to prevent fights in hockey games. When Mair looks out over the horizon, he even has advice for George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. To top it off, he invites his readers to be “happy in agreement with him and angry as hell in disagreement.” There are sparks flying from the pages of this book.

The book signing is free and everyone is welcome. For more information about the event, please call Chapters at (604) 431-0463.

Travel writer, Martin Mitchinson will be presenting a talk on his adventures in the Darien Gap at Vancouver's G.A.P. Adventures (109-1965 West 4th Avenue), July 10th at 7:30pm. Mitchinson will also visit Saskatoon's McNally Robinson Booksellers (3130 8th Street East at Circle Drive, Art Alcove) on Monday July 28th at 7:00pm.

Martin Mitchinson, author of The Darien Gap: Travels in the Rainforest of Panama, sailed into the heart of the province aboard his thirty-six-foot ketch, moved in with a native family and spent the next eighteen months travelling the province by foot and dugout canoe. After being swept under a jungle river at night and trapped in mangrove swamps, he eventually crossed the continental divide from Caribbean Sea to Pacific waters along the historic route of the Spanish explorer Balboa.

But Mitchinson’s greatest achievement was in coming to understand the real Darien—a captivating land with an exotic history of pirates, conquistadores, native tribes and tragic adventurers. Through his words and photographs, the reader is introduced to the people of Darien who share the same struggles faced by indigenous groups the world over. Like the greatest travel writing it is also a deeply affecting story about a man finding himself as he explores the unknown.

Gwen Sjogren, Alberta’s own Canadian trivia master, will be visiting the Chapters Kamloops, #4-1395 Hillside Drive, on Saturday, July 26 from 1-4pm.

Experienced puzzler Gwen Sjogren is back with twice as many puzzles in the fourth edition of her series Cross-Canada Crosswords. Featuring puzzles with Canadian themes from politics to pop culture, and interspersed with quotes by Canadians, about Canadians and the country we call home, Cross-Canada Crosswords 4 offers humorous anecdotes revealing all the quirks and characteristics of Canuck culture.

Congratulations to the authors who were recently longlisted for the Victoria Butler Book Prize!

Harbour's nominees include non-fiction writers David Spalding, Enchanted Isles: The Southern Gulf Islands (photographs by Kevin Oke), Arthur Black, Black to the Grindstone, Barry Gough, Fortune's a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America, and poet Patrick Lane, Last Water Song.

“Formal recognition of the many writers in the community is important,” said Mary Virtue, President of the Victoria Book Prize Society. “These awards focus on the best we have to offer and increases public exposure for all submissions through critical attention from readers and the media.”

Finalists will be announced in late August and showcased at a gala event on October 15, 2008 at the Union Club of British Columbia.

Harbour writer Patrick White, author of Mountie in Mukluks , won "Best New Writer" at the National Magazine Awards presentation in Toronto April 13. White, a reporter for the Globe and Mail, won for his article "Red Rush" which appeared in the Walrus. The article details the effects of the mountain pine beetle infestation devastating BC's forest industry and is based on White's experiences working in the Vanderhoof area as a logger and silviculturist. In his acceptance speech White thanked his mother, Harbour co-publisher Mary White, and the Vanderhoof logging company "that trusted a needy student with some very large and expensive equipment, even after I buried one machine up to its smokestack in a swamp." Host Adam Sternberg noted the award was "for more than just one article," adding "Patrick rocks!"

Congratulations go out to the Harbour, Nightwood and Caitlin authors who were recently named contenders for the 8th Annual ReLit Awards!

The longlist includes Tom Wayman’s High Speed Through Shoaling Water (Harbour), Patrick Friesen’s Earth's Crude Gravities (Harbour), Patrick Lane’s Last Water Song (Harbour), Christian McPherson’s Six Ways to Sunday (Nightwood), Rob Winger’s Muybridge's Horse (Nightwood), Sharon McCartney’s The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Nightwood), Marita Dachsel’s All Things Said & Done (Caitlin) and Gillian Wigmore’s Soft Geography (Caitlin).

