This event brings together two writers who work daily toward improving the plight of communities and ecosystems. Ian Thomas works for the Ancient Forest Alliance to protect BC’s endangered old-growth forests. His lifelong passion for the ecosystems and wildlife of the coastal rainforest informs Green Islands, his first book. Adrienne Fitzpatrick reminds us “how water can swallow a person, a village whole, wipe out a generation” in Instructions for a Flood. She explores where she grew up — the beautiful and sometimes dangerous places of central and northwestern BC, uncovering how extractive industries and the powerful force of water have impacted the lives and Indigenous cultures of the area.
Location: Britannia Library
Type: Poetry
Sponsored by Pandora’s Collective · VPL Britannia Branch
Moderators: Daniela Elza · Natasha Boskic
Readers: Ian Thomas, Green Islands, Poems from the Great Bear Rainforest (Raven Chapbooks) | Adrienne Fitzpatrick, Instructions for a Flood: Reflections on Story, Geography and Connection (Caitlin Press)
About The Moderators
Host of Twisted Poets event with Ian Thomas and Adrienne Fitzpatrick ----- Daniela Elza’s latest poetry collections are the broken boat (2020) and slow erosions (2020). Her work has won numerous contests and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology multiple times. She placed second in the 2022 Ken Belford Poetry Prize for Social Justice. Daniela is a founding member of the Place Mattering Matters Collective and is currently working with her community on protecting and growing our affordable housing.
Natasha Boškić works at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She moved to Canada with her two children from war-torn Serbia in 1999, during a NATO aerial bombing campaign. A long history of storytelling, folk tales and legends, and her personal life experience have shaped Natasha’s writing. She writes poetry and short personal narratives. Interested in technology as a new landscape for literary expression, she experiments with new media. She is fascinated by the opportunities to combine analog and digital technologies, and uses a variety of media to write narratives. She likes bringing poetry into every day in fun and engaging way. Her collaborative transmedial installation, “Still/ed here,” has been exhibited in Canada, Portugal, Serbia, Denmark, England and Ireland, and was awarded the 1st prize in the category of Digital and performative multimedia art in Surrey Art Gallery in 2019. The video poem, “On the Margin of History”, part of the installation, was also screened at various film festivals. Her project “Taste of Love” was a collection of edible flowers made of wafer paper with poetry lines printed on the petals. Each unique flower was available during Hot Chocolate Festival in Vancouver in 2020 for Valentine’s Day. Natasha’s Smart Cookie project was presented at TEC Expo event at UBC, where lemon tarts were overlayed with audio poetry, accessible via mobile app. Natasha’s work have been published in a number of literary journals and magazines in Canada, Europe and US. (ditch, Quills, Allegro Poetry, Visual Verse, The Post Feminist Post: Modern Romance), anthologies (Timeless Voices, Alive at the Centre: An Anthology of Poems from the Pacific NorthWest) and special publications. Natasha’s latest short poetry film, “Legacy”, was exhibited at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver in 2022 and screened at film festivals in 2023. She obtained a Ph.D. at UBC, with a focus on ethics and narratives in gameworlds. More about her work at onlywords.ca
About The Readers
Born in Vancouver, Ian Thomas has a lifelong passion for the ecosystems and wildlife of the coastal rainforest. A biologist by training, Ian received his master’s degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Windsor in Ontario. He currently works for the Ancient Forest Alliance, a non-profit that works to protect BC’s endangered old-growth forests. GREEN ISLANDS is Ian’s first published book. He has self-published two books of poetry: Twa Corbies: a Celebration of Crows and Ravens through Poetry and Photographs and Wild Cultures: Nature Poetry and Photographs from Coastal British Columbia.
Adrienne Fitzpatrick grew up in the north and returned to complete her Masters in English at the University of Northern British Columbia; her creative thesis won the John Harris Prize for the best in Northern Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Prairie Fire, CV2, subTerrain, The New Quarterly and Thimbleberry. Her art reviews have appeared in Border Crossings, C Magazine and Canadian Art and book reviews in the BC Review. She explores the phenomenological experience of place in her work and her first book, The Earth Remembers Everything is based on her experiences travelling to massacre sites in Europe, Asia, the Central Interior and Northwest Coast of BC; it was also short-listed for the 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Instructions for a Flood, based on her experiences of living and working with Indigenous Nations in the Central Interior and Northwest of BC was published by Caitlin Press in the Spring of 2023.
