Shelley O’Callaghan on Risk

I am a 69 year-old retired lawyer and I am embarking on writing a memoir. I am a private person. I don’t share my innermost thoughts easily. But when writing my memoir, How Deep is the Lake: A Century at Chilliwack Lake, I find that when I open my heart, my writing comes alive. I […]

Shaw TV Features the Fest

Shaw TV Sea to Sky and Stella Harvey, Festival Director, give us a look inside the treasure box of the festival’s offerings – guest author readings, craft workshops, and publisher pitch sessions!  

Claudia Casper on Risk

Researching my second novel I decided I needed to experience spelunking, and specifically, being in a squeeze. Vancouver Island has the largest concentration of caves in North America. I found a woman in Campbell River willing to take me spelunking in a spectacular limestone and marble cave system near Gold River. When I pulled up […]

Sheena Kamal on Risk

The very act of writing requires a leap of faith, a somewhat crazed belief that, with your words, you can create a story that another person—a living, breathing human being— will want to read. It’s the riskiest thing imaginable to sit and face a blank page armed with nothing but this belief and the germ […]

Putting it on the Line: Lenore Rowntree on Risk

So far as I know, no one has unfriended me on Facebook because of something I wrote. But I have landed in some unfriendly situations because of writing, including with myself. There were times I would have unfriended myself if I could have. I took a risk turning 50 and continuing to take myself seriously […]

Arctic Folly: Alisa Smith on Risk

  The first camping trip I ever did alone, at the age of 22, was probably outside the norm: I chose the high Arctic. Polar bears, pooh! I only learned later in life that camping scientists take rifles with them on the tundra. Okay, I admit to a slight fear of polar bears. This is […]

Yvonne Blomer on Risk

I can’t think of a more superb topic for writers to mull than risk. For myself, there are so many moments of risk in my memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur some people have asked me why I did the trip in the first place. My first answer is always that I […]

Shelley O’Callaghan Book Signing & Presentation

Join author Shelley O’Callaghan for a short presentation on her personal journey to uncover the history of her family’s “summer cabin” at Chilliwack Lake. Together with her grandchildren, she gained a new perspective on her sense of belonging to a land that was home to many others, long before her time. Author Signing: Tuesday, Sep. […]

The Risk of being Japanese Canadian by Terry Watada

With the redress settlement and the rise of Japanese Canadian writing, I noticed a new stereotype has emerged in the Canadian public.  Japanese Canadians are law-abiding, cooperative, timid, quiet, friendly, persevering and non-complaining (despite the redress campaign). No one thinks of them as angry, combative, corrupt, sexual and loud.  That would be politically incorrect, that would be […]

Shari Ulrich on Risk

I can’t pretend I don’t have a complicated relationship with writing despite knowing that the essence of the process couldn’t be more simple: “Show up and it will come”.  (A mantra plagiarized from Elizabeth Gilbert.) My sense is, it is all a risk – to show up and make oneself vulnerable to the muse; to tell one’s […]