Barry McKinnon was a B.C. poet and editor who founded and edited the Caledonia Writing Series, which was an independent forum for B.C. poets in the 1970s. His interviews with B.C. poets were published in the journal "Open Letter" in 1988.
Rick McGrath is a Canadian writer, editor, designer, and publisher. He was born in New Westminster, BC on July 4, 1946. McGrath was a charter student of Simon Fraser University, graduating with an Honours Bachelor of English, first class, in 1970. He stayed another two years at SFU working towards a Master's degree, which he ultimately did not complete. During his time at SFU, he worked on The S.F. View in 1965, was the sports editor of The Peak from 1965-1966, and the editor, editorial page columnist, and music critic of the Canadian University Press from 1968-1969. As an alumnus, he was the editor of Afterthoughts alumni magazine from 1975-1979.
McGrath's reporting career continued well past SFU. Concurrent to his academic career, McGrath was the entertainment editor and rock critic at The Georgia Straight from 1969-1972. In September 1972, he became a reporter for the Richmond Review, becoming assistant editor in 1974. He left in 1978 to begin his advertising career.
After leaving the Richmond Review, McGrath co-founded McGrath Dunn Advertising, and over the next nine years, became co-owner and/or partner in three Vancouver ad agencies. A self-described "adman," in 1987, he became the in-house advertiser of Pemberton Securities in Vancouver, which was later bought by RBC Dominion Securities in 1989. After the purchase, he transitioned into the role of VP Creative Services and moved to their head office in Toronto at this time. McGrath retired on December 31, 1999.
McGrath continued his writing and publishing after his retirement, contributing to SFU's AQ Magazine as a columnist from 2000-2004. In 2013, he started his own publishing company, The Terminal Press, and has authored and published his own books. These include Straight Man, The Disenchanted Forest, and many focused on J.G. Ballard, his writings, and writings inspired by him, such as The J.G. Ballard Book and Deep Ends.
An editor and reviewer for the LA Weekly and publisher of the Edgewise Café, one of Canada’s first electronic literary magazines, Heather Haley’s writing has appeared in numerous print journals and anthologies. In addition to publishing Rattler, a critically acclaimed multimedia arts and literary journal, she is the author of the poetry collections Sideways (Anvil Press), Three Blocks West of Wonderland (Ekstasis Editions), and Skookum Raven (Ekstasis Editions) and the novel The Town Slut’s Daughter, set in Vancouver British Columbia's early underground punk rock scene. Haley has directed numerous videopoems (Dying for the Pleasure, Purple Lipstick and Bushwhack) and official selections at dozens of international film festivals. She also has released collections of spoken word song, Princess Nut, and Surfing Season, under the name AURAL Heather.
Haley was a member of one of Vancouver’s first all-female punk rock bands, the Zellots in the late 1970’s. Following their dissolution, she formed the ‘45s with Randy Rampage of DOA, Brad Kent of the Avengers, and Karla Duplantier of the Controllers and relocated to San Francisco. Later, she formed HHZ—Heather Haley & the Zellots—praised by music critic Craig Lee as one of "Ten Great LA Bands". She has played the Smilin' Buddha Cabaret, Mabuhay Gardens, and Geary Street Theatre (People's Temple) in San Francisco, the Hong Kong Cafe, the Palomino Club, Blackies, Club 88, Club Lingerie and the John Anson Ford Theatre in Los Angeles. Haley currently performs in the indie folk duo, The Pluviophiles, with Keir Nicoll.
Ruth Emerson (Wortis) was a dancer, choreographer, dance educator, and a pioneer of postmodern dance. She was born in Palo Alto, California on March 16, 1938.
Ruth had her first exposure to dance under the inspiring mentorship of Mim Rosen at University High School in Urbana, Illinois. She was an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, where she spent all her spare time dancing and studied summers at the American Dance Festival in New London, Conneticut with Louis Horst and José Limon. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1958 with a BA in Mathematics. After college, she supported herself by writing school math texts while taking dance classes at the Martha Graham School, the Merce Cunningham Studio, and the Robert Joffrey School of Ballet in New York and performing with the Dancemakers in Boston. In New York she danced with the Pearl Lang Company. She was a founding member in 1962 of the Judson Dance Theatre, pioneers of the formal, minimalist movement style now known as Postmodern Dance.
In 1964, she married theoretical physicist, Michael Wortis, moving first to Berkeley, California, where she danced with Ann Halprin and then to Paris, France, where she performed and choreographed at the Theatre d’Essai de la Dance. From 1968 to 1973, she held a part-time faculty position in the Dance Department at the University of Illinois. She completed an MA in Dance at the University in 1973 under Margaret Erlanger and Jan Stockman Simonds. She founded a dance company, Somedancers, Inc., which performed in Champaign/Urbana from 1974 to 1978. From 1981 to 1987, she taught dance and choreographed musicals at University High School; during this time, she also held a residency at the Radcliffe Institute from 1986-1987.
In the fall of 1987, Ruth, Michael and their two daughters moved to Vancouver, B.C.. She helped to develop the first Provincial Dance Curriculum for B.C. schools under the Provincial Ministry of Education. As a Sessional Instructor at the Centre for the Arts and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Education at Simon Fraser University, she developed and taught a program for student teachers. She also continued to perform and to choreograph locally, offering dance courses at local community centres. She served nationally on the grant selection committee of the Canada Council, Dance Section.
Ruth passed away on September 13, 2015.
bill bissett (born William Frederick Bissett, November 23, 1939) is a Canadian poet known for his anti-conventional style. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, bissett (who deliberately does not capitalize his name) attended Dalhousie University (1956) and the University of British Columbia (1963-1965) but dropped out of both universities because of his desire to live as a free agent, writer and painter unencumbered by academic constraints. He did complete course requirements for his two majors in English and Philosophy. He moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1958. In 1963 he started the blew ointment magazine and later launched blewointment press, which has published volumes by Cathy Ford, Maxine Gadd, Michael Coutts, Hart Broudy, Rosemary Hollingshead, Beth Jankola, Carolyn Zonailo, bpNichol, Ken West, Lionel Kearns and D. A. Levy. bissett is based in Vancouver and Toronto, Ontario, alternating between the two cities. He is known for his use of a unique orthography and incorporating visual elements in his printed poetry, and his performance of "concrete sound" poetry, sound effects, chanting, and barefoot dancing during his poetry readings. He has also had large exhibits of his paintings and made audio recordings. He was the lyricist and vocalist in the Ontario band, Luddites. His work typically ranges from the mystical to the mundane, incorporating humour, a sense of wonder and sentimentality, and political commentary.
Alan Twigg was born in North Vancouver, British Columbia in 1952. Since 1987, he has owned and published the newspaper, B.C. BookWorld, Canada’s largest circulation publication about books. In 1985, Twigg co-founded the B.C. Book Prizes, and he was its executive director and
chief fundraiser in the 1990s. He also created the Van City Women’s Book Prize, and coordinated it between 1992 and 2005. Twigg was a representative of the Writers Union of Canada, on the original Board of Directors for the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University. He also served on the boards of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Committee and the Vancouver Cultural Alliance. He is a founder of British Columbia’s annual Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia, which he has also coordinated since 1995. In 1994, he organized events aiming to honor George Woodcock, who was British Columbia’s most prolific man of letters.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Alan Twigg worked as a freelance writer. From 1995 to 1998, he wrote a weekly editorial column for The Province newspaper. He has written for The Quill & Quire, BC Historical News, as a theatre critic for The Georgia Straight, Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, Maclean’s, Vancouver Sun, Step and Pacific Northwest Review of Books. Alan Twigg appears frequently as a guest on CBC Radio, and he has been the host of a CBC television series about B.C. authors.
Al Neil was born in Vancouver, BC in 1924. In 1941, he worked as a surveyor with the Department of Transport, helping to build the wartime airfield at Port Hardy, Vancouver Island. He served in Normandy during the Second World War. After the war Neil worked at a variety of jobs, including clothing salesman, postal clerk, roof tarrer, lighthouse keeper and jazz musician. Neil passed away in Vancouver on November 16, 2017
Al Neil co-founded Vancouver's Cellar Jazz Club in 1952 and performed with artists such as Art Pepper, Conte Candoli and Kenneth Patchen. He married Marguerite Sanders circa 1964; they separated in the early 1970s. During the 1960s and 1970s Neil became known for solo and ensemble performances which combined music with texts, art assemblages, slides and prepared tapes. He performed regularly at the Western Front in the early 1980s, and his collage works were exhibited in galleries such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, Coburg Gallery, and Atelier Gallery.
Neil lives in Vancouver, BC, with his partner and collaborator, Carole Itter. Their Dollarton beach cabin was the last remaining of a number of beach shacks in North Vancouver, and was removed from the waterfront in 2015. As of 2016, a collaboration of grunt gallery, Creative Cultural Collaborations (C3) and Other Sights is working to remediate and repurpose the cabin as a studio for a floating artist residency program.
Neil’s published writings include “West Coast Lokas” (Intermedia 1972), “Changes” (Coach House Press 1975; reprinted by Nightwood Editions in 1989), and “Slammer” (Pulp Press 1981). In 2003, Neil was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily Carr University of Art & Design. His work was the subject of a retrospective entitled The Al Neil Project, in 2005, organized in part by grunt gallery. Al Neil’s artwork was featured on the poster for the 2008 Vancouver International Jazz Festival, which included a concert called Homage Collage: Improv for Al Neil. In 2014, Neil received the Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Eli A. Popoff (1921-2014) was born on a farm near the town of Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan and as an adult he moved to Grand Forks in the interior of British Columbia. He was a farmer, carpenter, bookkeeper, writer, community worker, Doukhobor historian, educator, translator, editor of Iskra newsletter, member of the USCC and a family man. Popoff’s contribution includes working as an administrator of the USCC, as a secretary of John J. Verigin and as a primary correspondent of the USCC with individuals or organizations dealing with the Doukhobors from 1970s to 2010s. In 1957, Popoff was a first Doukhobor to hold public office in BC as School Board Trustee in Grand Forks. In 1968, Popoff became a secretary of the Association of Canadians of Russian Descent and helped organized 70th Anniversary of Doukhobors in Canada. Besides being editor of Iskra for two years, Popoff published numerous works on the Doukhobor beliefs and translated various Doukhobor writings, including psalms, hymns, songs, letters and speeches from Russian to English. In relation to Doukhobor songs translation, Popoff collaborated with Kenneth Peacock of the National Museum of Man in Ottawa in order to preserve musical tradition of the Doukhobors. In addition, from 1970s to 1980s Popoff was involved with Selkirk College, BC and gave series of lectures and facilitated discussions on the Doukhobor philosophy and history. Moreover, Popoff edited and translated the proceeding of the Joint Doukhobor Research Committee Symposiums Meetings, 1974-1982 that were published by Selkirk College in 1997. In 1992, he complied and published a collection called Stories From Doukhobor History containing translated articles about the Doukhobors meant to be used as teaching curriculum for children at the Sunday school meetings of the USCC. In 1999, during the Conference on the Doukhobor Centenary at the University of Ottawa, Popoff was awarded with the Institute of Canadian Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canadian Studies.
Ajaib (Jab) Sidhoo was born on January 8, 1923 in the Punjab, India, when it was still ruled by Britain. Due to his father’s protestation against high British taxes on farmland in India, Jab’s father relocated to Vancouver Island in 1927, where he worked in the Kapoor sawmill. Jab was sent to join him in 1929, accompanied not by family but by another couple from his village.
After a number of years residing amongst the Island’s lumber mills, the Sidhoo family moved to Kitsilano in the late 1930s and Jab attended Kitsilano High School in 1939, where he played on the school rugby team. In 1941, he transferred to Vancouver Technical High School to learn a trade. In 1943 he was one of three students from his class recruited by the Canadian Air Force, becoming one of the first South-Asian Canadians to serve in World War II. He was trained in aircraft maintenance and worked as a fleet mechanic at bases in Caron, Saskatchewan and in the Yukon.
After the war Jab founded East India Traders in Vancouver as a wholesaler for imported carpets and goods. He spent time in India training in the profession, and it was there that he met his future wife Nirmal Dutt (also known as Munni [ca. 1933]). They married in India in 1950 then returned to Vancouver, eventually having two children, Asha and Ravi. Jab’s business also expanded as his client base grew to include hotel chains, banks and other successful professionals. He renamed his business East India Carpets and opened a retail location at 1606 West 2nd Avenue in 1962, where it remains a fixture in the community.
An avid sports fan, Jab was one of the original 100 investors of the BC Lions in 1953 and became a lifelong season ticket holder. He also amassed a considerable collection of football-themed newspapers and magazines, as well as souvenir programs from games in the 1950s and 1960s.
Together, Jab and Munni were active in their community and involved in philanthropic ventures, such as the Ajaib (Jab) and Nirmal (Munni) Sidhoo Charities Fund which sponsors medical scholarships and schools. Munni died on November 14, 2001. Jab passed away on February 22, 2016 at the age of 93. His archive, recently donated to Special Collections and Rare Books by his family, consists of photographs, documents, sports memorabilia, ephemera and objects detailing all aspects of his life as a first generation Canadian, and the communities in which he lived and worked.
Koozma J. Tarasoff was born in Saskatoon. He is a writer and scholar creating works related to Doukhobor history and culture.
Lundy Dale is a writer for What's Brewing Magazine and a long-time organizer and contributor to the BC craft beer scene. She was a founder of CAMRA Vancouver, BC's Craft Beer Month, and Pink Pints - Barleys Angles Vancouver, and she was past President of CAMRA BC. Dale was the first-ever recipient of the BC Beer Awards Legend Award in 2018.
Dave Smith is a beer journalist and publisher based in British Columbia's Lower Mainland. Since 2015 Smith has edited and published What's Brewing Magazine, the journal of BC's craft beer movement.
Smith was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1965. After his family relocated to BC, Smith went on to study Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (1982-1984) and Business Management and Communications at BCIT (1992-1994). During the late 1980s and 1990s Smith worked at technology-related businesses, eventually focussing around the Internet. He established Dave Smith Consulting Services in 1999, which eventually evolved into web services company Line49 Design Group Inc., where Smith continues as principal.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Smith became interested in craft beer and the collection of breweriana (items such as beer bottles) as a hobby. With his wife Ivana he found a shared passion for beer tourism and soon began attending beer festivals and related events. The pair joined the fledgling Vancouver branch of the Campaign for Real Ale Society of British Columbia (CAMRA BC) in 2005, at which point they began volunteering at beer events regularly. Smith also served as a technical consultant for CAMRA Vancouver, establishing their website’s domain name and email system.
By 2013, this activity had sparked an interest in beer writing that led to contributions to CAMRA BC's long-running magazine-style newsletter, What's Brewing. When it suspended publication in 2014, Smith and other contributors found themselves without a forum for beer writing in BC. By tapping into the web publishing resources available through Line49 Design, Smith was able to evolve What’s Brewing into a digital-first magazine. Through the remainder of the 2010s, dozens of BC craft beverage enthusiasts and professionals would voluntarily contribute to this new platform, which eventually included a comprehensive weekly newsletter, events calendar, Tasting Panel and profiles of numerous BC craft community members.
In 2018, Line49 also took over publication of Beer Me BC—a website founded in 2012 which had become BC’s most prominent source of ongoing beer reviews, job postings and resources. At the end of 2020, What's Brewing joined its sister publication as an online-only service, and the pair of websites continue to be sources of BC craft brewing community news via web and social media.
Eleanor Wachtel, CM is a Canadian writer and broadcaster. For over thirty years she hosted the weekly literary show Writers and Company on CBC Radio One. She was born and raised in Montreal, where she took a B.A. in English literature at McGill University. Wachtel lived for a time in the United States and Kenya, and then in the mid-'70s worked as a freelance writer and broadcaster in Vancouver. She has co-edited two books: The Expo Story (1986), and Language in Her Eye (1990), and is the co-author of A Feminist Guide to the Canadian Constitution (1992). In 1993, Knopf Canada published a selection of interviews called Writers and Company; More Writers and Company was published in the fall of 1996. In spring 2003, HarperCollins brought out another selection, Original Minds. Wachtel is a contributor to the best-seller, Dropped Threads (2001), co-edited by Carol Shields, and Lost Classics (2000), co-edited by Michael Ondaatje et al. In 2007, she published Random Illuminations: Conversations With Carol Shields. For five years she was Adjunct Professor of Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University. In the fall of 1987, Wachtel moved to Toronto to work full-time as Literary Commentator on CBC Stereo's State of the Arts, and then as writer-broadcaster for The Arts Tonight, and Toronto reporter for The Arts Report. She was host of The Arts Tonight from 1996 to 2007, and has been host of CBC Radio's Writers & Company since its inception in 1990. In 1995 and again in 2003, Writers & Company won the CBC Award for Programming Excellence for the best weekly show broadcast nationally In 2002, Eleanor Wachtel was named winner of the Jack Award for the promotion of Canadian books. Wachtel has received six honorary degrees. In 2005, Wachtel was named a member of the Order of Canada.
Harold Henry (Hal) Johnston was born in Ardreagh, Northern Ireland, apprenticed as plasterer, and emigrated to Canada in 1951. Settling in Edmonton in 1952, he married Frances Henriette Coulombe (29 July 1932-14 Mar 2018) in June 1955. He worked in Edmonton as a plasterer until late 1957, when they moved to Burnaby, British Columbia. They purchased, renovated and occupied 4447 Venables St.
Johnston continued to work as a plasterer, serving in 1969 as business agent for the Plasterers’ and Stonemasons’ Union, and then self-employed as A&H Plastering and Stucco from 1970 until his death from cancer.
Harold Johnston was a serious photographer and camera collector, recording some 600 rolls of black and white and slide film in 35mm and other formats on a variety of cameras from the early 1950s until 1984, mainly of locations in the Lower Mainland and Pacific Northwest.
From 1960 he processed and printed the negatives himself in a home darkroom. From 1970 Johnston recorded several artists, illustrators and sculptors working in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, notably Wil Hudson (fine printer and typographer), Keith Shields (sculptor), Frits Jacobsen (illustrator), Charles Butler (wood sculptor) and Bill Shoebotham (artist). He maintained contact with, and often photographed, them until his death. For Wil, he recorded the sequence of operations involved in book production; photographically reproduced line drawings for a book project for the Alcuin Society; recorded candid views of Wil’s shops, and social occasions; and, processed and printed Wil’s film exposed during his time working at Cape Dorset, Baffin Island.
Syd (formerly Rachel) Zolf’s artistic practice explores materialist questions about memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. Zolf’s work queerly enacts how ethics founders on the shoals of the political, imagining other possibilities of sociality, space, and time.
Their books of poetry include Human Resources (2007, Coach House Books), Neighbour Procedure (2010, Coach House Books), Janey’s Arcadia (2014, Coach House Books), and Social Poesis (2019, Wilfrid Laurier University Press). Their book No One's Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (2021, Duke University Press) was a finalist for the 2022 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. They won a 2018 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and have been a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Raymond Souster Memorial Award. Their film version of Janey’s Arcadia has shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and other venues. Among their many collaborations, they wrote the film The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture, directed by New York artist Josiah McElheny, which premiered at Art Basel Miami; and they conducted the first collaborative MFA in Creative Writing ever, The Tolerance Project. They have taught at New York’s The New School and the University of Calgary and have completed a PhD in Philosophy, Art and Social Thought at the European Graduate School.
Mitchell J. (Mitch) Taylor was born on September 7, 1944 to Thomas and Florence Taylor, in Fort Frances Ontario. He was the fifth of the couple’s nine children. In 1952, at the age of seven, Taylor and his older brother Bob went to live with Alexander and Winnifred Brown on their farm near Regent, Manitoba to attend school and help on the farm.
Taylor lived with the Browns until the fall of 1962, when he began Bachelor of Science studies at the University of Manitoba. During the summers he held various jobs, including sweeping up nickel dust at the International Nickel Company of Canada mine smelter in Thompson, Manitoba and welding assistant on the TransCanada natural gas pipeline in Saskatchewan. After graduating from university in 1965, Taylor travelled through Europe before securing a job with Imperial Oil as an Industrial Sales Representative based in Kamloops, B.C.
On June 10, 1967, Taylor married Anne Franklin, his former classmate at Dand High School and a recent University of British Columbia graduate. The couple later had two daughters, Lydia and Jillian. The Taylors initially lived in Kamloops, with Anne teaching school locally. In 1969, Taylor became BC sales manager for Imperial Oil and was transferred to the Vancouver head office. He was promoted to a financial analyst role for the province in 1970, and in 1971 he became the Assistant to the Petroleum Products Committee of Imperial Oil, based in the Toronto office.
In 1972, Taylor resigned from Imperial Oil to embark on a new business venture in Vancouver with partner Bill Harvey. Purchasing the former Monsanto Chemical buildings on Granville Island for $18,000.00, the partners established Creekhouse Industries. They also received approval to build a 400-berth marina on the north shore of False Creek, west of the Cambie Street Bridge. While successfully lobbying for the revitalization of Granville Island, Taylor and Harvey fully renovated the Monsanto buildings, opening them as The Creekhouse in the winter of 1972. Their second venture, False Creek Marinas, began operations the following year in 1973 and immediately had a waitlist. After more than a decade of success, the land it occupied was expropriated by the BC government for Expo 86 and the marina was demolished.
By 1981, Harvey and Taylor were looking for a new business venture and they settled upon the establishment of a German-style lager craft brewery on Granville Island. The first microbrewery in Canada, Granville Island Brewing (GIB) was officially opened on June 9, 1984, with a German, Rainer Kallahne, as brewmaster. It had an initial capacity of 5000 hectolitres (125,000 cases) of beer per year. Bill Harvey eventually pulled out of the brewery operations. Taylor continued to operate as President and CEO until 1989, when International Potters Distilling (owner of Calona Wines and Pacific Western Brewery) did a share exchange with GIB. This reduced Taylor’s shares from a majority position in GIB to a much smaller minority position in Potters. Taylor remained involved with GIB, taking on the position of VP Sales and Marketing for Potters for three years before resigning and selling his shares in 1992. Additional information about Granville Island Brewing can be found in Series F-329-4 Granville Island Brewing Company Limited records.
In January 1995, Taylor purchased Bellingham Marine Industries, becoming the company’s President and CEO. Under his ownership, the company expanded to twelve plants in eight countries and became a world leader in marina design, engineering and construction by the time Taylor sold it in 2006. From 2006 to 2016, Taylor sat on the Board of Directors for The Knowledge Network, and from 2009 to May 2017, Taylor was co-owner of Knight Signs in Delta, BC. Through all of this time, he has retained an ownership position in Creekhouse Industries. In 2021, Mitch Taylor wrote and published his autobiography titled Making Way: A Memoir, which details his personal and professional experiences to that time.
Larry Gambone is a writer and publisher, SFU alumnus (1967-1970), and participant for over six decades in New Left, counter-culture and anarchist movements in Vancouver and later Montréal. He founded the Red Lion Press in 1984, now based in Nanaimo, BC.
Gambone was born in 1945 in Philadelphia to parents Dominick and Adree Gambone. At age two, he came with his mother, grandmother and aunt to Victoria. There his mother met Bill Shenk, who became Gambone's step-father. The family moved to a property at Gold Stream, just outside Victoria, with subsequent moves to Duncan (1954) and Courtenay (1957). Gambone's political activism began in the summer of 1965 when he became involved in the Comox Project. This was a campaign against the storage of nuclear warheads at the Comox military base, culminating in in a 36-hour occupation of the base gates in August.
After a brief stay in Toronto, travels to Mexico and participation in the Vietnam Teach-In in Victoria, Gambone enrolled at Simon Fraser University in September 1967. He joined the Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology (PSA) Department, graduating in 1970. At SFU, Gambone was a founding member of the Students for a Democratic University (SDU), helped organize an SFU branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and was involved in various campus campaigns and protests, including the occupation of the Administration Building in November 1968 and the PSA strike in 1969. He became printer for the Student Society in 1968 and helped produced the two issues of SFU IWW's Solidarity Magazine (1969).
Through the 1970s and '80s, Gambone was active in Vancouver's political counter-culture and was involved in a number of groups and projects: Vancouver Yippie! (Youth International Party, 1970-1971), the Yellow Journal (1971), a commune in the Kootenays (1974), the Open Road anarchist newspaper (1975 and 1979-1987), the Anarchist Party of Canada (Groucho-Marxist), Spartacus Books, the Muckfunnel - Fanzine of the Irrational (1982-1987), and the Vancouver IWW. Gambone moved to London UK for several months in 1979. Returning to Vancouver, he took up the study of working class movements and the thinkers that influenced them. Out of this grew his interest in Joseph Dietzgen, the 19th-century German socialist philosopher. In 1984 Gambone founded the Red Lion Press and brought out an edition of Dietzgen's book, The Nature of Human Brain Work (originally published in 1869).
In 1987 Gambone left Vancouver for Montréal, where he remained until 2006, working at warehousing and then as a housekeeper for the Montréal Children's Hospital. He participated in local anarchist circles and began producing numerous pamphlets through his Red Lion Press. During this period, Gambone also contributed articles for the libertarian left and anarchist press, and with Dick Martin produced the magazine Any Time Now from 1992-2007.
Retiring from the hospital in 2006, Gambone returned to BC to Nanaimo. He continued his studies and his political, writing and publishing activities. Through Red Lion Press he published several collections of his own essays - The View From Anarchist Mountain (2010), Another View From Anarchist Mountain (2012), and Anarchic Essays (2014); several anthologies - The Impossibilists: The Socialist Party of Canada and the One Big Union - Selected Articles (2010) and the International Socialist Review Anthology (ca. 2020); and editions of works by other writers, including Kevin Carson, Fred Casey, Sebastian Faure, Hans Feldt, Jack Kavanagh, Ima Louette, and Bill Pritchard. He produced a new edition of Dietzgen's The Nature of Human Brain Work for PM Press (2010) and published two works with Edmonton's Black Cat Press - his memoir, No Regrets: Counter-culture and Anarchism in Vancouver (2014) and a history of the IWW, For Freedom We Will Fight: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia, 1905-1990 (2021).
John Rowling is past President and co-founder of CAMRA BC (the Campaign for Real Ale Society of British Columbia) and a co-founder and long-time director of Victoria's Great Canadian Beer Festival Society.
Rowling was born in the United Kingdom, in Sidcup, Kent in the suburbs of London on May 11, 1940. He survived the Blitz and a bomb that destroyed all the houses on his street save his family home. Rowling studied at London University, graduating with a B.Sc. in Geology in 1962. He emigrated to Canada later that year to pursue graduate studies at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton. After four years at UNB, Rowling settled in Calgary, working as an exploration geologist for Chevron and other companies for the next 20 years. In 1988, he moved to Victoria to take up a position in the Petroleum Geology Branch of the BC Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, continuing there until his retirement in 1997.
In 1968 Rowling married Carol Graham, and they had three children and six grandchildren. Carol passed away in 2022.
Rowling has been a beer and pub enthusiast all his life. From Canada he followed the activities of the UK's Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) movement. His brother Rob had joined CAMRA UK in 1974, later becoming President of the Boston, Licolnshire branch. Shortly after his move to Victoria, John learned of the existence of a CAMRA Canada and signed up. On April 7, 1990 at a meeting at Spinnaker's Pub in Victoria, Rowling along with his wife Carol and Phil Cottrell and Dave Preston founded a CAMRA Victoria branch. The group opted for independence from the eastern-based CAMRA Canada and in September 1990 registered CAMRA BC as an incorporated society, with its own constitution, by-laws and finances. Rowling served as the first President from 1990-1992, with a further term in 2000-2003.
Rowling and other CAMRA BC members participated in Victoria's first beer festival in July 1992. The experience inspired them to create an annual festival under CAMRA's auspices. Starting in 1993 as the Victoria Microbrewery Festival, it showcased BC's craft breweries, while also bringing in a smaller number of brewers from other provinces and the USA. In 1995, the event was renamed the Great Canadian Beer Festival (GCBF) and a separate body, the GCBF Society, was spun off from CAMRA to assume ongoing responsibility for planning and organization. Rowling and Gerry Hieter were for many year the main organizers, and Rowling remained a GCBF Director until 2018. In 2019 the GCBF Society disbanded and a new organization, the Victoria Beer Society, took over responsibility for the festival.
Rowling was a frequent contributor to CAMRA BC's newsletter, What's Brewing, launched in June 1990 under the editorship of Phil Atkinson. (CAMRA UK, CAMRA Canada and CAMRA BC all had newsletters by this same name.) With the very first issue of What's Brewing BC, Rowling started the long-running column that would eventually become The Hopbine, "a fresh gathering of news and gossip"). In his column Rowling brought together short news items, announcements, reviews, comments and opinions on happenings in the beer world; he continued to write it until the end of 2003. From about 2004-2015, Rowling regularly wrote about beer and the BC craft beer scene for Victoria's Eat Magazine, and during the same period he was the BC correspondent for the California-based Celebrator Beer Magazine.
In 2002, Matt Phillips of Victoria's Phillips Brewing Company created a special beer to honour Rowling as "a trailblazer and true champion of the craftbrewers' art" – Big Bad John's Traditional English Barley Wine. "Giants fear him / Taste buds applaud him" declared its label. In 2018 Rowling stepped down from the Board of the GCBF Society. The following year, Rowling and Gerry Hieter were presented with Legend Awards at the BC Brewing Awards, in recognition of their contributions to BC's craft beer community.
Jim Rimmer was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1934. In 1950, he undertook a six-year apprenticeship with local printer and publisher J.W. Boyd and Sons. He subsequently worked for seven years as a journeyman compositor for several BC newspapers, including the Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun, and the Williams Lake Tribune. From 1972 to 1999, Rimmer ran a freelance design office, working as an illustrator, graphic designer, and type designer; some of his more notable commercial designs include the logo for Canadian Pacific Airlines, and the provincial mark for British Columbia.
Rimmer designed and cut his first typeface, Juliana Old Style, in 1980. In the years following, he designed and produced numerous faces in both metal and digital format, including proprietary fonts and typeface revivals. For several years during the 1980s Rimmer worked with Giampa Text Ware, operated by Gerald Giampa. Rimmer designed digital type fonts with this firm and its successor, Lanston Type Company. He was an active member of the American Typecasting Fellowship beginning in 1984, and founded the Rimmer Type Foundry in 1998.
In 1974, Rimmer founded Pie Tree Press, named after an old apple tree in his backyard, the fruit of which was used to make pies. As Pie Tree Press, Rimmer printed numerous broadsides and books, including Alison’s Fishing Birds, commissioned by Colophon Books. He subsequently produced four major limited edition publications, for which he did the typesetting, illustrations and book-binding: Shadow River: the Selected and Illustrated Poems of Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1997), A Christmas Carol (1998), Leaves from the Pie Tree (2006), an autobiographical work including “how-to” knowledge, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2008). Rimmer was working on the design of the ‘Dubloon’ typeface for a fifth book, Treasure Island, at the time of his death (this font will be released as the “Rimmer” typeface).
Over the course of his career, Rimmer taught drawing and typography classes at many local colleges and universities, including the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, Capilano College, Kwantlen College, Simon Fraser University, and the University College of the Fraser Valley. He also held workshops in hand-setting, printing, and book-binding. Rimmer’s work earned him awards from the Creative Club, Graphic Designers of Canada, Art Direction Creativity in Illustration, and the American Typecasting Fellowship. A series of broadsides designed for Westgraphica, now Karo, earned him the “Communication Arts Award of Excellence” in the self-promotion class. “Rimmerfest : An Evening to Celebrate Jim Rimmer and His Many Contributions” took place on November 25, 2006; the event was organized by Simon Fraser University Library. In 2007, Rimmer was made a fellow of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada.
Jim Rimmer passed away in New Westminster on January 8, 2010.
Barrie Philip Nichol (September 30, 1944 September 25, 1988), who often went by his lower-case initials and last name, with no spaces (bp Nichol), was a prolific Canadian poet and also a language artist, editor and publisher. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and became widely known for his concrete poetry while living there in the 1960s. He received his elementary teaching certificate from the University of British Columbia in 1963, but he only worked briefly as a teacher before dedicating himself to writing. His best-known published work is probably The Martyrology, a long poem encompassing 9 books in 6 volumes. Nichol also worked in a wide variety of other genres, including musical theatre, children's books, collage/assemblage, pamphlets, spoken word, computer texts, fiction, and television. In 1970, he began to collaborate with fellow poets Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery, forming the sound-poetry group The Four Horsemen. He was also active with Coach House Press and Open Letter, with his own presses, grOnk and Ganglia, and in the therapeutic community, Therafields, for a number of years. Nicol was married in 1980 to Eleanor Hiebert.
Anne Cameron was the author of several volumes of fiction, poetry, and children's stories, and scripts for television and film (published under the name Cam Hubert). Her novel, Daughters of Copper Woman, is one of the top selling BC books published by a BC publisher. In 2010, Cameron received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for B.C. literature. She lived in Tahsis, BC.
Philip Hobler was a professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), who was appointed from 1967 to 2001. For many years, he captained the SFU archaeological research vessel Sisiutil, which was launched in 1972 and used yearly for summer fieldwork until 1992. Hobler worked at various archaeological sites in Egypt, Fiji, the United States, the Northwest Territories, and on the west coast of British Columbia. His work primarily focused on archaeological sites within Nuxalk Nation territory; From 1987 to 1990, he directed the Bella Coola Villages Project, where excavations were conducted at the Nusqualst, Qwliuth, and Snxlhh village sites.
Other projects direct by Hobler took place along the Stikine River, around Moresby Island in Haida Gwaii, around northern Vancouver Island, on the Southern Gulf Islands, at Fort McLoughlin, at Barkerville’s Chinatown, and on the Snare River and Kakisa Lake in the North West Territories.
Dr. Hobler passed away on July 19, 2006.
Paul Keenleyside has been involved in the BC Social Credit Party from April 1979 to June 1995. Paul’s father was very civic minded and taught Paul about voting and community involvement, but himself was neither involved in politics nor was he a member of the Social Credit party. Paul’s mother was a friend of Shirley Barrett, wife of Dave Barrett (MLA) for Coquitlam riding where Paul and family lived.
Initially, Paul became involved in the 1979 provincial election in Burnaby-Edmonds Social Credit campaign office out of curiosity and after election he became more active participant. Paul introduced the idea of a monthly newsletter for the fledging BC Social Credit Youth Auxiliary. The Party took notice and the newsletter went on to be the longest running newsletter within BC Social Credit.
