Dear Friends &: Junie Désil, Tawhida Tanya Evanson, Isabella Wang

Description:

Produced in partnership with The Capilano Review, Dear Friends & is a monthly series showcasing the work of local and touring Canadian writers. Taking place on the first Thursday of each month, readings are hosted in the Grand Luxe Hall and made available to virtual audiences by livestream.

The series’ name draws inspiration from the salutations and sign-offs used by Roy Kiyooka in Transcanada Letters (1975), a collection which details the comings and goings of his literary sociality across Canada, the network of people and relations that enfold his writing, and the longings of his “Heart’s Geography” to be near the ones he loved. Kiyooka was an important figure for both Western Front and The Capilano Review, and this series invites his spirit of kinship, connection, and conviviality into the reading space.

The fourth event of the series included readings by Junie Désil, Isabella Wang, and Tawhida Tanya Evanson. Each writer presented twenty-minute sets that included new work and selections from published texts. Désil opening the evening with selections from her debut collection eat salt | gaze at the ocean (2020), as well as new poems from her forthcoming collection "Allostatic Load." This was followed by a reading by Wang of a new prose manuscript-in-progress titled "Subscript, Annotating Illness." Marrying breath, movement, and drumming, Evanson closed the event with a performance of four texts drawn from her spoken word concert film Cyano Sun Suite (2023). 

The readings unfolded against a projected image by resident artist Christian Vistan, who was invited to inhabit the peripheral spaces of Dear Friends & through a series of conceptual graphics, backgrounds, interventions, and ephemera reflecting on themes of friendship and correspondence through art. The image they produced was informed by the perspiration and heat generated in the Grand Luxe Hall during the previous iteration of Dear Friends &. In observing how sweat imprints on seats and walls, Vistan presented the “sweaty backs” of some of their recent water-based paintings, meditating on both exertion and stillness.  

The evening was hosted by Deanna Fong, literary editor of The Capilano Review.

Presented with support from Kootenay School of Writing.