Welcome to Historic Joy Kogawa House

Date: Monday, June 14
Time: 7:30pm – 9:30pm
Location: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

When Karen Connelly finds herself in Burma in the late 1990s, she is immersed in a world of students staging mass demonstrations in opposition to Burma’s dictators, revolutionaries fighting an armed insurgency against that same military regime, and refugees living in hellish limbo in Thailand. Connelly first comes to love a wounded, remarkably beautiful country, then a gifted man who has given his life to its struggle for political change. Her new novel Burmese Lessons is illuminated by the sensual language and flashes of humour that have won this author fans around the world.

Please join writer-in-residence Nancy Lee in conversation with Karen Connelly as part of our social justice reading series. To join this event, please RSVP to kogawahouse@yahoo.ca

Please join us in the intimate living room at Historic Joy Kogawa House for a series of small salon gatherings with five writers who use literature to call for social change and justice and as a tool for social transformation.

Five Mondays (and a Sunday) This Spring

1. Joan Macleod, Monday, April 19
2. Anosh Irani, Sunday, May 2
3. Steven Galloway, Monday, May 17
4. Karen Connelly, Monday, June 14
5. Nancy Lee, Monday, June 28

All conversations begin at 7:30 p.m. on a Monday, except the one with Anosh Irani, which begins at 3:30 p.m. on a Sunday.

Historic Joy Kogawa House is located in the Marpole neighbourhood of Vancouver at 1450 West 64th Avenue (two blocks east of Granville)

Admission by donation

Books will be available for sale and signing by the authors

Please RSVP at kogawahouse@yahoo.ca

Thanks to the Canada Council Author Reading and Author Residencies programs for funds to host these writers at Joy House

Click here to view Dr. John Asfour's co-edited book of poems and prose from the Carnegie Centre. On page 32, you'll find a link to a YouTube video of Asfour reading at the June 2009 launch. On May 9, 2009, Dr. John Asfour enjoyed an intense and rewarding collaboration with the Thursdays writing classes at the Carnegie Community Centre in Vancouver. Led by Elee Kraljii Gardiner of Simon Fraser University’s Writers’ Studio, these writing classes turn a third-floor classroom in a building at Hastings and Main into a playground where writers from the Downtown Eastside give voice to issues that range from class struggle to child abuse to mental instability and addiction. Several authors commented that their time in the classroom with Dr. Asfour “unleashed a beast in me,” “jumpstarted my creativity,” “made something click after writing on my own for 20 years on the streets.” The Thursday writing classes have had close to 50 participants since they began in September 2008. They offer writing support via workshops, editing consults and discussion to writers of the Downtown Eastside. For information please contact the Carnegie Centre at 604-665-2220 or email Elee Kraljii Gardiner at thursdayseditor(a)telus.net.

Award-winning novelist Katherine Govier will wait until her new novel is publishined in the spring of 2010 by HarperCollins before joining us at Kogawa house to discuss the life of Katsushika Hokusai, the Ukiyo-e artist who created The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, and his daughter Oi.

One of the most widely recognized woodblock prints of the 19th-century, The Great Wave established Hokusai’s reputation around the world. But who was Hokusai? Very little documentation remains about the life of this eccentric artist—who lived 90 years, double the life expectancy at the time—and in 93 “temporary lodgings” with his devoted daughter.

Is it possible that he created the roughly 10,000 very disparate works of art that are credited to him? Oi was a great painter in her own right but seldom signed her work. She was at his side from his mid-sixties (her mid-twenties) until his death.  Was she the “Ghost Painter”?

Govier explores this question in her ninth novel, to be published next spring by HarperCollins. Govier demonstrates Oi’s contributions to her father’s art through slides and discussion.

Please watch this website next spring for details of this postponed event.

When: 5 p.m., Friday, April 17Where: 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

Admission by donation. Space is limited. To reserve a seat, please RSVP kogawahouse@yahoo.ca

Writer-in-residence John Asfour welcomes Judy Rebick to Historic Joy Kogawa House on Friday, April 17. Rebick is a veteran activist, former host of CBC Newsworld, chair of Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University and former publisher of www.rabble.ca. Come join us on Friday, April 17, as Judy Rebick speaks about her new book Transforming Power.

One reader commented that Transforming Power "[is] a powerful, inspiring treatise on a paradigm shift in social action that is taking place from around the world. It offers new pathways to change making that are critically needed in this time of crisis, and is an exciting window into stories of hope and possibility around the world." To attend this event, please RSVP kogawahouse@yahoo.ca.

 

Shelagh Rogers, host of "The Next Chapter" on CBC Radio, to emcee

When: 7:30 p.m., Monday, April 20

Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

Admission by donation. Space is limited. To secure a seat, please RSVP kogawahouse@yahoo.ca  

Three BC Book Prize-nominated poets—George Stanley, Nilofar Shidmehr and Daphne Marlatt—have accepted an invitation from writer-in-residence John Asfour to read at Historic Joy Kogawa House on Monday, April 20, as part of BC Book and Magazine Week. 

