The Mysterious East

I am able to report on my trip to the west coast now that I have my brain back (damn that west-to-east jet lag). I spent four days last week in Vancouver to participate in Simon Fraser University’s series of summer publishing workshops. First, I can report that I experienced a rare stretch of pure blue sky weather and as a result have decided that Vancouver is the loveliest city in the world. I walked all over town and through Stanley Park, swam in the ocean, ate calamari and salmon on patios, drank in a cool jazz bar with an old friend on a long, funky strip called Commercial Drive, got locked in a sky train tunnel at 1:30 a.m. (okay, the public transportation needs work), and took a boat cruise and saw this extraordinary coastline from the water (see photo above).

In between all of this fun, I ran a writing workshop, and participated in a symposium on memoir writing. The symposium was an all-day conversation about books in a lecture theatre filled with book lovers who were engaged and interested and asking good questions from beginning to end. Hal Wake, the artistic director of the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, was a perfect moderator, who established and maintained the good spirit of the day and kept us from falling down black holes. I was part of a large group of presenters, including authors Sharon Butala, Marian Farrant, Leilah Nadir, Keith Maillard, and Jim Taylor. The authors were joined by Howard White, founder of Harbour Publishing, Jack Kirchhoff, deputy books editor of the Globe and Mail, Rebecca Wigod, books editor of the Vancouver Sun, and Joy Gugeler, publisher and editor-in-chief of Orato.com. I was pleased just to be part of this group.

While I was in town, I also had the opportunity to sit in on some sessions in the SFU summer book publishing immersion program, which were running all day every day. For example, I sat in on one session and listened to David Kent, president and chief executive officer of Harper Collins, Jack Kirchhoff and Randy Chan, director of marketing for Random House, debate the implications of the changing world of book media in an informal discussion hour with students. Every day I was there, David Kent, Suzanne Brandreth of the Cooke Agency, and other members of the faculty, were working one-on-one with students in the immersion program. This immersion program is clearly a remarkable learning opportunity for students who are interested in making a career in publishing. (This entire SFU summer program is directed by Suzanne Norman, my old friend from Newfoundland journalism days.)

All this is to say, if you can find you way to the west coast in the summer, there is a group of people who come together at SFU in downtown Vancouver who believe in books and the people who write them, and in the viability of the Canadian publishing industry, and they can talk about ideas and art, marketing and selling as if they were not exclusive domains. I arrived back home in the east inspired, and encouraged to go on.