Photo by Dillon von Petzinger
With over 100 authors in 88 events, the Vancouver Writers Fest, occurring from Oct. 17 to 23, has something for every reader. And there is no shortage of local writers. Critically acclaimed B.C. authors Genevieve von Petzinger, Anosh Irani and Fred Wah take readers on intimate journeys to overlooked places, from as far as the Cave of El Castillo in Spain and Mumbai’s red-light district to as near as small-town B.C. – all without leaving Granville Island’s stages.
As festival attendees gather to celebrate the products of written language, paleoanthropologist, former TED fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Genevieve von Petzinger takes a unique approach: investigating how human writing originated altogether.
Her book, The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols, transports readers back to Ice Age Europe, following von Petzinger to mud-filled tunnels and remote caves in Portugal, France and Spain, to decipher engravings left by our Paleolithic ancestors.
“To see them putting that much effort into making this art – what was it about the art that was so important to them?” she says.
While researchers before her pored over depictions of horses and mammoths, von Petzinger launched an unprecedented study of seemingly nondescript cave drawings – spirals, x’s, dots and other symbols – compiling a database of over 5,000 signs from nearly 400 sites in Europe.
Her discovery was remarkable: over a 30,000-year timespan, just 32 distinct types of geometric signs appear across the entire European continent.
These patterns suggest that a system of graphic communication, a defining human characteristic, may have existed earlier than previously believed.
Von Petzinger’s research has taken her places that most people will never be able to visit. She hopes, however, that she does not remain the only one studying these geometric markings.
“We’re going to open source all the data so that anybody anywhere in the world will be able to take a look,” Von Petzinger adds.
Storytelling from the street level
Fred Wah, Chinese-Canadian poet laureate.
For Anosh Irani, bestselling Indian-Canadian novelist and award-winning playwright, his passion for stories began in childhood.
“My dad is an exceptional storyteller. With ancient cultures like India, the storytelling tradition is very rich,” says Irani.
His latest novel, The Parcel, draws from his experience growing up opposite Bombay’s Kamathipura red-light district, grappling with the haunting disconnection between his life and those existing amongst the dilapidated laneways of brothels nearby.
“We’re like two parallel lines that would never intersect, and I think that as human beings, the lines should intersect. Someone has to make the effort to try and understand,” he says.
Shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Literary Award and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, The Parcel is a poignant story of a eunuch and retired prostitute, Madhu, who is tasked to prepare a trafficked Nepalese girl for the sex trade.
Through extensive research and interviews with sex workers, Irani’s newest work of fiction, in its depictions of violence, drugs, poverty and the “hijra” (transgender) community, reflects harrowing realities of the denigrated community in Bombay’s notorious
sex industry.
Witnessing new developments changing Kamathipura’s landscape during his visits to Bombay in recent years, Irani felt prompted to develop a character whose distorting and dissolving body mirrored the community around her.
But he adds that living in Vancouver gives him the distance and perspective required to maintain graceful and dignified narratives.
“You write about the things that make you uncomfortable, and it’s always a challenge. I don’t want the reader to feel comfortable,” Irani explains.
The hyphen is not just punctuation
Anosh Irani, award-winning Indian-Canadian
novelist and playwright.
“I wasn’t good at English,” says Fred Wah, former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate and author of seventeen books of poetry, including winner of the 1985 Governor General’s AwardWaiting for Saskatchewan.
He laughs in acknowledging that he became an English professor.
“My father was Chinese and his English wasn’t that great. It was OK. But I never really trusted colonial grammar or British grammar. I like the way poetry can break the rules.”
Wah’s newest publication, Scree, is a collection of his poetry from the 1960s to 1980s. While his earliest work focused on landscapes, Wah is perhaps most celebrated for his later contemplations on cultural identity and racial hybridity, writing that first piqued his interest amidst the late 70s Japanese-Canadian redress movement.
Growing up in the 50s in Nelson, B.C., Wah recalls that “race” was a term used only for legal documentation. Even so, filling in the race question perplexed him: his mother was Swedish and his father was a Chinese-Scots-Irishman raised in China. Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wah did not even meet a Chinese woman until his teens.
Paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger.
“During the 90s, I was interested in meeting other people who were mixed up,” he says. “Of course, hybridity is not just with race. It’s sexuality and also diasporas – caught between two cultures, two places. How to describe or how to confront the dynamics of what I call a hyphenated space, of being in between, is metaphysically something I am very interested in.”
Recently, Wah has returned to nature-centric writing in a collaborative art project on the Columbia River with Emily Carr University students. But hyphenation still informs his thinking about places like the river.
“We have to consider our spaces as not necessarily defined or given by their own materiality but perhaps also as spiritual spaces, spaces that involve imagination.” he says.
Besides writing, public readings remain central to his practice as a poet.
He explains, “Paradoxically, writing isn’t a solitary event. It is solitary in the sense that a person sits down and pours their guts out, but it’s always a language that is intended to be shared with an audience.”
For more information, please visit www.writersfest.bc.ca.
