VPL celebrates Vancouver’s literary landmarks

March 11, 2015

VPL celebrates Vancouver’s literary landmarks

More than two dozen plaques around the city

mark literary connections in Vancouver

VANCOUVER, B.C. – Near the Burrard Bridge. Insite on East Hastings. A Point Grey house. The bandstand in the West End.

Vancouver’s library today announced more than two dozen locations as official literary landmarks around the city, marking the connections – sometimes unlikely, occasionally surprising, but always meaningful – between our neighbourhoods and authors who have lived and worked there.

Identifying the landmarks: bold, colourful plaques – mounted on lamp standards – that outline the literary experiences and talents that make them worthy of recognition. A companion interactive online map (vpl.ca/literarylandmark) highlights the landmarks around the city, offers further details on authors and links to their works in the VPL catalogue.

“We wanted to bring out Vancouver’s literary history and make it come alive – right at street level, and right where it happened,” says Mary Lynn Baum, Vancouver Public Library’s board chair. “Our city has a deep and diverse literary community, and it’s a perfect fit for the library to highlight these stories for Vancouver to experience, discover and enjoy.”

VPL’s Literary Landmark project is a collaboration of the library, B.C. BookWorld and the VPL Foundation, through the support of Dr. Yosef Wosk.

B.C. BookWorld publisher and former VPL board member Alan Twigg remembers writing a book on Vancouver writers for the city’s centennial in 1986, and thinking at the time about celebrating their accomplishments with markers or monuments. “It was just an idea to propagate awareness,” he says. “Now we have a host of landmark plaques, and more to come.

“This progress makes me think of some lines at the end of a satirical poem that Earle Birney wrote here in 1947: ‘no Whitman wanted / it's by our lack of ghosts / we're haunted.’ Now our city literally boasts thousands of authors and B.C. easily qualifies as one of the most active literary societies on the planet,” he says.

A sampling of the landmarks:

-The Haywood bandstand (1755 Beach Ave.) in the West End, where the structure inspired Malcolm Lowry’s poem Lament in the Pacific Northwest;

-The Insite supervised injection site (139 East Hastings St.), North America’s first; Downtown Eastside musician, writer, poet and activist Bud Osborn was instrumental in establishing the facility;

-A Point Grey house (3800-block West 11th Ave.) – Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s most acclaimed authors, lived there in the mid-1960s when she was lecturing at the University of B.C. and writing two of her earliest works;

-Near the Burrard Bridge (Kitsilano side) – the bridge is the subject of one of Daphne Marlatt’s poems, from which came the closing line of a 2011 digital exhibit at the south end of the span: “If you lived under this bridge you’d be home by now.”

Discover all the authors in VPL’s Literary Landmark project at vpl.ca/literarylandmark:

Margaret Atwood, Sadhu Binning, George Bowering, Anne Cameron, Wayson Choy, Wayde Compton, Douglas Coupland, D.M. Fraser, W.P. Kinsella, Roy Kiyooka, Joy Kogawa, Evelyn Lau, Dorothy Livesay, Malcolm Lowry, Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt, Al Neil, Eric Nicol, Bud Osborn, Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, Jane Rule, Andreas Schroeder, Tom Wayman, Jim Willer, Ethel Wilson and George Woodcock.

Further landmarks will be added yearly.

BACKGROUND AND QUOTES:

Cathy Nicol, daughter of humourist and decades-long Province newspaper columnist Eric Nicol

VPL’s central branch downtown is itself a literary landmark in the city, and now that’s complemented with its connection to humourist and decades-long Province newspaper columnist Eric Nicol, the first writer to receive the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Nicol is recognized in the ‘walk of fame’ at Library Square and now with a literary landmark along Georgia Street.

“Dad would have been extremely proud of his inclusion in the landmarks project,” says his daughter, Cathy Nicol, who was on hand this morning when VPL unveiled the Eric Nicol plaque. “On his behalf, I thank everyone who worked to honour him.”

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Dr. Yosef Wosk, longtime library donor who inspired the project

“Vancouver is blessed to have such a vibrant and dedicated public library system to support our curiosity and love of knowledge. VPL’s new Literary Landmark initiative extends the definition of a library: It is not just a building but also the authors, the publishers, the readers, the very streets of our city. The public library embraces these many writer's homes as well as hideaways, apartments, parks and writers’ retreats that nurtured creativity. Ultimately, each of us is a library as is the city itself.”

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Daphne Marlatt, Vancouver poet and Order of Canada recipient

“This project sets words from our city's literature into concrete features of the city itself. This delights me because my words want to dig their way deep into the history and terrain of this ever-changing place. We are shaped by the place we live in as much as it is shaped by us.

“Because Vancouver is a young city with an edgy sense of itself, it is only beginning to acknowledge its own literature, a literature that has deep roots here but can compete on an international stage. Thanks to VPL, this project now locates our literature on its own ground and underlines its significance.”

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Media contact:

Marya Gadison

Vancouver Public Library

604.331.3681

marya.gadison@vpl.ca  

About Vancouver Public Library

Vancouver Public Library has been dedicated to meeting the lifelong learning, reading and information needs of Vancouver residents for more than 100 years. Our vision is an informed, engaged, and connected city. Our mission is a free place for everyone to discover, create and share ideas and information. Last year, VPL had more than 6.9 million visits with patrons borrowing more than 9.5 million items including: books, ebooks, CDs, DVDs and magazines. Across 22 locations and online, VPL serves nearly 428,000 active members.

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