Snow Day. No Show

Starting Tuesday night, Vancouver got a heavy dump of snow and so, as beautiful as it was, it caused a lot of havock to those who needed to travel.
My day was a series of cancelations and re-scheduling. As much as we all enjoy doing the show, there are days when it has to fall by the wayside. It came down to just me agreeing to go in and do the broadcast, but unfortunately, my friend Kali and her brother Frank, who is running a temporary bookstore on the Drive, Ziggy Books (where i work one or two days a week), was having a hard time getting back to the store from her home in Richmond so it made more sense to help my friend make some money - and me too! - by keeping her business open.

I managed to make it a day that I didn't have to leave the Drive at all. I went home after they left and had a bit of time to myself before heading back into the store for a reading by the very talented poet Goh Poh Seng, his courageously honest son Kagan Goh, and the liltingly beautiful Marni Norwich, who recently launched her wonderful book of poetry called Wildflowers On My Doorstep.
Here are some pics from that event (with video to come). My camera ran out of juice so I couldn't get much video. Missed the venerable Mr. Goh's reading completely.













Our guest had similar problems getting down to our show anyway, so I made an executive decision to cancel the show. The upside to all this is that I do have a sampling of the guest we never had, Jocelyne Robinson, an Algonquin artist, reading a piece of her work. This was taken at Ziggys' on Sunday, December 14. Also in the video was Zophia Kiefer, an amazing woman who fell dramatically from wealth and glamour to the point where she ended up living in the illegal tent city down by Science World.



I'll end this post with an excerpt from a poem Marni Norwich included in her book:

from
Poh Seng and I

I tell him I write poetry
because it's short;
it fits in the small crevices
between rent and bills.
I hope to write a book, someday,
have wealth enough to glide, like a bird
on Spirit's wing.

Poe Seng understands the dilemma of the artist's life;
he wrote one page a day for thirty-five years
while serving as a doctor in Singapore.
He works in words for full days now,
parlays love into tight black scrawl.

We meet over keyboard and water tumblers,
in a room thousands of miles from where either of us began.
We dance in the liminal space of story;
History surrounding us
like gentle rain.