OXYGEN ART CENTRE: ART IS ESSENTIAL

Last night Oxygen Art Centre threw a party to celebrate its new branding, including this logo



by designer Hildur Jonasson. Located in the alley beside Color Your World, behind Hipperson's and what used to be Kokanee Travel (for those of us who used to park there when the towering maple tree beside the back stairs could be swept aside with one hand), Oxygen and its antecedents have a long history in Nelson as spokeswoman and writing instructor, Nicola Harwood, told the enthusiastic crowd.

Here's Nic, talking us into buying memberships,



which, Nelson and area readers, is a good thing to do. Only fifteen bucks, and you get to feel good about supporting the arts. Funders need to know the organization seeking funding has lots of community support. It's all about numbers: if you want to GET numbers that have a dollar sign in front of them, you have to SUPPLY numbers with lots of PEOPLE behind them. Membership also gives you a shot at winning a painting IF you attend the upcoming AGM on November 22. You're also entitled to a 10% discount on any one Oxygen course, and you get five dollars off the cost of a very cool black T-shirt with the new logo on the front. ART IS ESSENTIAL is the simple message conveyed on the back. The red cross is a brilliant touch.



The place was packed. A number of writers read for three minutes each, standing at the podium surrounded by some fabulous artwork.

Verna Relkoff, poet, teacher, editor, and staunch supporter of Oxygen and its immediate predecessor, the Nelson Fine Arts Centre, started things off.



KLinda Kivi offered us a choice of topics from which she could read and then proceeded to warm a cold night with her words.



Margrith Schraner read from The Reluctant Author: The Life and Literature of Ernest Hekkanen, her new book that arrived from the printer just in time for the reading. She'll be launching it on November 18 at the New Orphic Gallery on Mill Street in Nelson.



Yours truly read three of her poems. Check out the paintings on the walls! No wonder Eileen Delehanty Pearkes said she had wall envy.



Rita Moir wound up the evening with a three minute reading about what you can do in three minutes...



...to a very appreciative audience. KLinda helped with props like wrenches and cat-scratched newspaper and even a baggie of coyote shit. (I can see all you city readers nodding savagely, for now you know it must be true what they say 'bout them country folk!)



Aspen Switzer arrived from her dance class in time to hear Rita's presentation which ended with her talking about, and cuing up so we could hear, Aspen, Jessa and Jesse's powerful rendition of Jerusalem Revisited. I wasn't expecting that and was reduced to sniffling proud mother status immediately. That's Josh Wapp behind Aspen. The first print run of his new comic book, Over the Fence, is almost sold out.



It was a great evening. Good friends, good food, good words, and lots to look at. Here, Nicola Harwood and Fiona Brown, two of Oxygen's many hard-working volunteers, enjoy the show. Looking at the upcoming list of events at the Ideas Cafe, Nelson's Oxygen Art Centre is poised for a bright future. Check it out.

WRITERS HELP CELEBRATE 40 YEARS OF SELKIRK COLLEGE

Hard to believe, but SELKIRK COLLEGE is 40 years old. All kinds of activities were planned to celebrate. First, there was a slow pitch game between Writers and Faculty. Writers won, thanks to organizer Almeda Glenn Miller salting the team with some of her (young/athletic) writing students.



In the evening there was a dinner followed by a panel discussion of the sense of place in writing. Here, Fred Wah weighs in, while Susan Andrews Grace looks on.



Then it was Susan's turn. Almeda helps with the mic.



Calvin Wharton was the third panelist.



And here's Holley Rubinsky, who interviews BC authors Bill Gaston, Anne Fleming, John Lent, and the inimitable Tom Wayman on The Writer's Show on Kootenay Co-op Radio Thursdays at noon, or you can listen on your own time since all the shows are or will be archived on the Internet.



The room was full of writers, of course. Here's Holly Phillips, who found out earlier in the day that she's this year's winner of the Sunburst Award for her collection of slipstream fiction called In the Palace of Repose. In the background is Rita Moir.



George Bowering was not able to attend as planned because of a death in the family.

A POETRY QUEST IN EAST VANCOUVER

Early October found me in East Vancouver for a much-anticipated reunion of some of the members of George Bowering's poetry group at VSW in 2005.

This is Kim Clark.



And this is Pat Smekal.



Paul Nelson, who bravely took on the role of only American and only male.



Leslie McBain.



Rose Marie Sackela.



Valerie Fetherston.



Rhonda Ganz.



Here we are, doing what we did, beginning with an arrival stir-fry dinner with George and Jean, thanks to the culinary efforts of Rhonda et al. The next day George was called away because of a death in the family.





Every day we sat around the big coffee table (which, with the addition of a couple of mattresses, doubled as a bed) talking poetry and critiquing each other's poems...



...a process that really wore some of us out.



As well as doing a little home cooking, we sampled some of the wonderful variety of ethnic restaurants in the area (which was King Edward and Fraser/Main). Here we are at Nyala African Cuisine on Main Street...



...where we were served delicious food presented like this.



Another night we had Thai food.



Another time we went to Himalaya, an Indian restaurant on Main that had a great smorg as well as desserts that looked like this.



But we didn't just eat. Oh no. There was food for the mind, too. One day five of us sat in or outside (did I mention the fine weather?) different cafés on Main Street between 23rd and 27th and wrote for an hour about what we saw. Here's Kim sitting at the corner she staked out.



One night we went to a reading by Alberta-born New York City poet Alan Davies at the Kootenay School of Writing's Vancouver headquarters on West Hastings Street.



And on the last night four of us went to Commercial Drive to hear the Colorifics who were, at the risk of dragging out that which has probably been dragged out before, terrific. Three of us bought the CD (the fourth already had it). Can't say better than that.



The last four standing...unfortunately I didn't manage to get a group shot with all 8 of us.

AWAY - AND A LINK TO A LINK

This is just a drive-by posting as I'm away from home and the familiarity of computers/systems. While checking my email I discovered that Andy, who provides info for a website that is crammed with information about the Doukhabors, has linked to my blog posting about the Our Way Home Reunion. Neat! Check out Spirit Wrestlers.

Also heard from Ascent Aspirations. One of my poems, Trail Blazers Come to the Kootenays Again, will be in the next issue. Always good news. That's ANOTHER poem that began as a 3:15 Experiment in 2005.

I'm in Vancouver for another couple of days. Thanksgiving Dinner at an old friend's place this afternoon. Tomorrow I'll be taking in Body Worlds 3, the exhibition at Science World. It's the one with the plasticized bodies.

This has been a week of poetry and writing and thinking. Went to a Vancouver KSW reading by New York City resident Alan Davies on West Hastings Street. Took in a talk by Dr. Peter Hudoba who is into things spiritual and talked about how meditation can help us to reach (or at least attain occasional glimpses of) inner peace.

Began some new poems. Discussed work brought to the group, which was comprised of seven members of the George Bowering workshop from the Victoria School of Writing, summer of 2005.

Went to the Special Collections at Simon Fraser University's Library and saw a couple of gorgeous books done by Barbarian Press among others. One, from Shanty Bay Press called Circus: Five Poems on the Circus includes poems by D.H. Lawrence, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rainier Maria Rilke, P.K. Page, and Kenneth Koch, and the vibrant pochoir illustrations by Walter Bachinski are such a palette of primary colours that for a minute I was five years old, clinging to my dad's hand and heading into the big top!

Adventures with rats. Yes, the little house we rented near Fraser and King Edward had scritching/gnawing sounds going on in the walls at night. The couple we were renting from found this all but inexplicable. "It's not a tsunami" offered the trap-setter. "Would you like me to pick them up by their little tails?" queried the trap-setter's wife. Because we had the audacity to mention this, plus the fact we’d already mentioned there were only 3 rolls of toilet paper in the house, evoking protestations from the trap-setter's wife about how she couldn't possibly be expected to supply TP for 7 people (even though she'd been happy to RENT it to 7 people), we were referred to as being "high maintenance". Well, the old travel agent in me can assure you that our little group of scribes was anything but. We didn't, for example, call the health authorities. We didn't go ballistic about the lack of dusting and vacuuming. We left the place cleaner than we found it. And we'll not be going back.