In 1929 Virginia Woolf published her essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, based on lectures she had given the previous year at Cambridge University. In it, Woolf made her famous observation that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

I doubt that the essay was widely known in Vancouver. Even so there was a group of young local women who knew the truth of...

Last evening I attended a launch for a new edition of Pauline Johnson’s classic story collection, Legends of Vancouver, first published in 1911. (Except that the new book has a new title, Legends of  the Capilano, for reasons that are explained.) Editor Alix Shield has added several new stories as well as...

News broke a couple of weeks ago that plans are being formulated to release the captive orca known as Lolita back into the wild, sort of.

Lolita has been held in a small tank in a Florida marine park ever since she was captured in Puget Sound in 1970. During the 1960s and 1970s dozens of animals were taken from the Northwest Coast for sale to amusement parks and aquariums around the world....

The BC Book Prize nominees for 2022 have been announced (here) and there are not many history/biography titles on the list this time around. The only books I would place in that category are The Acid Room (Anvil Press) by Erika Dyck and Jesse Donaldson, about the...

Congratulations to artist and art historian Robert Amos whose gorgeous book, E.J. Hughes: Canadian War Artist, has won this year's Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book about British Columbia. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the prize jury.)

Hughes,...