After Desire, the new book of poems by George Stan­ley, is now avail­able and being shipped to the last remain­ing book­stores car­ry­ing this sort of thing. It is the San Francisco-born Stanley’s eighth book and his first since Van­cou­ver: A Poem (a final­ist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize) came out in 2008.

After Desire con­sists of four parts. Some of the pieces in the first sec­tion, ‘After Desire,’ appeared in an issue of the Capi­lano Review devoted to Stanley’s work. Two other suites of poems, ‘2005–2011′ and ‘Open Space,’ fea­ture work that has been writ­ten since, or dur­ing the period when Stan­ley was writ­ing Van­cou­ver: A Poem. ‘Open Space’ includes ‘West Broad­way,’ appar­ently the first sec­tion of a longer, Van­cou­ver: A Poem–style work on Stanley’s Kit­si­lano neigh­bour­hood. And one sec­tion of After Desire, ‘1971,’ presents three poems writ­ten not long after Stan­ley moved to Van­cou­ver that were then lost for forty years.

There will be two oppor­tu­ni­ties to hear George Stan­ley read this month. On Tues­day, May 21, at 7:30 pm at the People’s Co-op Book­store, Stan­ley will be read­ing with Phil Hall, whose book Killdeer (pub­lished by Book­Thug) won the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry last year.

The launch for After Desire will be Fri­day, May 31 at the Com­mer­cial Street Cafe. The launch gets under­way at 8 pm; admis­sion is free.

The cover of After Desire fea­tures a paint­ing by Van­cou­ver artist Mina Totino called Plink, and was designed by Mark Mushet.

Voy­age Through the Past Cen­tury, Rolf Knight’s vivid and thought­ful mem­oir of his life as an inde­pen­dent social­ist scholar and writer, is pub­lished this month by New Star Books. Knight has writ­ten some of the most impor­tant and influ­en­tial his­tory books about British Colum­bia, includ­ing A Very Ordi­nary Life and Indi­ans at Work.

Writ­ten with the same verve and acu­men that Knight brought to his ouevre of works about BC’s working-class his­tory, Voy­age Through the Past Cen­tury is described by Mark Leier as “a fas­ci­nat­ing account of a van­ish­ing world … informed by a deep, per­sonal appre­ci­a­tion of work­ers and a smart, pugna­cious dis­gust for cap­i­tal­ism and its apologists.”

Born while his par­ents worked at a remote coastal log­ging camp, Knight was raised in working-class East Van­cou­ver, a period doc­u­mented in A Very Ordi­nary Life and Along the No. 20 Line. A bright stu­dent, he stud­ied at the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia and went on to obtain a PhD in Anthro­pol­ogy from Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, train­ing that is put to good use in his obser­va­tions of the peo­ple and the com­mu­ni­ties he encoun­tered in Africa, South Amer­ica, North­ern Que­bec, post-war Berlin, 1950s New York, and 1970s Cana­dian academia.

An ear­lier ver­sion of Voy­age Through the Past Cen­tury was pri­vately printed and cir­cu­lated among Knight’s friends twenty years ago, and copies have been avidly sought ever since. Knight was rec­og­nized in 1992 by the Cana­dian His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion with a Clio Award for his life­time con­tri­bu­tion to regional his­tory. He lives in Burn­aby, BC.

Lisa Robert­son, whose first three books are avail­able from New Star, is a fea­tured blog­ger on Har­riet, the Poetry Mag­a­zine blog, this month. Thomas Bern­hard and adverbs; Rousseau, Bunting, Goethe, Williams, and plant tax­on­omy, are some of the sub­jects she’s writ­ten on so far.

Robert­son, who lives in France, lived in Van­cou­ver dur­ing the 1980s and 1990s. Her books XEclogue (1993; reis­sued 1999), Deb­bie: An Epic (1997), and The Weather (2001) were pub­lished by New Star.

Other Har­riet blog­gers include Vanessa Place, K. Silem Mohamed, Alan Davies, Jen Hofer, Bill Berk­son, and David Meltzer.

A cou­ple of years ago, New Star pub­lished Sweet Eng­land, the third novel by Steve Weiner. Steve’s pre­vi­ous books, The Museum of Love and The Yel­low Sailor, had been pub­lished by some of “the big boys” (Blooms­bury; Overlook).

The Museum of Love was gen­er­ally well reviewed, and — remark­able for a debut novel — was a final­ist for the very first Giller Prize back in 1994 (juried by Alice Munro, Morde­cai Rich­ler, and David Staines). Pre­sum­ably because of its treat­ment of homo­eroti­cism, it was widely and respect­fully reviewed in gay pub­li­ca­tions. The title of The Museum of Love sug­gests some kind of vacation-friendly rom­com, but the novel is in fact a dark hal­lu­ci­na­tion, and any reader pick­ing it up on the implied promise of the title and the Giller endorse­ment was surely headed for baf­fle­ment, or pos­si­bly enlightenment.

The Yel­low Sailor was, if any­thing, even stranger than The Museum of Love. The back­ground for its nar­ra­tive arc — a young, unformed man try­ing to gain his bear­ings in a soci­ety that is bewil­der­ing to him — is Ger­many, in the debris of the First World War. No Giller nom­i­na­tion this time; and no groundswell of inter­est in the gay press, the homo­erotic themes in this one being more muted / con­strained / marginal.

Com­mer­cially, nei­ther book made much of an impact. The print edi­tions are unavail­able (though Blooms­bury has reis­sued The Museum of Love as an e-book).  I’m a lit­tle embar­rased to admit that I bought my copies of both books off remain­der tables. At least I bought mul­ti­ple copies. I had no choice with The Yel­low Sailor: I never saw a copy until it made its debut on the remain­der table. Most book­stores (no doubt after con­sult­ing their Book­Man­ager or Word­Stock for Museum of Love sales) never ordered it in the first place.

The reviews of both books tended towards baf­fle­ment, as if the reviewer felt obliged by the publisher’s imprint or the Giller nom­i­na­tion to notice the book, but at the same time to not fail to notice that The Museum of Love and The Yel­low Sailor both fell well out­side of the bounds of con­tem­po­rary main­stream lit­er­ary fiction.

You are begin­ning to see why New Star Books was cho­sen to con­tinue the work begun by Blooms­bury and the Over­look Press. It wasn’t the reviews that counted against Steve Weiner when it came time to find a pub­lisher for his third novel; it was the sales figures.

Sweet Eng­land is unam­bigu­ously a work of art. Steve Weiner is using lit­er­ary devices — nar­ra­tive, descrip­tion — in the ser­vice of reveal­ing some­thing about our­selves, and about the anthill we have derived for our liv­ing, that can­not be cap­tured using more straight­for­ward tech­niques of expos­i­tory prose. He relies upon the same semi– and un-conscious effects that poets work with. It also incor­po­rated a sub­tle polit­i­cal under­tone, pos­si­bly not even inten­tional, as the reader can’t help rec­og­nize Weiner’s Lon­don as a city shaped by neoliberalism.

Tech­ni­cally, Sweet Eng­land is a tour de force, a 150-page seam­less nar­ra­tive with­out any breaks (“He awoke the next morn­ing feel­ing .. .”), even though the action appears to take place over a few days. And, despite the fre­quent typos in his man­u­script (Weiner has to fight through arthri­tis to get to the key­board), the novel was as pol­ished as any­thing we’ve seen here.

It was obvi­ous to our read­ers that Steve Weiner was not so much a nov­el­ist, as an artist whose medium was lit­er­a­ture, and that he is work­ing in a tra­di­tion whose prac­ti­tion­ers were peo­ple like Beck­ett, Angela Carter,  David Mark­son, and (one of Weiner’s acknowl­edged influ­ences) Ben Okri. Weiner’s influ­ences are as likely to be film­mak­ers (Broth­ers Quay, who pro­vided the Sweet Eng­land cover; Jan Svankma­jer) as writ­ers. One reviewer com­pared Weiner to Todd Haynes.

New Star did not sell Sweet Eng­land effec­tively into the inde­pen­dent sec­tor of the book trade. Our sales reps at the Lit­er­ary Press Group did bet­ter with Indigo-Chapters, obtain­ing a pretty decent ini­tial order — respect­ful num­bers that expressed con­fi­dence in Sweet Eng­land as a solid lit­er­ary title but not nec­es­sar­ily one that was going to be a best­seller. With the reviews and pub­lic­ity in hand, we could con­fi­dently point towards their stores to sat­isfy con­sumer demand. And — one fine fea­ture of chain book­selling — if a book starts to sell, the com­put­ers will notice, and order more books.

