VPL Celebrates Vancouver’s Literary Landmarks With Plaques Around The City!
More than two dozen plaques will be erected around Vancouver to mark the city’s literary connections.
VANCOUVER – Vancouver’s library announced this week more than two dozen locations as official literary landmarks around the city, marking the connections – sometimes unlikely, occasionally surprising, but always meaningful – between our neighbourhoods and authors who have lived and worked there.
The first inaugural list of Vancouver literary greats in the VPL’s Literary Landmarks project includes Margaret Atwood, Sadhu Binning, George Bowering, Anne Cameron, Wayson Choy, Wayde Compton, Douglas Coupland, D.M. Fraser, W.P. Kinsella, Roy Kiyooka, Joy Kogawa, Evelyn Lau, Dorothy Livesay, Malcolm Lowry, Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt, Al Neil, Eric Nicol, Bud Osborn, Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, Jane Rule, Andreas Schroeder, Tom Wayman, Jim Willer, Ethel Wilson and George Woodcock.
Further landmarks will be added yearly.
Identifying the landmarks: bold, colourful plaques – mounted on lamp standards – that outline the literary experiences and talents that make them worthy of recognition. A companion interactive online map (vpl.ca/literarylandmark) highlights the landmarks around the city, offers further details on authors and links to their works in the VPL catalogue.
“We wanted to bring out Vancouver’s literary history and make it come alive – right at street level, and right where it happened,” says Mary Lynn Baum, Vancouver Public Library’s board chair. “Our city has a deep and diverse literary community, and it’s a perfect fit for the library to highlight these stories for Vancouver to experience, discover and enjoy.”
VPL’s Literary Landmark project is a collaboration of the library, B.C. BookWorld and the VPL Foundation, through the support of Dr. Yosef Wosk.
B.C. BookWorld publisher and former VPL board member Alan Twigg remembers writing a book on Vancouver writers for the city’s centennial in 1986, and thinking at the time about celebrating their accomplishments with markers or monuments. “It was just an idea to propagate awareness,” he says. “Now we have a host of landmark plaques, and more to come.
“This progress makes me think of some lines at the end of a satirical poem that Earle Birney wrote here in 1947: ‘no Whitman wanted / it’s by our lack of ghosts / we’re haunted.’ Now our city literally boasts thousands of authors and B.C. easily qualifies as one of the most active literary societies on the planet,” he says.
A sampling of the landmarks:
-The Haywood bandstand (1755 Beach Ave.) in the West End, where the structure inspired Malcolm Lowry’s poem Lament in the Pacific Northwest;
-The Insite supervised injection site (139 East Hastings St.), North America’s first; Downtown Eastside musician, writer, poet and activist Bud Osborn was instrumental in establishing the facility;
-A Point Grey house (3800-block West 11th Ave.) – Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s most acclaimed authors, lived there in the mid-1960s when she was lecturing at the University of B.C. and writing two of her earliest works;
-Near the Burrard Bridge (Kitsilano side) – the bridge is the subject of one of Daphne Marlatt’s poems, from which came the closing line of a 2011 digital exhibit at the south end of the span: “If you lived under this bridge you’d be home by now.”
Discover all the authors in VPL’s Literary Landmark project at vpl.ca/literarylandmark:
