Stan Persky (1941 – 2024)
Play the game of word association with “New Star Books”, and the first name that comes to mind for many is that of Stan Persky. Stan was a guiding spirit and a writer of books for the press from its inception as the Georgia Straight Writing Supplement / Series, which morphed into Vancouver Community Press, which in turn became New Star Books in 1974.
He may be best known for writing one of New Star’s early bestsellers, Son of Socred (1977), followed by a couple of similar interventions in temporal politics, The House That Jack Built (1980; about city politics and then-mayor Jack Volrich, though the title nods to one of Stan’s own fathers, Jack Spicer); and Bennett II (1983). At the Lenin Shipyard (1981) provided what we are now calling The West with one of the early accounts of the Solidarnosc trade union uprising in the Gdansk shipyards in Poland, one of the first major cracks in the edifice of the post-WWII Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc.
Stan wrote or edited fourteen other titles that appeared under the New Star imprint between 1980 and 2007. Perhaps the one that was most significant for him was Buddy’s (1989), where he returned to his literary origins to create a lasting work that is both an exemplar of the then-”new narrative” writing that has since become one of the standard forms for contemporary literary writing, as well as a portrait of gay life in late 20th century North America that still fascinates and illuminates a third of a century after its publication.
A popular teacher for many years at Capilano College / University, Stan fell in love with the city of Berlin in the 1990s, and moved there permanently early in the present century. He remains however an indelible thread in the fabric of this city and province.
Roy Miki (1942 – 2024)
New Star published two books of poetry by Roy Miki: There (2006), the follow-up to his Governor-General’s Award-winning 2002 book, Surrender; and Mannequin Rising (2011), both now out of print. The press is honoured to have part of Roy’s project, and to have contributed to his extensive publication record; but Roy’s influence extended far beyond those books, or his poetry.
Roy’s organizing and advocacy work for the Redress campaign, to recognize and compensate for Canada’s historical discrimination against Japanese Canadians, had an impact that went far beyond the war-time interments which gave rise to it. The Redress campaign, and the space that Roy through his own work, opened Canadian literature to a broad range of voices representing alterity to the Anglo-European colonial project called Canada.
“He’ll be missed,” is what people say. Yes; but he won’t be. The work that Roy Miki did to make this a better place will continue to reverberate and influence long after his own leaving of it.