This did not hap­pen. New Star, with its admit­tedly lim­ited pub­lic­ity resources, was not able to bring Sweet Eng­land to the atten­tion of the review­ers, blog­gers, prize jurors, &c. that leads to read­ers. Amaz­ingly, we are aware of but a sin­gle review of Sweet Eng­land, in the Review of Con­tem­po­rary Fic­tion (pay­walled; but there seems to be a copy here).

Not that it should mat­ter, but Steve him­self was born with­out the self-promotion gene, isn’t on Twit­ter or Tum­blr or Face­book or even MyPage, he doesn’t hang around a cir­cle of writ­ers who review each other’s books, he’s not one for the read­ing cir­cuit (though he is a trooper, and I expect he’d do his best if he ever was invited to one of the pro­lif­er­at­ing writ­ers’ fes­ti­vals). He’s just an artist, sit­ting at his work­bench, painstak­ingly mak­ing his art.

Did we get this wrong? Have we wasted our time, wasted Steve’s time, wasted the taxpayer’s latte, on Sweet Eng­land? Here’s your chance to make up your own mind, at absolutely no cost or risk to your­self — we’ll send you a free copy, just for asking.

Through­out 2011 and 2012, we received returns of Sweet Eng­land from Indigo-Chapters. These returns include numer­ous copies that are not, strictly speak­ing, in “resal­able” con­di­tion: they show obvi­ous signs of shelfwear and/or poor pack­ing for jour­ney back to the publisher’s ware­house. We’ll send you one of those, absolutely gratis. Send us your name and address, and we’ll send you a free copy of an excel­lent, under­noticed, under­ap­pre­ci­ated work of art, at no charge, and with no obligation.

All you have to do is send us an e-mail at info@NewStarBooks.com with your mail­ing address, and we’ll send you a copy of Sweet Eng­land by Steve Weiner. Sorry, offer good only in USA and Canada.

A brief moment in time, it turns out: the Book Ware­house in Yale­town.
Photo by Jor­dan Dawe.

My pre­vi­ous digres­sion in this series con­cerned the intro­duc­tion of “ratio­nal” dis­tri­b­u­tion and retail prac­tices to the book trade, and the resul­tant growth of book­store chains through­out the 1980s and 1990s. These changes increased the shelf space given over to books, but it also rad­i­cally changed the rules of com­pe­ti­tion for access to that shelf space. This marked a dynas­tic shift tak­ing place in North Amer­i­can busi­ness, as man­u­fac­tur­ing lost its lead­ing role and was sup­planted by finance. The “big iron” that used to call the shots — Detroit, US Steel, &c. — was pushed aside, as Citibank et al. took control.

North America’s post-war sub­ur­ban build­ing boom, and higher uni­ver­sity and col­lege enrol­ment dri­ven by gov­ern­ment pro­grams, had done much to increase the num­ber of book­shops through­out North Amer­ica. The chain store boom that began in the 1970s brought on another surge of growth in the mar­ket­place, and the large-format stores that appeared at the end of the 1980s cre­ated what seemed like a glut of shelf space. But the glut was illu­sory, con­sist­ing largely of miles and miles of dis­play shelves that were effec­tively cloned copies of the same much smaller stretch of shelves; and access to that dis­play space for books was now cen­trally con­trolled from the upper right­hand cor­ner of the con­ti­nent. Mean­while, the peo­ple decid­ing which prod­uct went onto those shelves tended more and more to believe they were deal­ing with gro­ceries — the back­ground, indeed, of many of the new execs now run­ning the big book retailers

The ratio­nal­iza­tion tak­ing place within the book trade put enor­mous pres­sure on inde­pen­dent presses to turn their dis­tri­b­u­tion over to cen­tral­ized book dis­tri­b­u­tion ware­houses. The num­ber of books in print had in the mean­time swelled to over a mil­lion, while a typ­i­cal book­store had room for some­where between 5,000 and 35,000 titles (for a Duthie class store). Book­sellers couldn’t be expected to main­tain hun­dreds of sep­a­rate accounts with all their publisher-suppliers. The mid­dle­men dis­trib­u­tors and whole­salers would be able to offer effi­cien­cies to both ends — book­sellers, pub­lish­ers — and the abil­ity to order New Star’s books from the same ware­house that car­ried the offer­ings of the big­ger pub­lish­ers was going to be mutu­ally advan­ta­geous. The buzz phrase of the day was “just in time” inventory.