The ReLit Awards, short for Regarding Literature, Reinventing Literature, Relighting Literature, were founded in 2000 and emphasize the importance of ideas over big-money prizes. The winners will be celebrated at a special ReLit event during the Ottawa Writer's festival in October. Winners receive the ReLit Ring, which features four moveable dials, each one struck with the entire alphabet.

Harbour Publishing is pleased to announce that Operation Orca: Springer, Luna and the Struggle to Save West Coast Killer Whales by Daniel Francis and Gil Hewlett has won first place in the nature category for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year award.

Through the amazing story of two “orphan” whales, Springer and Luna, Operation Orca tells the larger story of orcas in the Pacific Northwest, the people who have studied them and the transformation of the whale’s image from killer to icon. Award-winning author Daniel Francis and former Vancouver Aquarium biologist Gil Hewlett, give breadth to the complications, contradictions and political posturing that twice engulfed the debate of whether to interfere or let nature take its course with these whales from the wild.

Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Award honours books that offer practical knowledge. The award was established to bring increased attention to the literary achievements of independent publishers and their authors. Winners were announced at Book Expo America. The other winners in the Nature category were: Amazing Rare Things, by David Attenborough, et al (Yale University Press) which won silver; and Ladybugs of Alberta by John Acorn (University of Alberta Press) which won bronze.

One of Canada’s most beloved poets was honoured today with the unveiling of a statue in his likeness at an historic ceremony at Queen’s Park. This is only the second full-length statue of a poet in Toronto (the other being of Robbie Burns), and one of very few in Canada. The event was presided over by Toronto’s Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco with Purdy’s widow, Eurithe Purdy, unveiling the monument to her late husband.

Mayor David Miller spoke to the crowd about the man who was often described as Canada’s national poet. “Al Purdy is one of Canada’s greatest poets,” said Toronto Mayor David Miller. “This statue, donated to the people of Toronto by the friends of the Poet Laureate and placed in a prominent location in Queen’s Park, is a fitting tribute to a person who enriched the lives of so many Canadians.”

In 2001, Scott Griffin, founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and a member of the Friends of the Poet Laureate, suggested the statue to Dennis Lee, Toronto’s first Poet Laureate. Together with Lee, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and professor Sam Solecki, Griffin commissioned husband and wife sculptors Edwin and Veronica Dam de Nogales to create the memorial artwork after a review of a number of contemporary sculptors.

Lee said of the poet, who died in 2000: “Al Purdy is one of the titans; if we have a national poet in English Canada, he’s it. The Purdy statue is a tremendous way to celebrate his place in our lives.”

Voice of the Land, the name given to the Purdy statue by the Dam de Nogales, is situated prominently in Queen’s Park north.

Griffin – who underwrote the project – along with Lee, Atwood, Ondaatje, and Solecki, partnered with the City of Toronto’s Culture Division to honour Al Purdy with the sculpture. Atwood summarized the importance of the project: “It’s wonderful that the Friends of the Poet Laureate has arranged for this arresting public statue of Al Purdy, one of Canada’s foremost poets. Cities such as Edinburgh, Scotland, are known for their honouring of their own cultural tradition, and it’s encouraging to see Toronto, as well as the province of Ontario beginning to do the same.”

Solecki, Purdy’s editor and close friend, added: “When a great Scottish poet died, one of his friends insisted that ‘Because of his death, this country should observe two minutes of pandemonium.’ Since pandemonium is un-Canadian and not protected by the Charter of Rights, we’re commemorating Al Purdy’s remarkable life with a statue in Queen’s Park.”

Reported by the City of Toronto-

Ottawa poet Rob Winger has been shortlisted for the 21st Annual Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English for his first collection, Muybridge’s Horse (Nightwood Editions). The Trillium Book Award is the Ontario government’s prestigious award for literature. Winger will be reading in Vancouver at the Robson Reading Series (UBC Bookstore at Robson Square, 800 Robson Street)  on Tuesday, June 3 at 7pm (with poet Karen Houle).

