Welcome to Historic Joy Kogawa House

Inviting the Reader In and the Power of Point of View

When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Sunday, June 5
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4
Cost: $135 (includes lunch)

To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca

Short fiction’s possibilities are delightful, startling and seemingly endless. Of the vital mechanics of the form (including structure, timeframe and tense choices, narrative momentum, dialogue, character) the single-most important choice you can make in writing short fiction is deciding on what point of view (or points of view) a story should be told from. Your POV choice (together with the more elusive quality of Voice) will dictate HOW you will write WHAT you want to write.

Beginning and emerging writers often adhere unconsciously to a particular POV ― what I call the default mode (and we all have one). During this workshop you’ll discover a multiplicity of POV choices and how a story can radically shift depending on who’s doing the telling or through whose eyes we’re witnessing things from. We’ll also look at The Writer’s Voice and talk about why finding your own voice as a writer is so important.

The second most important decision you need to make is deciding Where and How to begin your story. “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop,” said the king in Alice in Wonderland. We’ll look at why it isn’t that simple when it comes to short fiction.

During this workshop you’ll do writing exercises, as well as read your work out loud and discuss your writing with the class. I will provide a mini course pack that we’ll use for examples and inspiration and that you are welcome to take home with you.>

Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the critically acclaimed story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth (Key Porter), the just-published Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (April 2011, Hamish Hamilton / Penguin Canada), editor of the BC Book Prize–nominated Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow (Douglas & McIntyre), and the fiction editor of Vancouver Review. Her fiction has been broadcast on CBC and widely anthologized, most recently in Best Canadian Stories: 2010. A new story appears in the May 2011 Walrus magazine. She is on faculty this spring with the Banff Centre’s writing program and is an adjunct professor in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She lives in East Vancouver, with two men, one tall, one small.

To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca.

Writing Workshop

When: Saturday, March 26, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4
Cost: $135 (includes lunch). To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca

At some point, all writers find themselves turning to a variety of sources to build a story and to ensure its accuracy. And when they do, they may find themselves asking some or all of the following questions:

– What sources should I use and to what ends? What should I be aware of when interviewing people for a story?
– Is researching for non-fiction different from researching for fiction?
– When, if ever, is it acceptable to change the facts, to alter geography, for example, or change history?
– When should I stop researching and start writing?
– How do I make sure that my story is accurate?

Workshop participants will explore the research component of excerpts from published works and works-in-progress. They will brainstorm story possibilities drawn from a variety of sources including their own lives. Participants are invited to bring their own research conundrums to the workshop, whether in the form of an idea, notes on the page, or a short piece of writing.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have begun at least two new stories, and will have several strategies in place to follow through with development, research, writing, further research, and fact checking.

Maggie de Vries is an award-winning writer who teaches in UBC’s Creative Writing Department and Masters in Children’s Literature program. In 2005, she was Vancouver Public Library’s first writer in residence.

When: Wednesday, March 30, 7:30 to 9 p.m.

Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4

Cost: $65

(Ticket price includes ONE ticket to any production of The Forbidden Phoenix, running April 7 to 23, at Richmond’s Gateway Theatre
PLUS $25 tax-deductible receipt for one year's membership in Historic Joy Kogawa House Society. This event is a fundraiser for our writer-in-residence program, which will run at Historic Joy Kogawa House from September 15, 2011, to April 15, 2012.)
To purchase tickets, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca

In his role as Canadian playwright, radio writer, television story editor, and young adult author, Marty Chan explores the tensions between opposing forces of assimilation and the search for heritage and cultural roots.

His new play, The Forbidden Phoenix, combines adventure and martial arts to present an eye-popping musical that tells the story of a father who comes to Canada looking for a better life. High drama and visual spectacle combine for a unique evening of family entertainment. Performed in English with Chinese surtitles. The play runs April 7 to 23 at the Gateway Theatre in Richmond.

On Wednesday, March 30, please join us in the living room of Historic Joy Kogawa House, childhood home of the author Joy Kogawa, for a rare opportunity to sit with this master author, hear him read from the playscript, and discuss the issues of history and mythology he raises in his work.

Marty Chan is an award-winning playwright. His Mom, Dad, I’m Living with a White Girl won the Sterling Award for Best New Play and Best Sound Design, and Harvard University’s A.C.T. Award. The Forbidden Phoenix won the Alberta Literary Awards Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama in 2004.

Love pours down on Joy Kogawa’s cherry tree

Sometimes all you have to do is ask. Earlier this winter volunteers at Historic Joy Kogawa House asked knitters from across Vancouver to help them cheer up the dying cherry tree that stands just outside the back gate at 1450 West 64th Avenue in Vancouver.

“The 60-year-old tree was leaking sap, branches had been snapped by passing trucks—it really looked sad this winter,” said Ann-Marie Metten, executive director of the writing program that welcomes writers to live and write at the house for three months each year.