Asfour, a Montreal poet, is the first writer-in-residence at Kogawa House and will present poetry readings to a variety of audiences, in collaboration with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Simon Fraser University’s Writers Studio, Christianne’s Lyceum of Literature and Art and the Vancouver Public Library. 

Asfour is the author of four books of poetry in English and two in Arabic. He translated the poetry of Muhammad al-Maghut into English under the title Joy Is Not My Profession (Véhicule Press), and he selected, edited and introduced the landmark anthology When the Words Burn: An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, 1945–1987 (Cormorant Books). 

CBC Radio host Shelagh Rogers will emcee the event, which is a co-presentation of Historic Joy Kogawa House and the West Coast Book Prize Society. George Stanley (Vancouver: A Poem), Nilofar Shidmehr (Shirin and Salt Man) and Daphne Marlatt (The Given) are finalists for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. 

The event takes place the evening before National Al Purdy Day, and the League of Canadian Poets has invited all Canadian poets and lovers of Canadian poetry to host a Purdy party to raise funds for the Al Purdy A-Frame Project—Purdy’s former home on Roblin Lake, Ontario—and to create a poet-in-residence program there that is similar to the writer-in-residence program now under way in the childhood home of the author Joy Kogawa. 

This poetry reading will be held at 7:30 pm at Historic Joy Kogawa House, located at 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver. Entrance by donation. Space is limited. To secure a seat, please RSVP kogawahouse@yahoo.ca 

Writer-in-residence John Asfour welcomes novelist, playwright, and essayist Ann Diamond to read excerpts from My Cold War, stories from 1950s Montreal

 

Monday, April 6, at 7:30pm, by donation

 

Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

 

Ann Diamond's best-known work is a long poem, A Nun's Diary (1989), which was adapted for theatre by Robert Lepage and became the subject of a National Film Board documentary, "Breaking a Leg" directed by Donald Winkler. Her first novel, Mona's Dance, was chosen by CBC as the best small press novel of 1988. In 1994, a story collection, Evil Eye, won the Hugh MacLennan Award for fiction. As an experiment, she self-published her novel Static Control after it had been accepted by DC Books and Les Editeurs XYZ.

 

Since 2002 when Diamond began work on her memoir, My Cold War, she has reincarnated as a researcher and haunter of libraries, fine-tooth-comber of documents and files, and explorer of a forbidden chapter in recent Canadian history. This ongoing project has been, in many ways, about reclaiming her own history as the daughter of a Canadian Air Force intelligence officer, who came to Quebec from Sea Island, BC, in 1943 to "hunt for Nazi spies." Learning of her father's secret activities led her inevitably into a wide-ranging study of the history of that period, some of which remains classified to this day.

 

It has also changed Diamond's relationship to the community she came from--Anglo Montreal. It was a mixed blessing to live in a city with a rich cultural tradition and a multi-layered history. By the mid-1980s, when I began publishing fiction and poetry, Montreal had wandered off the literary map of Canada. Diamond waged a personal campaign to change that, writing for the Gazette, Books in Canada, Canadian Forum, CBC, Montreal Mirror, Room of One's Own, Geist, and so on.

 

Today Diamond continues to study the history of Cold War experiments on children, a secret program that spanned the country. Her birthplace, Montreal, was the epicentre of a project that has altered our future in countless ways which need to be faced. After five years of research and writing, Diamond is pleased to shared those stories with a Vancouver audience at Kogawa house.

 

Join us on Monday, April 6, at 7:30pm at Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue in Vancouver. Admission by donation.

Historic Joy Kogawa House chooses first writer-in-residence 

Historic Joy Kogawa House is pleased to announce our first writer-in-residence, Montreal poet John Asfour. 

Upon arriving in Vancouver, Asfour said: “I am pleased to be chosen as the first writer-in-residence at Kogawa house. I’m here to learn how a community like the Japanese Canadian would turn a part of their historical suffering into something positive by establishing a place where writers can live and work. Japanese Canadians were very supportive of the community of Arab Canadians and what it had to endure after September 11.” 

Asfour is the author of four books of poetry in English and two in Arabic. He translated the poetry of Muhammad al-Maghut into English under the title Joy Is Not My Profession (Véhicule Press), and he selected, edited and introduced the landmark anthology When the Words Burn: An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, 1945–1987 (Cormorant Books). 

The majority of the writer’s time in residence will be devoted to work on a book of poems entitled Blindfold, which exposes the “rich and strange” possibilities of a life that has undergone some frightening transformation and is displaced from its element. The book is partly autobiographical—born in Lebanon, Asfour was blinded in 1958 at age 13 during the Civil War there.

The poems also explore feelings of loss, displacement and disorientation experienced by the disabled and relates them to immigrant themes that Asfour has previously addressed. Asfour suggests that the disabled often feel like foreigners in their own land, hampered by prejudice (sometimes well-meaning), communications barriers and the sense of “limited personality” that characterizes the second-language learner.   

While in Vancouver between now until the end of May, Asfour will present poetry workshops to a variety of audiences, in collaboration with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Simon Fraser University’s Writers Studio and the Vancouver Public Library. Opportunities for consultation on work in development are also available. 