Winger was also named a finalist for the Governor General Literary Award for Poetry in 2007 for Muybridge’s Horse. Part history, part invention, this stunning debut is a sensual biographical long poem that follows the career of Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth-century British-born photographer whose studies of bodies in motion led to the invention of moving pictures. Rob Winger’s tale uses an inventive combination of poetic styles and voices, recounting early attempts to capture images on glass. Searching out stereoscopic beauty, Winger’s version of Muybridge carries portable darkrooms from the heights of Yosemite’s domes to the depths of the North and South American coastlines, and ultimately onto an 1878 race track, where a battery of fifty cameras settles a bet about a horse’s stride, forever changing the world’s understanding of movement.

Elegantly told, Muybridge’s Horse is an evocative exploration of history, personal obsession, passion and negatives.

Rob Winger grew up in a tiny Ontario town, and has since lived in eastern Canada and Asia. His work has been published in literary journals across the country. Currently at work at a doctoral degree in English and cultural studies, Winger lives with his family in Ottawa, Ontario, where he skates to work each winter.

The Trillium Book Award for Poetry recognizes literary achievement for a first, second or third published work of poetry in English and French. The winners receive $10,000, and finalists receive a $500 honorarium. Other finalists for the English Trillium Book Award for Poetry are Emily Schultz, for Songs for the Dancing Chicken (ECW Press) and Rachel Zolf for Human Resources (Coach House Books). Ontario’s Minister of Culture, Aileen Carroll, will announce the winners in Toronto on June 12, 2008.

Nightwood Editions is pleased to announce that forage by Rita Wong has won the BC Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. The $2,000 prize, awarded to the best book of poetry published in BC during the preceding year, was announced at the Lieutenant Governor’s BC Book Prize Gala held in Vancouver on Saturday, April 26.

Of her win, Wong said, "having just returned from a reading tour in the Kootenays with [other book prize nominees] Meg Tilly, David Jones and Heather Burt, I was surprised, happy, and grateful for this honour.  I'm very pleased that the BC Book Prizes are putting thousands of dollars of books into school libraries in this province through the Adopt-a-Library program.  I plan to devote the prize to supporting future projects that integrate creative practices with ecological concerns."

Like the title suggests, the poems in forage address the ravaging of the planet and humanity by abusive powers. Wong’s discourse situates itself on modern international political planes, but leaves space for humour, beauty and resilience to shine within this burning global landscape. forage confronts our current “value chain” in relation to such colossal topics as patriotism, environmental issues, race and gender roles, history, media, food, housing, addiction and the unsubstantiated accumulation of waste.

Wong intersperses the pages of forage with clever wordplay and frames her poems with evocative marginalia, Chinese characters and quotes from influential cultural icons. forage sings a song of “skeptical love in a body politic with revolt” through “the corridors of power noisy with mistakes” (stance). In the words of Shani Mootoo, “this little book of poems leads the literary wing of the 21st century’s people’s revolution” and is a vivid, fierce commentary on our international political landscape and the injustices it breeds.

Newfoundland poet George Murray has been shortlisted for the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Atlantic Poetry Prize, for his latest book of poetry, The Rush to Here. Upon hearing the news Murray said he was, “chuffed to be in the company of great poets like Anne Simpson and Don Domanski and thrilled to a part of the arts scene out here by the ocean."

With his latest poetry collection, Murray proves once again he is one of his generation’s most accomplished poets as he breaks new ground with poems that are dangerous, sharp and glistening in both language and style. The Rush to Here darts through the absurdity of daily life to organize the mess and contradictions of modern society. Relentlessly honest, elegant in form and language, The Rush to Here is an intimidating, eerie, but ultimately hopeful collection.

