Three Vancouver Island authors will read this Wednesday at Fanny Bay Hall from their recently published works.
The event is the first in what is hoped to be a year-long series that will feature many well-known Canadian writers together with local emerging talents.
In the debut event, Victoria author Arleen Paré will share the stage with Cumberland’s Matt Rader and Fanny Bay’s Judy LeBlanc.
• Paré’s Paper Trail published in 2007 was a reflection on her many years work in the social services sector. A mixture of prose and poetry the novel won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was short listed for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize in Poetry.
Leaving Now, her second book released in 2012, was described by author Lorna Crozier as “an unsettling, tender lyric, beautifully written in a mixture of poems, prose fragments and fairytales, a story like no other … a splendid, unique contribution to our country’s literature.”
• Highland Secondary School graduate Matt Rader’s writing has taken him to many points on the globe including a writing residency in Ireland.In Vancouver he helped to found Crash, the Indie Writer’s Festival, and his work was part of Poetry in Transit, a program that placed his writing in buses and sky train cars.
He has published three books — Miraculous Hours, Living Things and his most recent collection of poems, A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno.
A prolific writer whose work can be found in many magazines and anthologies in Canada and abroad; Rader returned to the Comox Valley in 2011 and teaches at North Island College.
• Judy LeBlanc’s work has been published in many journals over the last decade and a half.
A Masters of Fine Arts graduate from the University of Victoria, LeBlanc won the Antigonish Review’s contest with her short story You Can’t Go Wrong with an Iris.
Judy, one of the organizers of the Fat Oyster Reading Series, will read from her most recent work Exposure, which was published in PRISM Magazine this fall. The story idea for this interesting work of fiction developed from a visit to the Cumberland Museum, where one woman’s image in the Japanese photo collection inspired LeBlanc to do further research on Cumberland’s early 20th century history and its Japanese residents.
The Fanny Bay Hall doors will open at 6:30 p.m. and the readings will be from 7 to 9 with time for an intermission. Refreshments will be available. The Fanny Bay Hall is at 7793 Island Highway.
The event is sponsored by the Fanny Bay Community Association and the Writers Union of Canada.
For more, call Jane at 250-335-1157.
— Fanny Bay Community Association