But soon the tree will be a cloud of pink blossoms and an early sign of spring. On Sunday, March 6, 2 to 3:30pm, local knit graffiti artists Leanne Prain and Mandy Moore, authors of Yarn Bombing: The Art of Knit and Crochet Graffiti (Arsenal, 2010), will cover the tree with knitted blossoms. A fire truck and fire fighters from Fire Hall No. 22 will be on hand to lift the writers into the tree so they can safely sew blossoms in place.

Knitters from across Greater Vancouver have come together to knit and crochet pink blossoms over the past two months. Knit-ins have filled the tiny living room of the 1912 bungalow that Joy Kogawa writes about in her children’s picture book, Naomi’s Tree, a story of friendship, forgiveness, remembering, and love.

A knit-in Monday night in Council Chambers at Vancouver City Hall had volunteers sitting in Councillors’ chairs as they spun pink yarn into delicate blossoms. Young knitters at Bowen Island Community School crafted beautiful blossoms under the guidance of local knitter Anne Mann, who brought friends in to help the students with their knitting.

Blossoms have arrived in packages from Oregon and California, from across Canada, and from as far away as Kingscliff, New South Wales. “The most rewarding moment was when three small children arrived at the house and lifted a branch full of blossoms from the hatchback of their mother’s car,” Metten says. The little cherry tree survived yesterday’s wind and rain, and stands planted in the front garden at the house.

It is the mother tree standing behind the house that on Sunday will show signs of the love that knitters and writers have showered upon it.

Media interviews with the knit graffiti artists are welcome before Sunday’s event. Thanks to Shaw Multicultural Channel, our media sponsor.

Dream Vancouver:
Diversity in our History and our Future

When my great-great grandfather Rev. Chan Yu Tan came to BC in 1896, the roads were dirt, and there was a head tax on Chinese immigrants.

When I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s I marveled at the way Hawaiian culture was so ethnically diverse.  Asian faces were on nightly news casts, and Hawaiian culture was embraced by mainstream American culture.  In Vancouver, there was still a sense of racial divisions, and ethnic marginalization.  Chinese-Canadian and First Nations history were more likely relegated to sidebar stories and foot notes.

Today, I am living my dream of making Vancouver and Canada more racially tolerant and interculturally exciting!

Every culture that lived along the Silk Road from Italy to Japan, from India to Egypt now lives in Vancouver.  Through the cross-fertilization of ideas, we are able to express new ways of seeing ideas and expressing customs, of expressing the same oneness through many perspectives of the kaleidoscope of life.  But so many times we talk about Canada as a mosaic or multicultural, and become more concerned with the pieces while we lose sight of the whole.

Vancouver IS an inter-cultural crossroad and we are inter-historic… linking not only Vancouver’s history with each new wave of immigrants – but also with our collective global history.  We carry within us the global cultural history of the world… in our little city on the edge.

Vancouver must become a 21st Century Renaissance City.  The “Gateway to the Pacific” is gone with the passage of steam ships… we are now in the computer internet information era.  Everything is instant – within hours… minutes… seconds.  We know what is happening around the world.    Vancouverites can live here and work all around the world.

We must NOT be afraid of doing something new or borrowing from a different culture, nor to place an idea within a different context.  Creative synthesis takes what already exists and applies it to different scenarios – new and exciting.

This is the simple beauty of Gung Haggis Fat Choy.  How would a Robbie Burns Day be celebrated by Chinese-Canadians?  How would a Chinese New Year be celebrated by Scottish-Canadians?

What if…  Canadians had both Chinese and Scottish ancestry?  What if we celebrated both Robbie Burns Day and Chinese New Year on the same day… with the same families?

This is the future of Vancouver.  We are already acknowledged as the Canadian city with the most intercultural marriages.  

We are all one family.

I see a day for Vancouver when every family will have a member whose ancestry: paid the Chinese head tax; was an indentured Scottish labourer after the Highland clearings; was a French-Canadian settler; is First Nations; left Iran after the Shah was deposed; was in the Japanese-Canadian internment camps during WW2; or fished in the Maritimes; or worked oil fields in Alberta; and is addicted to dragon boat racing.

We MUST know our history to build our future.  How did we come to be here?  Who built and shaped this city?

People told us it was impossible, when we embarked on our campaign to save author Joy Kogawa’s childhood home from demolition.  But in our success we helped to build a corner stone foundation for our future Vancouver.  It gave Vancouver its first literary landmark for a Canadian writer.  It gave Vancouver a landmark from a dark period of its history when Canadians, born of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and sent off to internment camps in the mountains, and their property was confiscated… for no reason other than fear.  

Kogawa House can link history, literature, the arts, social-criticism, heritage, and multiculturalism all together.  By building understandings for our cultural history, through the arts, business, and even recreation sports like dragon boat racing, we can give value to our history… and to our future.

We need to educate and mentor our future leaders.  Our city, our societies and our education must embrace the continued diversity of our cultures. We must build inter-disciplinary social-cultural philosophical infrastructures throughout business, society, arts, politics, academia, sports and recreation.  There is no separation between business and art, between sports and history, between academia and recreation.  All is related, and everything is possible.  This is my Vancouver.

Todd Wong

 

Joy Kogawa's dream statement to be posted soon.