Tag Archives: literacy

2013 Word Vancouver (Canada); a literacy festival

Word Vancouver starts today but the main action will be taking place this weekend, Sept. 28 – 29, 2013. While it’s been a little the last few years, the event seems poised for a resurgence of sorts, if the information on the website can be considered a good indicator. For anyone not familiar with this annual event, here’s more from the Word Vancouver home page,

This is Word Vancouver, Western Canada’s largest celebration of literacy and reading. Held on the last weekend of September at Library Square [350 West Georgia Street] in beautiful downtown Vancouver, our festival promotes books and authors with free exhibits, performances, and hands-on activities for a wide range of ages and interests.

For the 2013 year, we are undergoing a renewal of programming so stay tuned for new and exciting changes.

Word Vancouver’s News page describes some of the new initiatives,

The team at Word Vancouver is thrilled to announce an innovative new festival event: the Automated Poetry Project. Word Vancouver will transform ordinary vending machines into poetry dispensers!

Poems will be placed in vending machine capsules and dispensed for just a toonie each. The machines will be in multiple locations in downtown Vancouver during the month of September 2013.

Adopt an author! Make a meaningful connection to Vancouver’s writing community. Your name will be associated with a lively cultural event aimed at promoting literacy and you will receive a signed copy of your author’s book.

This program was created as a way to fundraise for WORD Vancouver and we need your help to ensure that the program is a success.

It’s easy! Just check out the list of authors available (PDF attached or see below) and fill out the registration form (PDF). Your choice of author, registration form, and cheque for $100 must be submitted to the Word Vancouver office by August 27, 2013 to ensure your acknowledgment in the festival program. If you submit after this date you will still be acknowledged at the author’s reading and will receive your author’s signed book.

Authors available as of August 12, 2013:

Short Fiction

  • Theodora Armstrong — Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility
  • Julia Lin — Miah
  • Cynthia Flood — Red Girl Rat Boy

Fiction

  • Cathy Ace — The Corpse with the Golden Nose
  • Peter Roman (Peter Darbyshire) — The Mona Lisa Sacrifice
  • Stella Harvey — Nicolai’s Daughters
  • Cameron MacDonald — The Endangered Species Road Trip

Poetry

  • Kurt Lipschutz — This Drawn & Quartered Moon
  • Pamela Porter — Late Moon 
  • Kim Minkus — Tuft
  • Dennis Bolen — Black Liquor: Poems
  • Brad Cran — Ink on Paper
  • Peter Culley — Parkway
  • Mariner Janes — The Monument Cycles
  • Wanda John-Kehewin — In the Dog House
  • George Stanley — After Desire

Young Adult

  • Irene Watts — Touched by Fire
  • Sara Leach — Count Me In

Children’s Literature

  • Loretta Seto — Mooncakes
  • Julie Flett — Little You
  • Holman Wang — Cozy Classics: Pride and Prejudice
  • Paola Opal — Pippy
  • Dan Bar-El — Not Your Typical Dragon
  • Rachelle Delaney — The Metro Dogs of Moscow
  • Ainslie Manson — Roll On: Rick Hanson Wheels Around the World
  • Robert Heidbreder—Black and Bittern was Night

Non-Fiction

  • Sa Boothroyd — Before the World Was Ready
  • Charles Wilkins — Little Ship of Fools
  • Ian Parsons — No Easy Ride: Reflections on My Life in the RCMP
  • Arno Kopecky — The Oil Man and the Sea

The entire schedule is pretty overwhelming but here are some snippets from the Sunday schedule,

Mainstage

Presented by The Rosedale on Robson. Hosted all day by David C. Jones

11:00 am The Federation of BC Writers Celebrates the Present and the Past
Hosted by Ben Nuttal-Smith
12:00 pm UBC Creative Writing Celebrates 50 Year Anniversary
Presented by UBC Creative Writing. Hosted by Steven Galloway with Linda Svendsen, Andreas Schroeder, and Keith Maillard
12:40 pm Vancouver Youth Theatre
1:15 pm Vancouver Youth Poetry Slam team with Victoria Fraser, Jacob Gebrewold, Mariah Dear, Floyd VB, and Andrew Warner
2:00 pm Mascall Dance with The Nijinksy Gibber Jazz Club
Dancers: Darcy McMurray, Justine Chambers, and Billy Marchenski.
2:15 pm Barbara Adler with FANG
joined by Gavin Youngash and the Company B Singers
3:00 pm Color Magazine’s Game of S.K.A.T.E. with Chad Dickson
3:15 pm Dead City Scandal
3:45 pm Dragon Dance: Gung Haggis Fat Choy Dragon Boat Team.
With “Toddish McWong,” and ukelele accompaniment from Daphne Roubini and Guido Heistek.
4:30 pm Spoken Word Poetry with Jillian Christmas and Chelsea D.E. Johnson

There’s also something for people who have publishing aspirations of their own,

Word Talks

Readings and panel discussions, poetry, theatre, romance and crime. Inside, downstairs in the Alma VanDusen Room (of the Vancouver Public Library Central Branch]

11:00 am Pauline Johnson: A Vancouver Legend with Sheila Johnston
11:30 am Cameron Macdonald
The Endangered Species Road Trip (Greystone Books $19.95)
12:00 pm Adapting Classics for the Stage
Presented by Rumble Productions. Panelists Stephen Drover, Hiro Kanagawa, and Peter Boychuk
12:30 pm Page to Stage or Screen
Moderated by Maegan Thomas with panelists Dennis Foon, Aaron Bushkowsky, Mina Shum, and Ian Weir
1:40 pm New Directions in Creative Writing
Presented by UBC Creative Writing. Moderated by Annabel Lyon with panelists Bryan Wade, Maureen Medved, Andrew Gray, and Timothy Taylor.
2:50 pm The Scene of the Crime
Presented by the Crime Writers of Canada. Moderated by Cathy Ace with panelists Debra Purdy Kong, David Russell, Robin Spano, Kay Stewart and Chris Bullock.
4:00 pm Dishing on Romance
Presented by Greater Vancouver Chapter of Romance Writers of America. Panelists Eileen Cook, Susan Lyons, Lee McKenzie, Nora Snowdon, and Roxanne Snopek.

Writing Talks

Editing, Publishing and Writing explored from different angles. Inside, downstairs in the Peter Kaye Room. Presented by subTerrain

11:00 am Writing from the Body with Ingrid Rose
12:10 pm Get Published with Janet Love Morrison
1:20 pm Editing: Both Sides of the Fence with Susan Safyan
2:00 pm Finding, Hiring, and Working with a Freelance Editor with Shelagh Jamieson
Presented by Editors Association of Canada
3:10 pm 300 years of Publishing in 30 Minutes with Leanne Johnson
4:00 pm To Be Announced

I hope you get a chance to get out there and enjoy.

Science and multimodal media approaches

There’s an interesting article on an experiment being conducted at Fortune magazine. For anyone who’s not aware, the publishing industry is in a serious quandary and many publishers are struggling for survival. This explains why Fortune magazine has a multimodal media version of its print cover story available on the web. From the article by Andrew Vanacore on the Physorg.com site here,

Dispensing advice on finding a job during a recession, the piece had a soundtrack, a troupe of improv actors from Chicago and about 4,000 fewer words than your average magazine feature. Instead of scrolling through a column of text, readers (if the term can be applied) flipped through nine pages that told the story with a mix of text, photo-illustrations, interactive graphics and video clips.

I like that bit about “readers (if the term can be applied)” because I’ve been coming to the conclusion that with less and less text (think Twitter) that we may be returning to a more oral society as opposed to our still literate-dominant society. I’ve been thinking about this since some time in the early 1990’s when a communications professor (Paul Heyer) at Simon Fraser University first made the suggestion to us in class.

Following on this idea that we will be less and less text oriented, the work that Kay O’Halloran is doing at her Mulimodal Lab (situated at the National University of Singapore) casts an interesting light on where this all may be going with regard to science communication.  An associate professor in the Dept. of English Language and Literature, O’Halloran is speaking tomorrow (in Ottawa, Canada) at the 2009 Congress of Humanities and Social Science about reading, mathematics, and digital media. I hope there will be a webcast of her talk available afterwards (I suggested it to the folks from the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW) who are sponsoring her talk. If there is a webcast, I’ll post a link.

Meanwhile, for those of us not lucky enough to be there, from the programme,

To understand digital texts we need theories that study more than words alone. This talk will show how images, mathematical and scientific symbols, gestures, actions, music, and sound can all be studied along with words using examples from the classroom, digital media, and mathematics.

I believe that more and more of our communication, science and otherwise, is moving in a multimodal direction. It seems so obvious to me that it surprises me that it’s not commonly accepted wisdom.

Later this week, I will have more about science funding and I have notice of another sythetic biology event coming up at the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologie.