Adventures in Debt Collection
Unless you’re there right now, unfortunately, you’ve missed the Christian Bok reading at KSW this afternoon. Sorry Christian! I’m there in spirit…
Just recovering from a very compelling grad student conference at SFU, called Sexing the Text. Some highlights for me: the Friday evening creative panel, especially readings by Kim Minkus, Maya Seuss and Sharanpal Ruprai; a Betsy Warland object poem about states of emergency that seven of us performed together(impromptu); a paper by Rahul Golia about the politics of cross-dressing Jackie Kay’s 1988 novel Trumpet; a paper by Sarah Bull on the gendering of murderous women in 1930’s pulp fiction; and Ashok Mathur’s multimedia keynote performance “Transnational Border Shopping: What We All Long For When We Long to Cross Over.” Parties afterwards– one at Deanna Kreisel and Scott McKenzie’s and one at Ashok’s. Man, I am wrecked today.
But excited about going to visit Peter Dickinson’s class tomorrow morning to talk about Salt Fish Girl and the gothic.
It seems a lot of people don’t know where the Commodore launch of Fred Booker’s Adventures in Debt Collection is going to be. So here’s the PSA I got from West Coast Line:
Join us in launching and celebrating Fred Booker’s Adventures in Debt
Collection, the inaugural edition from Commodore Books. Books will be
available for sale and the author will read and sign copies.
Thursday 9 November 2006
The Brickhouse
730 Main Street (@ Union Street)
Vancouver
8PM
Access to a secure parking lot is available on Georgia Street; when you
arrive, ask the hostess for the lot code. Free street parking is available
on Union Street after 8PM.
The introduction of Commodore Books marks a historical turn in black
cultural production in Western Canada. While Canada has had black-owned book
publishers before — most significantly, Williams-Wallace and SisterVision
— there has never existed a publishing house operating under the control of
a black editorial collective west of Ontario — until now.
Our name recalls the paddle steamer The Commodore, which transported
thirty-five black migrants from San Francisco to Victoria in 1858, during
the Gold Rush. This small pioneer committee became the nucleus of British
Columbia’s first black community.