The public is invited to an open house reception being held at the Haig-Brown Heritage House on Sunday, Nov. 23, from 1-3 p.m to welcome the 2014/2015 Writer in Residence.
Take this opportunity to meet author David Carpenter, this year’s writer, who will be staying at the House from mid-November 2014 to April 2015.
Carpenter is the first writer to ever repeat the residency and he looks forward to engaging with the local community.
He is planning to hold readings in and around the community and to participate in literary events coordinated by the Museum at Campbell River, that oversees the Writer in Residence program.
He will also take part in Campbell River’s writer’s festival, Words on the Water.
Carpenter is experienced in teaching creative writing and will be on hand to assist local writers with their manuscripts, offering one on one consultations.
Despite this busy schedule, he also intends to find time to write, and will work on his latest book, The Gold, that examines the life of an Englishman searching for gold in the Northwest Territories in the 1930s.
His expectations are based on the excellent experience he had the first time round at the Haig-Brown House, when he finished two books (A Hunter’s Confession and Niceman Cometh).
“The amount of work I managed to complete at the Haig-Brown House,” he notes, “was staggering.”
Carpenter says that he has always had an interest in nature writing and “in Roderick Haig-Brown’s work in particular.” He wrote a homage to Haig-Brown for the magazine Outdoor Canada and confesses to “having fallen under the spell of the master himself.”
Before becoming a full time writer in the 1990s, Carpenter taught English Literature at the University of Saskatchewan, and earned a PhD at the University of Alberta.
He continues to teach creative writing at the Banff Centre. He has had 12 books both fiction and non fiction published; five of which have won awards.
David Carpenter’s residency is made possible through assistance from Canada Council for the Arts. The Haig-Brown House is located at 2250 Campbell River Rd. Call the Museum at 250-287-3103 or details.
