“Into the Cosmic Auditorium”: Readings, Reflections, Mixed Media

Make no mistake: the mind dances to the tune
of invisible orchestras, each trillions of strings,
playing up worlds of facts, fictions, and fancies
in the auditorium of every raindrop, every galaxy…

                                                   Henry Beissel (from Fugitive Horizons)

Join a distinguished panel of thinkers, artists and performers as they explore and critique the worlds we find and make for ourselves in various media.

Henry Beissel is one of Canada’s most distinguished and internationally celebrated poets, playwrights and critics. His play, Inuk and the Sun, which premiered at Stratford in 1973, has been translated into a dozen languages and is described by Sherrill Grace in Canada: The Idea of North (2001) as “a mythic masterpiece.” Recent work includes adaptations of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Sophocles’ Antigone for Third Wall Theatre in Ottawa and three new volumes of poetry: Seasons of Blood (BuschekBooks, 2011), Coming to Terms with a Child (Black Moss, 2011) and Fugitive Horizons (Guernica Editions, 2013; bilingual English/German edition, 2015). He taught for many years at Sir George Williams (subsequently Concordia) University, and founded its Creative Writing Program.

Arlette Francière has been a teacher (at the primary, secondary and university levels), a literary agent for writers and playwrights, a literary translator, and a translator and editor of art catalogues for the National Gallery of Canada and for Galerie Simon Blais in Montreal. Her literary translation credits include works by Robertson Davies, W.O. Mitchell, Henry Beissel and Sheila Watson, and she has served three times as a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. She is also an artist, working in the Expressionist tradition in oil, acrylic, and watercolour. Her most characteristic theme is that of land, sky- and seascape, but she also enjoys painting portraits and abstract works. Another of her specialties is artwork for book and CD covers.

Gary Geddes grew up on the East Side of Vancouver and edited one of the earliest anthologies of BC literature, Skookum Wawa (1975), as well as Vancouver: Soul of a City, published in the Expo year of 1986. He has published over thirty volumes of poetry and creative non-fiction, including a long poem, Falsework (2007), about the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge during its construction in 1958, and Drink the Bitter Root (2011), which describes his forays, at age 68, into Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Somaliland. The title poem of his latest collection, The Resumption of Play (Quattro, 2016), received the 2015 Malahat Review Long Poem prize for its evocation of the trauma produced by Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.