Join these three authors who examine climate change and its devastation from various vantage points to give us the personal, the historical and the hopeful.
Location: Room C440
Type: Panel, Reading
Moderator: Vince Beiser
Readers: Sarah Cox, Signs of Life (Goose Lane Editions) | Meghan Fandrich, Burning Sage: Poems from the Lytton fire (Caitlin Press) | Frances Peck, Uncontrolled Flight (NeWest Editions)
Sponsored by The Writers Union of Canada and the Canada Arts Council
About The Moderator
Vince Beiser
Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist and author of the forthcoming book, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future—an investigation into how the materials we need for digital technology and renewable energy are causing environmen-tal havoc, political upheaval, mayhem and murder, and how we can do better. Vince’s first book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization was translated into five languages, was a finalist for a PEN America award and a California Book Award, and spawned a TEDx talk.
Vince has reported from over 100 countries, states, provinces, kingdoms, occupied territo-ries, no man’s lands and disaster zones. He has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with US Army soldiers, ridden with the first responders to natural disas-ters, and hunted down other stories from around the world for publications includ-ing Wired, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Time, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Play-boy, Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
About The Readers
Sarah Cox
Sarah Cox is an author and journalist for The Narwhal. Sarah’s first book Breaching the Peace: The Site C Dam and a Valley’s Stand Against Big Hydro won a B.C. Book Prize and was a finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing (Writers’ Trust of Canada) and the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. In 2022, Cox won the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Award for Environmental & Climate Change Reporting and her investigative reporting for the Narwhal has also been awarded the World Press Freedom Award and the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Jackman Award for Excellence in Journalism. Sarah lives in Victoria, B.C. When she’s not at her desk, you can find her enjoying nature: hiking, kayaking, paddle boarding, camping, and bird watching.
Meghan Fandrich
Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village in Nlaka'pamux Territory that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For almost a decade, she ran Klowa Art Café, a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage (Caitlin Press) is Meghan’s debut poetry collection.
Frances Peck
Frances Peck worked as an editor, ghostwriter, and instructor before returning to her childhood preoccupation, creative writing. Her debut novel, The Broken Places, was a Globe and Mail best book of 2022 and a finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. Her second novel, Uncontrolled Flight, a tragedy/mystery about the death of a BC firefighting pilot, made 2023 book-of-the-year lists at 49th Shelf and Consumed by Ink. Frances grew up in Cape Breton, moved to Ottawa, and now lives and writes in North Vancouver. Visit her at francespeck.com