One of the unan­tic­i­pated con­se­quences of this arrange­ment is a phe­nom­e­non of “churn­ing” stock. The book­seller needs to get in some copies of The Book Everybody’s Talk­ing About. But they’re at their credit limit with the dis­trib­u­tor, and there’s no cash lying around. Solu­tion: round up a bunch of books sup­plied by the same dis­trib­u­tor, and return those books to free up the credit you need. Book­Man­ager, the locally devel­oped soft­ware pro­gram used by about 250 Cana­dian inde­pen­dents to man­age their inven­tory, even has an impres­sive set of tools designed for this purpose.

It sounds like I’m talk­ing about inde­pen­dent book­sellers here. But the techique was pio­neered by the chains, who used returns to, nom­i­nally, keep within the terms of sale they had agreed to (though in prac­tice, these are changed to their spec­i­fi­ca­tions when­ever the old terms prove incon­ve­nient). Inde­pen­dents who ramped up their returns were merely fol­low­ing the trail blazed for them by their big broth­ers — another instance of “Money see, money do.”

This sig­naled a sig­nif­i­cant change in the way the book­stores oper­ated. For the first time, books began to be returned to their sup­plier, not because they had failed to sell in a rea­son­able period of time (about a year), but because they hap­pened to be shipped by a dis­trib­u­tor with some­thing poten­tially more lucra­tive in the ware­house. While the prac­tices of the big chains have dri­ven the returns boom, inde­pen­dents adopted the same big-box prac­tices, and return rates from inde­pen­dents have been every bit as high if not even higher.

The his­tor­i­cally high rate of returns we enjoy today are a phe­nom­e­non of mod­ern book retail prac­tices — which have been largely dri­ven by changes in dis­tri­b­u­tion prac­tices, not by  con­sumer pref­er­ences — and are an arte­fact of the mod­ern sup­ply chain. But returns are not some­thing books do; they are some­thing booksell­ers do. Today’s extrav­a­gant return rates are not a sign that acqui­si­tions edi­tors, book­sellers, or read­ers are stu­pider than ever.

One phe­nom­e­non of this post-1980s com­mand econ­omy that char­ac­ter­ized the book trade is the remain­der mar­ket and stores like Book Ware­house, which flour­ished dur­ing this era. This sec­tor of the mar­ket depended on the over-production of skids of this year’s $40 best­sellers for their avail­abil­ity next year at $6.99 while the paper­back sells for $10.99, or $19. (It is the remain­dera­mas of the world that are now being imper­illed by e-books, which so far are mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant inroads only in this sec­tor of the trade. E-books may not end up doing as much dam­age to the book trade as claimed, but they were surely a fac­tor in the demise of the Book Ware­house remain­der chain.)

The decline in ini­tial orders for new books, com­bined with the greater propen­sity on the part of book­sellers to return sooner and in greater quan­ti­ties, as they in turn expe­ri­ence the pres­sures of “ratio­nal­iza­tion”, was by the mid­dle of the 1990s pos­ing a threat to New Star’s exis­tence. Book­sellers that in 1980 had read­ily taken 10 or 15 or 20 copies of a new New Star title more or less on spec, and return­ing no more than 10 or 15 per­cent of them, were by the end of the decade tak­ing 1, 2, or 3 copies, and return­ing upwards of 30 per­cent or more for credit after a few months.

This was not just facil­i­tated but fueled by cen­tral­ized book dis­tri­b­u­tion. Even stores that thought of them­selves as sup­port­ing small presses were exhibit­ing these symp­toms. The People’s Co-op, which used to sell $1K to $2K a year’s worth of New Star titles in a year, installed Book­Man­ager in the late 1980s, and adopted the prac­tices built into that soft­ware. By 1997, New Star’s sales through the People’s Co-op, employ­ing the lat­est in inven­tory man­age­ment tech­niques, had fallen to under $300 a year.

My response to all this was Plan A, a con­sign­ment pro­gram that saved the press a few years later when our trade dis­trib­u­tor lost the Man­date of Finance, and was put out of busi­ness in 2001.