George Murray’s three previous books of poetry include The Hunter (McClelland & Stewart, 2003) and The Cottage Builder’s Letter (M&S, 2001). His poems, fiction and criticisms have appeared in many publications in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and Europe. Murray won the 2003 New York Festivals Radio and Television Gold Medal for Best Writing for his broadcast poem “Anniversary: A Personal Inventory” and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the editor and publisher of the popular literary website Bookninja.com and a contributing editor for several literary magazines, including Canadian Notes and Queries and The Drunken Boat. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

In 1993, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia endowed funds ($5000) for a prize to honour the work of Atlantic poets. Led by Deirdre Dwyer, Atlantic Canadian poets gave readings, held bake sales, organized raffles and wrote letters. WFNS has subsequently worked to increase the endowment to ensure an annual $2,000 prize. Other books shortlisted for this prize are Quick, by Anne Simpson (McClelland & Stewart) and All Our Wonder Unavenged by Don Domanski (Brick Books).

2008 has been a noteworthy year for author Tim Bowling. His first book of non-fiction, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture (Nightwood Editions), was recently shortlisted for three literary awards: The Writers’ Trust Nereus Non-Fiction Award, the BC Book Prizes’ Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the Alberta Literary Awards’ Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. It was also chosen as a  2008 Kiriyama Prize "Notable Book."  Bowling's 2007 novel, The Bone Sharps (Gaspereau Press), was also one of three nominated titles for the 2008 City of Edmonton Book Prize.

Now Bowling has received news that he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of North America’s most prestigious awards. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment in their field. This year, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 190 Fellowships to artists, scientists and scholars in over seventy-five disciplines, with awards totaling $8,200,000. There were over 2,600 applicants. Bowling is one of only three Canadians to receive the Fellowship, and the only Canadian writer.

In addition to his highly acclaimed memoir The Lost Coast, Tim Bowling has published three novels and seven poetry collections, including The Witness Ghost and The Memory Orchard—both nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Bowling is the recipient of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the Jack Chalmers Award, the National Poetry Award, the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Orillia International Poetry Prize.

An important literary press has just found a new home and new ownership. Vici Johnstone, currently the general manager for Harbour Publishing, one of Canada’s leading regional publishers, has just announced the purchase of Caitlin Press. She is now the sole owner and publisher.

Caitlin, a feminist literary press founded in 1977 by Carolyn Zonailo, was first located on Gabriola Island off BC’s Southern Coast. In the 1980s, Caitlin moved to Vancouver and was run as a literary press. For almost fifteen years Caitlin published talented BC women writers, such as Elizabeth Gourlay and Cathy Ford. In 1991 Cynthia Wilson purchased the press and moved it to Prince George, where she quickly established her reputation as the publisher of BC’s Central Interior.

Wilson passed away in 2005, leaving Caitlin in the care of her brother Howard White, the publisher of Harbour Publishing. For the past two years White has managed Caitlin for Wilson’s estate, publishing between two to four books each year. The company boasts an impressive backlist, including non-fiction BC bestsellers by Jack Boudreau and prestigious literary titles such as Soft Geography by Gillian Wigmore, which was recently shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Publisher Johnstone began her diverse career in the arts over 30 years ago as a stage manager and sound designer for theatre. In 1989 she moved to the CBC Radio, where she worked as a technical engineer and designer in Current Affairs and the Arts. She wrote and produced Sounds of the Disappearing Prairies, a mini-documentary series for Calgary’s Wild Rose Country.

After 20 years in Alberta, Johnstone moved her family back to her native province and re-established her roots in BC. Since moving to the Sunshine Coast she has gained extensive publishing experience in media and entertainment, first as a new media producer for Basis Applied Technology, and then as the production and general manager for Harbour Publishing.

“As the publisher of Caitlin Press I intend to support and develop both of the press’s original mandates. The voices coming from BC’s Central Interior are fresh and real and reflect the heart and soul of BC. And, after 30 years of working in the arts it is clear to me that we still have a lot of work to do to bring women’s stories to the forefront. I am excited about re-establishing a press for BC’s women writers.”