By Paul Falardeau (Arts & Life Editor) – Email
“A Short Sad Reading” hardly sounds like a fun way to spend your time. Yet, that is exactly what a roomful of students, faculty and community members did last Thursday, March 24 and no one in attendance seemed too sad to do so, especially since the read-ing was by legendary BC author George Bowering. Words can be deceiving.
Bowering, the first parliamentary poet laureate of Canada, is a prolific writer with dozens of works of fiction, poetry, history, and literary criticism. In 2002, the same year he was made poet laureate, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 2004. Bowering is best known for his Avant Garde approach to all his work and inclusion as a founding member of the influential TISH magazine and group of poets that includes Fred Wah, Frank Davey, and Jamie Reid. These are just the bare bones of a prolific career that can be found on any online source. Facebook also insists that Bower-ing “now spends his time trolling facebook and heckling schoolchil-dren from his patio.” Words can be deceiving.
“A Short Sad Reading” was named so because Bowering read from his, now out-of-print novel A Short Sad Book. Neither, of course, are depressing affairs, unless you happen to be certain bird-named antagonists that Bowering lam-basts throughout the book. The book’s title is a nod to Gertrude Stein’s A Long Gay Book. Through-out the story, told in Bowering’s unique anti-narrative, the story of Canada’s true secret history is unfolded. The story, of course, is entirely untrue. Words can be deceiving.
Throughout the reading, Bowering kept up a comical repartee with his audience and read well from his book. Clearly practiced in the art of speaking as well as writing, he kept the crowd at full attention. Afterwards, he accepted questions from the seats and an-swered them with vigour, giving attendees the chance to learn from a long time institution of the Ca-nadian literary world. Of course, Bowering would hardly like to be associated with, let alone called “the institution.” Words can be deceiving.
The well-attended reading was put together by UFV English pro-fessor Carl Peters, a former student of Bowering’s at SFU. “A Short Sad Reading” was well attended and is yet another in a series of excellent readers that have been at UFV on behalf of the English department in the past few years including George McWhirter, Judith Co-pithorne, Sonnet L’Abbe, Joseph Boyden, Lionel Kearns, and two visits by bill bissett amongst many others. With events like the South Asian writers “One Book, One UFV” and visits from CBC news correspondents and the CEO of Westjet, this is only one depart-ment’s part in the growing repu-tation of the “small” Fraser Valley university. Words can be deceiv-ing. So, like Evangeline, his novels heroine, George Bowering got into his spaceship and left UFV’s Ab-botsford campus, but not before awakening a love of words and an encouragement to distrust the hardline “facts” of the “innocent” novel. Words can be many things.
Thirty.
