Come on out to WordStorm and set the writing/performing world of Vancouver Island on FIRE!

Everyone is welcome to get involved and participate.

September 27th WordStorm Program

Headline Readers

Elizabeth Bartel - Poetry

Elizabeth Bartel has lived with her husband between the mountains and the sea on Vancouver Island since 1980. She has however, one foot firmly planted in the prairie soil of her childhood. She writes from the richness of her cultural heritage that celebrates the lives of ordinary people by showing them to be much more than that. Her work spans many years as she takes the reader on a journey of life and death, laughter and tears vividly reflecting upon her personal life from youth to the present. Her poems and short stories have been published in Geist, Praire Fire, Room of One's Own and other literary magazines. Her first novel Even Such is Time was published in 2002.

Elizabeth is the co-founder of "Mostly Poets", a Comox Valley group of eight women poets who have been working together for the past four years. This March they launched A Murder of Crones a collection of poetry which has been well received. Elizabeth now lives in Nanaimo but remains an active participant in group critiques and readings.

Besides her commitment to poetry she is at present working on another novel and her memoirs.

Lyn Hancock - Prose

Lyn Hancock, the Aussie-Canadian author of 19 books, including the popular classic There’s a Seal in my Sleeping Bag, and several thousand other stories, finds incredible adventures in her day-to-day doings and lives to tell the tales. She reads today about living with a raccoon from her latest book Tabasco the Saucy Raccoon but she has also lived with eagles, sea lions, bears, cougars, and apes; in beds, in cars, in classrooms; in British Columbia and both ends of the world.

Email Lyn    Web Site    Profile    Write On Speakers    Articles  

Author of There's A Seal In My Sleeping Bag, Winging It In The North, Nunavut, Western Canada Travel Smart, and 15 other titles, including the new Tabasco The Saucy Raccoon. Orders taken. For booking a presentation, contact Lyn directly.

Kim Goldberg - Poetry

Kim Goldberg is still one step ahead of the law somewhere on Vancouver Island. She is believed to be camped out along the scrubby margins of poetry and other indeterminate art forms. Do not approach without a tranquilizer dart. Innocent readers of Prism, Dalhousie Review, On Spec, The New Quarterly, Cahoots and other magazines have all been subjected to her ravings in recent months. (She has always maintained her innocence in the matter of "Spirit Mop" and the other unchained appliances that began springing up in Nanaimo's historic Old Quarter during the Spirit Bear invasion of Fall 2006.) Prior to her life of aesthetic crime she was a journalist for many years reporting on politics, media and environment. FBI profilers believe that a Chi Gong overload may have super-heated her synaptic pathways, leading to her subsequent unraveling. Despite her life on the lam, she somehow managed to organize and curate the Urban Eyes Art Exhibition in 2006, held at two Nanaimo galleries and featuring the work of 52 local artists and architects on the theme of urban development. She has reportedly launched a publishing enterprise under the baffling moniker of Pig Squash Press (suspected to be code for some future barnyard uprising) to further disseminate her brain-addled, photo-poetic manifestos.

Tracy Myers - Spoken Word Performance

Tracy Myers has been performing spoken word as a soloist on Vancouver Island since 1993. She is also a studied drummer/percussionist with formal education and travel to study musical cultures in Cuba, Brazil and Ghana, West Africa. Currently, Tracy puts words to the funky rhythms of the local, political trio- Tongue and Groove.

Tongue and Groove Music

Open Mike Sign-up

Prizes and certificates for first, second and third-place winners will be awarded based on:

quality of content

inspiration and/or entertainment value

delivery.

Our esteemed panel of judges (purple-wigged, bunny-eared, pilot-helmeted) will be chosen at random from the audience.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine