Vancouver is gunning to be named the second UNESCO City of Literature, after Edinburgh was named as the first in 2005. It’ll have to beat out competition from Amsterdam, Alexandria, and Krakow.

Alma Lee, founder of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, is spearheading the campaign, with the help of representatives from the Association of Book Publishers of B.C., the University of B.C., Simon Fraser University, Tourism B.C., and, naturally, Douglas Coupland.

From the Vancouver Sun:

“I decided the best way to present us as a city was as new; you know, we’re new, we’re young, we’re vibrant, we’re part of a new world,” said Lee, who has been talking to representatives of the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization since 2004

…

Lee said application to UNESCO must be made by the City of Vancouver. She said the bid already has the support of Mayor Sam Sullivan, Coun. Elizabeth Ball and Coun. Peter Ladner.

“Personally, I don’t see how [city council] can say no — you never know, of course — and I certainly don’t see how UNESCO can say no.”

“One Book, One Vancouver” has picked Karen X. Tulchinsky’s 2003 novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky (Raincoast Books) as this year’s selection in the city-wide book club.

More info here, at the One Book, One Vancouver website.

Click here to read Q&Q’s review of The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky.

A Vancouver bookstore with a long history of pricey court battles is seeking a buyer. According to Xtra West, Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium owners Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth are looking to move on after 25 years of fighting the good fight. The store is probably best known for pursuing a case against Canada Customs (now Canada Border Services Agency) – which had seized erotic literature bound for the store on the grounds of obscenity – all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Here’s Deva on the kind of candidate they’re looking for:

The challenge now, says Deva, is finding someone who’s going to “proceed and continue with what we’re doing.” There’s no one on a short list just yet, he notes.

“I just want somebody that will carry on, not with everything that we’re doing, but certainly [who can] appeal to a broad section of our community….”

Apart from that, he says, the only other condition of sale is keeping Janine Fuller on as manager — a position she’s held for 12 of the 18 years she’s been at the store.

For more on Little Sister’s previous legal woes (or triumphs, depending on how you look at it), see here (or here or here).

Monday was the deadline for former students of native residential schools to opt out of a $2-billion compensation package offered by the federal government for abuses they suffered while attending the schools. (Accepting compensation means they agree not to sue the government or the churches that ran the schools.) The Tyee provides some related reading with a review of two books: Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast by Jan Hare and Jean Barman (UBC Press) and The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast, edited by Mary-Ellen Kelm (University of Calgary).

Tyee reviewer Crawford Kilian says the books provide some insight into what those schools were like, the mindset of the people running them, and ways that the students suffered even when they weren’t subjected to the worst types of physical and sexual abuse that have been documented.

Apart from chronicling an almost forgotten era in B.C. history, these books introduce us to two remarkable women. Both were highly intelligent, immensely competent, and profoundly toxic to the people they were trying to save.
…
For modern readers, however, it’s striking to see that Emma expressed zero interest in the people the Crosbys were trying to convert. She never discusses the Tsimshians’ culture or history. (One photograph, from 1876, shows Thomas Crosby in Tsimshian regalia; he looks painfully embarrassed.) She refers in passing to the dirt and disease of the natives, but doesn’t even mention the catastrophic smallpox pandemic that a decade earlier had killed a third of the native population on the B.C. coast.

Margaret Butcher made similar remarks: “They are a slow, indolent, dirty people,” she writes, “bound very strongly by custom and superstition.” But Kilian makes particular note of her attitudes toward the Kitamaat people’s language.

“I suppose in a few years time Kitamaat speech will be extinct for the young folks learn to speak Eng. in the schools & one of our senior girls told me they cannot understand all the Kitamaat of the old folk.”

Butcher clearly considered this progress.

It’s very difficult to compensate for this kind of suffering and loss in dollars, but the costs to native people across the country are clearly evident and profound.

The Tyee recently posted a good-news/bad-news article about the state of books in B.C. The good news is that local publishers are doing well and the Vancouver International Writers Festival is putting the province on the literary map. The bad news is that “there’s less about B.C. in locally produced books.” As BC Bookworld publisher Alan Twigg tells The Tyee, “I don’t perceive a strengthening of the B.C. literary climate…. it’s harder to find culturally newsworthy books about B.C. in 2007 than 1997.” And Twigg and others blame a familiar culprit: the big-box phenomenon and the decline of the independent bookselling sector.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the federal government should not be required to provide advance funding to Vancouver’s Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium for its legal battle against Canada Customs, The Globe and Mail reports.

Little Sister’s fight with Canada Customs began 12 years ago after the agency blocked the import of four books. In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that while Customs has the right to censor material, its practices at the time were unfair. The bookstore’s current allegation is that the agency has not obeyed that ruling an is still banning material in an arbitrary and discriminatory way.

But today’s 7-2 decision said that the challenge was too “narrow and insignificant to the broad public interest to justify such an unusual move,” writes Globe reporter Kirk Makin. “Public interest advance costs orders must be granted with caution, as a last resort, in circumstances where their necessity is clearly established,” according to reasons supplied by five of the majority judges.

(more…)

Thank goodness for anonymous corporate donors! One of those mysterious benefactors has come through in the clutch with the $500,000 needed to save the childhood home of Obasan author Joy Kogawa in Vancouver, the CBC is reporting. A number of groups led by The Land Conservancy of British Columbia had long been trying to raise the funds needed to buy the house and prevent it from being demolished to make way for condominiums. They had raised more than $200,000, but had fallen far short of the money needed to pay for Kogawa’s house. “The future of the historic Joy Kogawa House is now completely in our hands, and we are proud of what we were able to accomplish with such a short deadline,” TLC deputy executive director Ian Fawcett told the CBC.

Related links:
Click here for the CBC story

In The Georgia Strait, some glowing praise for Ronald Wright, his book, his ideas, and his move to British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island. Writer Terry Glavin records Wright’s thoughts on the province’s future: “There’s still great hope for Vancouver, Wright says, and despite great mistakes — like paving over some of the best farmland in Canada in the Lower Fraser Valley and grinding through some of the best forests on the planet — British Columbians still have a shot at holding onto the living, breathing world we’ve been blessed with.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story on The Georgia Strait

CBC Arts looks back at the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. There is, of course, a strong emphasis on the commercial glory days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Eden Robinson, Annabel Lyon, Steven Galloway, and Nancy Lee, among countless other UBC MFA grads, went on to find fame and fortune (on the CanLit scale, at least). “[N]early half the graduating class of 2001 finished school with a book contract,” notes the writer of the CBC Arts piece, writer Greg Buium. The more recent sharp downturn in the market for first-time fiction gets much less play in the story, though agent Denise Bukowski is quoted as saying, “It’s very hard to convince the media that fiction isn’t what they think it is. Publishers are running scared right now because fiction isn’t selling.”

Related links:
Click here for the CBC Arts story

The robots are coming! The online B.C. magazine The Tyee reports on the University of British Columbia library’s plan to launch “a new storage system that uses robotic cranes to fetch books.” Once the system’s up and running, the UBC library’s main location will store books in stainless steel bins accessible to the, er, robots. Patrons will be able to search for books online, but may not be able to physically browse the books — a change that has some worried. Says Max Cameron, one professor and library adviser: “That is a major cost to research. We’re now going to have to invent other ways of getting around if we want to be able to do that kind of exploratory work.”

Related links:
The Tyee’s piece on the UBC library’s new automated retrieval plans