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We sat down with Caroline Adderson in the waning days of summer at her home in leafy Kerrisdale to chat about her new book of short stories (currently long-listed for the Giller Prize) and the notion of happiness itself!

In addition to being one the country’s most highly regarded authors (of five novels and two previous collections of short stories) she also created Vancouver Vanishes, originally a Facebook group dedicated to the documentation and preservation of the histories contained in the many early Vancouver houses that have fallen to the wrecker’s ball in the last decade. It eventually became a book and continues in its online form. Caroline also participated in the first VR Media video production; an on-site interview in support of the Vancouver Vanishes project.

Her new collection of short stories is fantastic. We can’t recommend it enough. It is being deservedly well-reviewed via all the regular literary channels and we wish her luck with the Giller! We hope you enjoy the chat!

Vancouver-based photographer Greg Girard is enjoying a great and well deserved late career surge of interest in his work. He continues to explore and expand on themes that originally engaged him in the early 1970s. I recently did a video for Galleries West featuring one his many Asian culture-focused projects; that of the phenomena of the Japanese “Snack Sakura” bars that he has been documenting. During the interview I ventured into other topics and the port of Vancouver came up. So I decided to expand the interview and include a couple of outtings with Greg to talk further and illustrate the topic a little more fully. We hope you enjoy this little snippet of working life on the city’s waterfront over the years!

https://www.gallerieswest.ca/events/greg-girard-%7C-snack-sakura_1/

What does climate anxiety look like? Is there mourning? Anger? Resignation? Hope?

These are some of the things on my mind constantly these days, on top of everything else and in common with millions of others. But it came especially to the fore on a week-long stay on Galiano Island in the summer of 2023, which we now know was the hottest year in recorded history.

After the appalling Lahaina Fire, where embers could be seen spiraling horizontally through the streets on a phone video captured by a desperate, fleeing resident, I could not escape thoughts of a similar fate awaiting any one of a number of locations closer to home. And at an opening of the wonderful Valley Grill on Galiano I spoke with the island’s fire chief about his feelings on climate change and the impact on Galiano specifically, and BC in general. He mentioned that in light of what’s been observed with regards to fire behaviour in the last few years alone, ideas of protecting Galiano with several firebreaks must be revisited. The embers will just blow across. And John Vaillant’s new book “Fire Weather” (which I picked up at the well-stocked Galiano Bookstore) gives further cause for concern as it documents the unprecedented speed and change of the very nature of fires as we crash past environmental red lines.

Mindful of all this I did some filming and photography on Galiano and later at my friend Marian Bantjes’ house on Bowen on an unseasonably warm fall day. I had some vague notion of making a new video poem after “Rig Veda”, the previous video poem done with Christina Shah, was enjoying some success at Spanish and Italian film festivals. So I approached EVENT magazine suggesting it would be nice, in the future, to do some more. But before I could think of a realistic schedule they put a call out! And that’s when Catherine Graham enters the picture.

Catherine has a substantial and highly regarded body of work out which you can check out at the link below. She is also a judge of the CBC Poetry Prize. In any event she showed immediate interest in working together. We met via zoom and got along well. I’d mentioned that I’d like to have a poet respond to the images I make rather than the other way round as is usually the case. I mentioned the Galiano visit and that the images were created with the hot, horizontal winds on the tinder dry islands in mind. I’d read her recent work and it was full of imagery that naturally resonated with me. And there were elements of grief which seemed to connect to a phenomena now attached to the climate crisis.

After bouncing video rough cuts back and forth across the intertubes, Catherine quickly came up with perfection. I had initially used a half-speed recording of music by Brooklyn-based musician Benoit Pioulard for setting the mood but then decided why not ask him to do an original score? And so he did! I was thrilled about this development because on top of it all, he also released “Eidetic”, one of my favourite CD releases of 2023. And the results are also, by my reckoning, something resembling perfection.

Thank you Catherine and thank you Thomas (Benoit)!

So herewith; fireseed.

catherinegraham.com

pioulard.bandcamp.com/music

This new video was premiered at the MANTIS Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music at the University of Manchester (UK) on November 27th, 2022 and will see more screenings throughout 2023. It’s a unique hybrid project that I developed with composer David Berezan during the first two years of the pandemic. It took a while to take this final form and for an appropriate title to emerge but David Berezan and I immediately took to Hydrology. I strongly advise a big screen and good sound system!

HYDROLOGYthe study of the distribution and movement of water both on and below the Earth’s surface, as well as the impact of human activity on water availability and conditions.

Work on Hydrology began during the first post-covid lockdown “re-opening” in the summer of 2020. At the first opportunity I revisited the banks of the Capilano River where I grew up in the shadow of Cleveland Dam during the 1970s. Built in 1954, the dam necessitated the downstream construction of the Capilano Salmon Hatchery in 1971 after it choked off the natural salmon spawning grounds, transforming them into one of Vancouver’s three main lake reservoirs. These were two human interventions into natural water flows and processes which I never questioned at the time. But revisting this place during climate breakdown and a pandemic had me fearing for these systems on many levels.

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VR Media is pleased to offer another in our series of video poems, visual adaptations of the work of local poets. The first ones we did featured the work of Liz Bachinsky (Nails and Lions Gate Bridge). Then we did several pieces from Catherine Owen’s The River System (currently viewable on our YouTube channel). This latest offering is a piece I did with Christina Shah after reading her work in EVENT magazine. The title struck me first, rig veda. What is that? It seemed a good fit on several levels so we arranged to nail down a location that reflected the setting and I got down to improvising, guided by the text and conversations we’d had around visual treatment. I added a subtle pulse underneath using a fretless bass and Strymon effects unit. We recorded Christina reading and I adjusted the pitch down just a hair to give it just a bit of “off-ness” in post. Otherwise I just cut it (or, rather, dissolved it) to the feel and mood I got from both the text and footage from the job site down by the “River District.”

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