News & Reviews
It’s common knowledge, in western democracies, that banning and burning books, and shaming, beating or burning those who read them, signals a nation’s descent into anarchy or tyranny. Book-burning was a common practice of the German Nazi party. Mao’s Red Guards featured it during the Cultural Revolution. And the Khmer Rouge destroyed just about every…
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Fawcett’s “enquiry” is “impolite” in the sense that it attempts objectivity in a context that isn’t currently welcoming it. As he says, cultural appropriation and misappropriation is “a hot-button question.” However, it’s “a sub-issue of the cultural self-determination that every minority in a multicultural society has the right to pursue” and, as a sub-issue, “it…
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edited by Rob Budde. Prince George: Wink Books (at the UNBC Copy Centre), 2019. 28 pp. $10.00. This chapbook, containing the work of fourteen poets, begins with a quotation from Wong, “jail the stories & the storytellers, but they will keep speaking the night, until empire expires.” This is followed by an appeal from…
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A significant cross-section of northern B.C. literary and artistic talent is showcased in the Summer 2019 issue (Vol. 4) of the literary magazine, ThimbleBerry, edited by Kara-lee MacDonald of Fort St. John and Rob Budde of the University of Northern B.C. This cross-section is primarily, as the editorial introduction explains, the work of only…
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Race” for the purposes of Dr Alexis Mootoo’s speech means Mootoo’s own ethnicity, African, described as “black (visible)” and studied in its interaction with the dominant colonialist ethnicity, which is European (Anglo-Saxon in the U.S. and Portugese in Brazil), described as “white.” “Tensions” are non-violent in the sense of attitudinal and institutionalized (“structural”). In liberal…
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The Spoken Word event at Cafe Voltaire on Thursday, April 19th was Emceed by Erin Bauman and was held mainly to showcase Christina Kinnie’s self published book, Walking through the Layrinth; A Memoir. The selections Kinnie read dealt with women leaving difficult and often violent relationships, the guilt resulting from those relationships and…
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On May 6th, 2015, the Canadian government passed the Anti-Terrorism Act (Bill C-51.) According to the Angus Reed Poll taken days before, 82% of the people interviewed supported the bill. Of that group only 18% had read and/or discussed it with others, while 20% knew nothing about it. Of the rest, 25% had seen a…
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The unrestricted literary imagination was at play during the readings by Barry McKinnon and Cecil Giscombe held at the Black Donkey Café on June 10th. The atmosphere lent itself well to free-thinking and the strengthening of friendship. John Harris introduced the two poets, Barry McKinnon of Prince George and Cecil Giscombe of Berkeley, California. “I like what they’re talking about…
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The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree, written by Josh Massey, a journalist from Terrace, BC was published by Book Thug of Toronto. His launch was held at Books and Co in Prince George and is available for $21. He also spoke to CNC students in English 204 (Canadian Poetry) about his writing strategies and…
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Fabienne Calvert Filteau is in her late twenties and from an old Central BC family. Her great grandparents settled in Vanderhoof around the turn of the twentieth century. As the family expanded it spread across the country but centred itself on a cabin that the grandparents built in the late twenties near Fort St. James…
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Don Precosky’s memoir, published by Repository Press, Prince George in 2016 is about how he put himself through university working exhausting all night shifts at a truck stop on the Trans-Canada Highway near the current Thunder Bay is painful to read. However, this is not a criticism, but a tribute to how well the book…
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