Paul joined the Burnaby Edmonds Social Credit Constituency Association, became a Director, and rose to be Membership Secretary and later Association Secretary and Vice President. He also was on of the founding Directors of the reconstructed BC Young Socreds and contributed greatly in many ways to the group that started with 35 members and rose to about 3100 in the early 1990s.
Paul received the highest award in BC Social Credit, an Honorary Life Membership in 1990 and highest award in the BC Young Socreds also in 1990. He had received awards of recognition of service from Burnaby Willingdon and also North Vancouver Seymour.
Paul had served in the capacity of Constituency Vice President, being a Regional Returning Officer, and officiating at nomination meetings and annual general meetings. He had volunteered in three leadership campaigns, and three provincial elections at the riding level, and six by-elections. He was a part in the pioneering of using merged voter information to telephone number based databases and also in the use of GIS printed maps for campaigning. He also developed instruction materials for demographic analysis and past election analysis for campaigns.
Sharon Thesen, also known as Sharon Fawcett, was born in Saskatchewan on October 1, 1946. She is a Canadian poet who lives in Lake Country, British Columbia. A graduate of Simon Fraser University (B.A. English, 1970 and M.A. English, 1975), in the late 1960s and early 1970s she was involved in the production of Iron magazine (1967?-1971) edited by her then-husband Brian Fawcett and others. She also participated in the production of Iron II (1975-1976), edited mainly by Brett Enemark. Thesen taught for many years at Capilano College in North Vancouver, where she edited The Capilano Review. She also took part in a teaching exchange with Dawson College (1980) and was a writer-in-residence at Concordia University (1992). In 2003, Thesen was a judge for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She taught Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) from about 2005 until her retirement in 2012. Since then, she has been teaching poetry through her own Pinecone Poetry Workshops.
Thesen has been nominated and has won several awards for her writing, including the Governor General's Literary Award in poetry for "Selected Poems: The Vision Tree" (1982, won; 1984 & 1987, nominated), the BC Book Award for "News and Smoke: Selected Poems" (2000, won), and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for "A Pair of Scissors: Poems" (2001, won).
Sharon Thesen's bibliography includes the following books:
The Wig-Maker (co-written by Janet Gallant). New Star Books, 2021.
The Receiver. Vancouver: New Star Books, 2017.
Oyama Pink Shale. Toronto: Anansi, 2011.
From Toledo. (Chapbook). Prince George, BC: Gorse Press, 2007.
Scrap Book. (Chapbook). Edmonton, AB: The Olive Reading Series Collective, 2006.
Weeping Willow. (Chapbook). Vancouver: Nomados, 2005.
The Good Bacteria. Toronto: Anansi, 2005.
A Pair of Scissors. Toronto: Anansi, 2000.
News & Smoke, Selected Poems. Vancouver: Talon, 1999.
Aurora. Toronto: Coach House, 1995.
Po-It-Tree: A Selection of Poems and Commentary. (Chapbook). Burnaby: SFU, 1992.
The Pangs of Sunday, Selected Poems. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.
The Imagination of Awakening. Monograph. Archai 2, 1973.The Beginning of the Long Dash. Toronto: Coach House, 1987.
Confabulations: Poems for Malcolm Lowry. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan, 1984.
Holding the Pose. Toronto: Coach House, 1983.
Sheet Music. (Chapbook). Burnaby: SFU, 1982.
Radio New France Radio. (Chapbook). Vancouver: Slug Press, 1981.
Artemis Hates Romance. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.
She has also been an editor for the following books:
After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff. With Ralph Maud. Talon Books, 2012.
The New Long Poem Anthology, 2nd Ed. Talon Books, 2001.
Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence. With Ralph Maud. Wesleyan U. Press, 1999.
The New Long Poem Anthology. House of Anansi Press, 1991.
Please note: this bibliography was taken directly from poetrycanada.org, with addendums of publication dates for edited books and addition of Janet Gallant as co-author of The Wig Maker by the archivist.
Shani Mootoo is known for her work as an artist and writer. She was born in Ireland in 1957, grew up in Trinidad, and has lived in Canada since the early 1980s. Mootoo studied fine arts at the University of Western Ontario (1976-1980) where she earned a BFA in Visual Art and began to paint and produce video works. She earned a master of fine arts equivalent at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1982. Mootoo's collection of short stories Out on Main Street was published in 1993. This was followed in 1996 by her first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, which was published in fourteen countries and was a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. In 2001, Mootoo published a collection of poetry, The Predicament of Or. Her second novel, He Drown She in the Sea, was published in May 2005 and long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her subsequent books include: Valmiki's Daughter (2008), Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (2014), and Polar Vortex (2020). Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab and Polar Vortex were both shortlisted for the Giller Prize. 2022 saw the publication of her memoir-based poetry collection titled Cane|Fire. Mootoo has been a writer in residence at the University of Alberta, at Mills College in Oakland, California, and at the Varuna Writers Residency program in Australia. She has taught writing at the University of Alberta, Capilano College in North Vancouver, the BC Festival of the Arts, and the BC Arts Council. Her visual art and video productions have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Queens Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Venice Biennale. In 2021, she received an honorary doctorate from Western University. In 2022, the Writers' Trust of Canada awarded Mootoo the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work.