The roar­ing tur­bines go silent for a while at New Star world head­quar­ters dur­ing the sec­ond half of April, as we take a bit of a break and recharge before gear­ing up for the rest of 2013.

Although we won’t be here to serve your every need, we’ll be check­ing phone and e-mail mes­sages almost every day for fresh emer­gen­cies. And the book trade can con­tinue to obtain New Star titles from our Cana­dian trade dis­trib­u­tor, Lit­DistCo.

Stay tuned for announce­ments in early May about our Fall 2013 list of new titles.

McNally Robin­son Book­sellers on Grant Avenue in Win­nipeg is the host site for the offi­cial Win­nipeg launch of Indi­gena Awry, the first book of poetry from Annharte in almost a decade. The launch takes place on Mon­day, April 22, in the Travel Alcove — the per­fect loca­tion for a First Nations writer liv­ing in Winnipeg.

Orig­i­nally from Lit­tle Saskatchewan First Nation in cen­tral Man­i­toba, Annharte a/k/a Marie Baker lived for a num­ber of years in Van­cou­ver, before return­ing to Man­i­toba to set­tle in Win­nipeg. Writer, edu­ca­tor, per­for­mance artist, granny, stu­dent, she is the author of Being on the Moon (1990), Coy­ote Colum­bus Cafe (1995), Exer­cises in Lip Point­ing (2003), and a book of essays, AKA, forth­com­ing from Capi­lano Uni­ver­sity Edi­tions.

Admis­sion to Annharte’s McNally Robin­son launch is free. The event gets under­way at 7:30. Here’s a link to more info about the launch on McNally Robinson’s own site. Many thanks to McNR for organizing!

Gabri­ola Island res­i­dent Roger Farr’s IKMQ has been named as a final­ist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize, awarded annu­ally to a dis­tin­guished book of poetry by a BC writer. Win­ners will be announced on May 4 at the annual BC Book Prizes awards din­ner, hosted by British Columbia’s Lieutenant-Governor Judith Gui­chon at Gov­ern­ment House in Victoria.

This is Farr’s first appear­ance as a final­ist for a BC Book Prize. IKMQ, which con­sists of 64 brief prose pas­sages that fol­low the exploits of four “char­ac­ters” — the let­ters I, K, M, and Q — through a series of lan­guage sce­nar­ios. It is Farr’s third book of poetry, fol­low­ing Sur­plus (2006) and Means (2013). It is extremely grat­i­fy­ing to see all that hard work and excel­lence finally pay off for Roger.

Slightly dis­ap­point­ing is Farr’s omis­sion from the BC Book Prizes Tour (par­tic­i­pants are cho­sen by draw), as we had visions of him read­ing from selec­tions like “P.O.V.” and “Fine Bub­ble Hash” to a Grade 6 class in Ter­race. More seri­ously, it is encour­ag­ing that there is room in the BC Book Prizes for work such as IKMQ, which chal­lenges con­ven­tional views of poetry in terms both of form as well as con­tent / sub­ject matter.

IKMQ is avail­able from lead­ing inde­pen­dent book­sellers, Indigo-Chapters, Ama­zon dot com as well as ca, and from our own web­site.

Before we get to why win­ning the lot­tery set the People’s Co-op Book­store back by a gen­er­a­tion or so, let’s take moment to con­sider what’s hap­pened in the book trade since those golden days of Expo 86.

Publishing’s image as a sleepy back­wa­ter, which was never really accu­rate — the old­est cor­po­ra­tion in the world started as and still is a printer-publisher — can prob­a­bly be attrib­uted to the fact that, from one per­spec­tive any­way, the book trade circa 1980 was a sleepy back­wa­ter. That per­spec­tive was that of the finance sec­tor: banks, the peo­ple who loan money to cor­po­ra­tions to use as work­ing cap­i­tal. Our his­tor­i­cally low rates of profit repelled their inter­est, so to speak. Until, one day, those inex­orably falling rates of profit, or ris­ing prices of crude oil, or what­ever, finally caused them to turn their atten­tion to us.

