My friend, Betsy Warland, will be launching her latest book, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing on Sunday, September 12 at Rhizome Café in Vancouver (that's at 317 East Broadway @ Kingsway). Several of Betsy's former students (whose writing is featured in her book) will join her for three performance readings at 6:00, 6:40, and 7:15 p.m. Why not come along (I'll be there) and join Betsy for what's sure to be a very lively event? I hear there's going to be snacks, too.

Back in the late 1990s, my wife and I moved from Canada to New Zealand -- we'd fallen in love with the country on our honeymoon (when we backpacked through the South Pacific) and wanted to return. We found work, made arrangements, said our good-byes, and packed our bags. We brought the kids, we brought our clothes, we even brought our photo albums and other assorted family treasures. But some things we couldn't take with us -- we'd only reserved two cubic metres of shipping space, so everything we did take had to pass some very rigorous do-I-really-need-this crap-and-will-I-use-it-again tests (the kids got seats with us, so they passed automatically). Since then, I've realized there are a few things I'd wished we'd hung on to, and most of those are books (we only took one bookshelf's worth with us).

Last week, I was in a book store with a pocket-hole-burning gift card when I came across four of the books I'd given up so long ago: The Midwich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes, and The Day of the Triffids, all by John Wyndham. My heart leapt, I grabbed all four, and promised them a good and permanent home (and my wife let me buy them).

I was so happy to have found them for another reason as well. Back when I read Wyndham for the first time, I had trouble collecting all eight of the works published under the Wyndham name (the author's real name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris, and he wrote a bunch of other stuff, too). There was even one clerk who explained to me at length that Wyndham was no longer in vogue (her words, not mine). Well, I'm glad that the books are making a comeback, because I got to read four of the eight again last week, and really enjoyed them. While I found some structural holes as well as a few other annoying devices Wyndham used (which I attribute to being a product of his time -- like the heavy exposition dumps), on the whole I still like Wyndham's writing and am very glad to have been reacquainted with his work. Now for the hard bit, finding the rest of Wyndham's books (because, I think I want to now). Anyone seen The Seeds of Time, Trouble with Lichen, The Outward Urge, or Chocky by any chance?

My one-act play, Daguerreotype, which debuted at UBC's Brave New Play Rites Festival in 2008, is included in volume 7, number 3 of paperplates magazine (available as a free PDF download on their website). I mentioned in a previous post that the play finally feels complete to me: it's been written, workshopped, edited, rehearsed, produced, had a staged reading, and now, it's been published. Paperplates has also included the stills which we used in the original production (taken by director Lauchlin Johnston), which reminded me how we had people crying in the audience when this first ran: I felt like a ghoul, but their sadness made me happy (the play's supposed to generate tears). Evan Frayne and Joanna Rannelli were awesome in the roles of Edgar and Mrs. Bosanko.