Come join us at the the 3rd annual Asian Canadian literary festival, celebrating the best of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian literary talent! LiterASIAN 2015 features readings, workshops, panel discussions and book launches. Featuring some of the Asian Canadian writing’s most innovative and creative writers in fantasy, science, and speculative fiction, history, and poetry, LiterASIAN is for literary enthusiasts, publishers, literary agents, and anyone interested in writing. http://literasian.com/
The Significance of Moths (poetry) by Shirley Camia and The Homes We Build on Ashes (novel) by Christina Park
Thursday, 7.00-8.30pm, Oct 8, 2015
Pat’s Pub, 403 East Hastings St, Vancouver, BC
The Significance of Moths (poetry) by Shirley Camia
Synopsis: Against the backdrop of the changing seasons, Shirley Camia’s poetry comprising “The Significance of Moths” offers a graceful exploration of home and memory through the eyes of the migrant and the migrant child. As lives are displaced by new landscapes, where does home exist? In the land or in the mind? For new Canadians and their children there is no easy answer. In the journey to form identity, “The Significance of Moths” confronts the ghosts of “what was” with the here and now.
Shirley Camia is a poet of impressive abilities to evoke emotion from the written word. “The Significance of Moths” is one of those collections of free verse that will linger in the mind and memory long after the slender volume has been finished and set back upon the shelf. Highly recommended for community and academic library Canadian Contemporary Poetry collection
The Homes We Build on Ashes (novel) by Christina Park
Synopsis: God-fearing Nara Lee carries a painful secret and a corrosive guilt. Set against an historical backdrop when Korea was a colony and citizenry was rendered impotent, Nara’s life is forged in the 1919 March First Movement. Her journey takes her from her ancestral home to an insidious orphanage to a forced-labour factory during the Japanese Occupation. When colonialism has outlived its usefulness, she is emancipated only to live through an era of high suspicion and treason. After surviving the grand tragedy of the Busan Fire that leaves 28,000 people homeless, Nara leaves the squalid tent city that had become her home and is thrown headlong into a new life in Vancouver, Canada, where she elucidates the poetry of home. Amidst violence and abject injustice, Nara finds a way to rise up from the ashes again and again to rejoice in small triumphs in the homes she has lived, in the homes she has lost.
Christina Park has been around art and letters all her life. Her writing is informed by personal experiences as a second-generation Korean Canadian, as well as by living in Vancouver and Montreal. She was editor of the University of British Columbia’s literary magazine and attended Oxford University. She comes from a family of academics and a notable Korean author: a film adaptation of one of her father’s most well-known works screened at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival and was short-listed for Critics Choice.