That’s when we saw the “boom” in book­store chains and big-box retail­ers. Those exam­ples of hyper­trophic growth were not fueled by any prof­its or suc­cess gen­er­ated within the book­trade itself. Instead, they reflected a hunger to extract more trib­ute from our sec­tor of the econ­omy. The money invested by finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the cre­ation and growth of the book chains rep­re­sented a gam­ble albeit a low-risk one, and the money being ven­tured was not any of ours, at least not in the sense that we might ben­e­fit from its invest­ment. B. Dal­ton and Walden­books, Coles, W.H. Smith, Clas­sic Book­shops: these were by and large not actu­ally suc­cess­ful busi­nesses in the ordi­nary sense. Each and every one of them was an expres­sion of a capitalist-utopian vision in which pools of finance cap­i­tal dom­i­nated the world of man­u­fac­tur­ing, labour, &c.

The result was the reshap­ing of the retail book­selling envi­ron­ment, even­tu­ally into what we have today. Small, single-proprietor book­shops, which for a few cen­turies had been the back­bone of a book writ­ing and read­ing econ­omy, were being swept away, replaced by highly ratio­nal­ized (though hardly ratio­nal) retail oper­a­tions owned by large cor­po­ra­tions with spoons in many dif­fer­ent pots, ulti­mately con­trolled by some bank or finan­cial fund which had pro­vided the loan cap­i­tal. The new boss was def­i­nitely noth­ing like the old boss.

What that meant in turn for a com­pany like New Star Books — indeed, for a coun­try like Canada, with its nascent and frankly frag­ile pub­lish­ing trade — was a shrink­age, begin­ning in the late 1980s (surely a coin­ci­dence), of the shelf space that was effec­tively avail­able to us, though this was not appar­ent at first. The bur­geon­ing chain store phe­nom­e­non went into over­drive with the 1987 acqui­si­tion of the B. Dal­ton chain by Barnes & Noble; and — money see, money do — in 1992 in Canada, with the takeover of Coles by Clas­sic Book­shops / Smith­Books, which had them­selves merged three years previously.

At first, the con­ti­nent was flooded with mas­sive stores fea­tur­ing kilo­me­tres of shelv­ing, cry­ing out for a blan­ket of books to cover up their naked­ness. This was the era that coined the term “wall­pa­per” for book­store inven­tory: an early clue that these new mas­ters didn’t have a clue.

But for a while, it was a party, as pub­lish­ers of all sizes were flooded with orders to fill those dis­play shelves, and to cover those walls. It was never going to last, and this was start­ing to show by 1997 or so.

New Star, like a lot of smaller presses — Press Gang comes to mind — didn’t “fit in” to the new world of pub­lish­ing and big-box book retail. The kind of books we pub­lished didn’t “work” in this new retail envi­ron­ment. Why didn’t we pub­lish more books like, oh, you know, [what­ever]. Inex­orably, as the chains con­sol­i­dated their stran­gle­hold, and as many inde­pen­dents began copy­ing their meth­ods in an effort to com­pete, we were los­ing access to book­store shelf space, which meant eye­balls, which meant readers.

I wasn’t con­vinced that there was no inter­est in the books we did, and I wasn’t inter­ested in retool­ing the list to pub­lish [what­ever] to appeal to the Chap­ters cat­e­gory buyer. As New Star’s pub­lisher, I had to fig­ure out how to get my books in front of read­ers, or get out of the business.

That’s where the People’s Co-op Book­store came along and saved the day.

Marie Baker, who has been liv­ing in Win­nipeg these past few years, returns to her old hood on the Drive March 16 to launch Indi­gena Awry, her new book of poetry. Marie will be launch­ing her new book in tan­dem with Mer­cedes Eng’s first book, Mer­ce­nary Eng­lish, just out from Capi­lano Uni­ver­sity Edi­tions. The launch is at the People’s Co-op Book­store. The launch gets under way around 8 pm. Admis­sion is free.

Indi­gena Awry is Marie’s first book since Exer­cises In Lip Point­ing came out ten years ago. She has pub­lished all of her books — includ­ing Being On the Moon and Colum­bus Coy­ote Cafe in the 1990s — as Annharte.

The fol­low­ing week, Annharte’s new play, Can­ni­bal Woman Camp Out, will be fea­tured at Word Ruckus, a fes­ti­val of writ­ing and per­for­mance, in Kelowna. Performers/readers include Mer­cedes Eng, Cecily Nichol­son, Dorothy Lusk, Arlene Bow­man, and Muriel Mar­jorie. Word Ruckus takes place at the Lau­rel Pack­ing­house, and runs Sat­ur­day, March 23 from 4 pm until late.