News & Missives

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Celebration Reading

Join us for a celebration reading by the 2021 VMI cohort on Zoom!

We are delighted to showcase the accomplishments of this unique group on completion of the six-month program and invite you to gather with us across time zones to listen.

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Pandemic Readjustments

We support community health and want to ensure writers are best equipped to present their material.

Given the difficulties surrounding Covid-19 and social distancing, VMI has cancelled the June public group reading.  In light of the unforeseen turn of events we have converted this loss into a gain: two extra hours of mentoring in which authors can attend to extra editing, conversation, or questions with their mentors.

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Betsy Warland at Jane’s Walk

Betsy Warland was a featured poet for Jane’s Walk, a citizen-led walking tour. Jane’s Walk on Saturday, May 5 was hosted by Kevin Spenst.

Jane’s Walk, in honour of Jane Jacobs, is “a community-based approach to city building that uses citizen-led walking tours to make space for people to observe, reflect, share, question and re-imagine the places in which they live, work and play.”

Jane’s Walks take place in many cities across the world.

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Body and Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers | VPL Launch

Have you ever had questions about faith or religious practice?

On March 13 at VPL, join Susan Scott, editor of Body and Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers and an all-female panel of contributors including Dora Dueck, Pam Johnson, Jonina Kirton, Lori McNulty, Betsy Warland as they break the age-old code of silence and explore open conversations about the messiness of faith, practice, religion and ceremony.

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Federation of BC Writers launches ‘Who is ‘The Other’’ Poetry Contest

Submissions are now open for this year’s Literary Writes poetry contest sponsored by the Federation of British Columbia Writers (FBCW). There will be two sections: a general category, judged by Fiona Tinwei Lam, and a 19-and-under youth category, judged by Renée Saklikar, both themed: “Who is ‘The Other’?”

Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored two poetry books and a children’s book.

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The Writers’ Union of Canada launches Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers

The Writers’ Union of Canada launches its 26th annual Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers, which invites submissions of fiction and nonfiction for a grand prize of $2500.

The Union is proud to announce an esteemed group of jurors for the Competition:

  • Peter Dubé is the author, co-author, or editor of eleven books including the novels Hovering World and The City’s Gates, the short fiction collection At the Bottom of the Sky, the novella Subtle Bodies, which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and Conjure: a Book of Spells, a collection of prose poems that was shortlisted for the A.

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Betsy at Canadian Writers Against Kinder-Morgan Expansion

On Saturday, August 25, Betsy Warland and many writers gathered to protest the Kinder Morgan buyout and pipeline expansion in Burnaby, BC.

Writers met to share concerns about the threat to local waters; the federal government’s promise that toxic bitumen can be cleaned up when science says it can’t; the marketing of tar sands oil, adding hugely to climate change; the squandering of Canadian tax dollars on a plainly awful business deal; and the violation of the rights and titles of Indigenous peoples during this time of reconciliation.

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