Joy Kogawa's Birthday - June 6th
What a wonderful advance birthday present it will be for Joy to see that her childhood home is bought by The Land Conservancy and turned into a Writing Centre, with a writers-in-residence program.
There are gifts to the world to be given and shared. Hopefully the Joy Kogawa Writing Centre will be able to share and give to the world as much as Joy has done.
June 6th will be a time to celebrate!
Excert from BCBookworld
http://www.abcbookworld.com/?state=view_author&author_id=3755
Daughter of an Anglican minister and a musician, Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver as Joy Nozonie Nakayama on June 6, 1935. Her award-winning novel Obasan (1981) is a memoir of her family's forced relocation from the West Coast during World War II when she was six years old. The family was herded into converted barns on the PNE grounds, then sent by train to internment camps, first in the Slocan district ("a shack made of newspaper walls"), then in Coaldale, Alberta, where the family lived in a one-room, mud-walled shack and she graduated from high school. The fictional memoir of Naomi Nakane, who recalls her early childhood in the Marpole area of Vancouver in 1942, has become a touchstone for the pain and drama and racism associated with the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. It describes how Naomi Nakane's father, as an enemy alien, was forced to provide labour for sugar beet farms while the family lived in a one-room shack "with no water, no heat, no toilet, no electricity, surrounded by gumbo."
....In 2005, Vancouver city council formally consented to preserve the house as a heritage site if sufficient funds could be raised for its purchase from the owner. On November 30, 2005. the City of Vancouver granted a 120-day delay on the demolition permit for the house. In early December, the Land Conservancy of British Columbia announced they would spearhead the campaign to raise the $1.25 million needed to acquire the house, restore it and set up an endowment to secure its protection in perpetuity as a symbol of Canada’s cultural heritage. The original deadline for funding was March 30, 2006. It was extended to the end of April.