Further information can be found on the website of the Historic Joy Kogawa House Society at www.kogawahouse.com and TLC, The Land Conservancy of BC, at www.conservancy.bc.ca or by calling (604) 263-6586.  

Contacts: Kogawa House Society: Ann-Marie Metten (604) 263-6586 

TLC, The Land Conservancy of BC: Tamsin Baker (604) 733-2313  

Information on Historic Joy Kogawa House Historic Joy Kogawa House is the former home of the Canadian author Joy Kogawa (born 1935). It stands as a cultural and historical reminder of the expropriation of property that all Canadians of Japanese descent experienced after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Between 2003 and 2006, a grassroots committee fundraised in a well-publicized national campaign, and with the help of The Land Conservancy of BC, a non-profit land trust, managed to purchase the house in 2006.  

Together with Joy Kogawa, the various groups decided that the wisest and best use of the property would be to establish it as a place where writers could live and work. Following the models of the writer-in-residence programs in place at the Berton House Writers’ Retreat in Dawson City, Yukon, and Roderick Haig-Brown House in Campbell River, BC, the Historic Joy Kogawa House writer-in-residence program brings well-regarded professional writers in touch with a local community of writers, readers, editors, publishers, booksellers and librarians.

While in residence, the writer works to enrich the literary community around him or her and to foster an appreciation for Canadian writing through programs that involve students, other established and emerging writers and members of the general public.

Beginning in March 2009, as a partner with TLC, the Historic Joy Kogawa Society will begin hosting writers to live and work in the house on a paid basis. Funding is provided through the Michael Audain Foundation for the Arts, the Canada Council and through donations from the general public.   

Historic Joy Kogawa House will host a resident author between April 1 and June 30, 2010, as part of its writer-in-residence program. The aims of the residency are to foster greater appreciation for Canadian writing within the Metro Vancouver community, offer members of the community an opportunity to interact with the resident author, and to provide the space, time and resources for a Canadian author to write.

The writer-in-residence will provide advice to emerging and other writers through one-to-one consultations, seminars and school visits. This full-time position (35 hours per week) requires 25 percent of the author’s time be spent on public programs or projects, leaving 75 percent of the work week available for creative writing.

Applicants are encouraged to identify innovative ways their residency would foster an appreciation for Canadian writing and involve communities not typically exposed to Canadian literature.

Requirements
• Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada
• Minimum of one critically well-received title published professionally, including a complete work of fiction, short stories, poetry, drama, or literary non-fiction
• Professional teaching or public speaking experience
• Comfortable and willing to engage with the public one-on-one and in group settings
• Active participant in the writing community
• In the early working stage of a new writing project intended for book-length publication

Remuneration
• $2500 per month, plus free accommodation valued at $1500 per month
• Assistance available for travel expenses

Expressions of interest must include 1) a cover letter; 2) a resume with a history of literary publications, and previous experiences teaching, conducting writing programs, and facilitating workshops or other forms of public presentation; 3) contact information for three references; and 4) a 20- to 30-page sample of recent writing along with reviews of earlier works.

Once a short-list of candidates has been determined, the selection committee will request three letters of reference from each of the short-listed applicants.

Application Deadline
• Completed applications must be received by midnight (PST) on February 1, 2009
• Applications can be mailed, faxed, or e-mailed as a Word document.

Author Residency Selection Committee
c/o Ann-Marie Metten
Historic Joy Kogawa House
1450 West 64th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4
E-mail : kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
Fax : 604.263-6581

Terms of employment are based on Canada Council guidelines.This position and length of term are subject to Canada Council funding.

 

 

On January 5, 2009, Historic Joy Kogawa House welcomed to Vancouver a young poet from Kazakhstan. Akerke Mussabekova will be hosted until the middle of May in a homestay at the home of Vancouver International Writers Festival artistic director Hal Wake as part of a cultural exchange initiated by Poet in the City in London, England, sponsored by HSBC and supported and hosted by Historic Joy Kogawa House.

Akerke is a third year-student of the Translation Department at al-Farabi Kazakh National University, the country’s largest and premier university, situated in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan. There her interests in poetry, languages and translating come together in the translation of poems from English into Kazakh. In 2007 Akerke took part in an International Congress of Students and Young Scholars and was awarded the main prize for her research on the poems of Byron as translated into Kazakh during the Soviet era.

 "I identified many mistakes in the translations," she says, "because all were translated into Russian before being translated from Russian into Kazakh." Akerke’s proficiency in English—she has studied the language since the age of seven—allowed her to review the original English poems and translate them into Kazakh with good results.

Here in Vancouver, Akerke studies literary translation as a guest of UBC’s Department of Creative Writing, where she participates Thursday afternoons in a translation workshop led by Dr. Rhea Tregebov. Throughout the week, Akerke improves her English in high-intermediate level classes in SFU’s English Language and Culture Program. Later this winter she will also participate in SFU Writing and Publishing Program courses.

The expected outcome of Akerke’s stay in Vancouver is a collection of 20 to 25 original poems, to be published in Kazakh, English and Russian, but we have asked that she also consider translating some of Canada’s best poets into Kazakh, in order to develop an audience for our literature in this faroff country.