Live Lit!

Friday, May 1
Bentley Chamber Music Studio, 7:30 p.m., $5

Kick off the merry month of May with one of Canada’s finest writers, Jack Hodgins, who is joined by writers taking part in The Banff Centre’s Writing Studio.

Friday, May 8
Bentley Chamber Music Studio, 7:30 p.m., $5

Poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists — Marilyn Bowering and Dionne Brand do it all.

Monday, May 11, 7 p.m.
Whyte Museum, $4 donation at the door

One of the great craftsmen of Canadian poetry, Don McKay is featured when The Banff Centre’s Writing Studio moves downtown for the first of three evenings of high-test poetry at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

Wednesday, May 13, 7 p.m.
Whyte Museum, $4 donation at the door

Karen Solie’s first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine, won the $50,000 Griffin Prize. Her third collection, Pigeon, is out this summer.

Monday, May 18, 7 p.m.
Whyte Museum, $4 donation at the door

A Victoria Day Holiday Treat — a rare chance to hear Australia’s Les Murray, one of the world’s great contemporary poets.

Friday, May 22
Rolston Recital Hall, 7:30 p.m. , $5

Masters of their genres, Greg Hollingshead and Isabel Huggan have mentored emerging writers and taught creative writing for more than 30 years.

Friday, May 29
Rolston Recital Hall, 7:30 p.m., $5

Edna Alford is one of Saskatchewan’s most beloved authors. Steven Galloway’s third novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, is an international bestseller sold in 20 countries.

Playwrights’ Speakeasy

Saturday, May 9, 7:30 p.m.
The Club
$10, includes 1 drink

An open mic night where playwrights step out of the shadows to deliver their own lines. Featuring Crystal Béliveau, Brendan Gall, Don Hannah, Karen Hines, Rosa Laborde, Joan MacLeod, and Greg MacArthur.

Art and Science:
Researching the
Work of Art

Tuesday, May 12, 4 p.m.
Telus Studio, Free

She blinded me with science. Since the Renaissance, there has been both a convergence and divergence between the fields of arts and science. Saul Ostrow and Charles Tucker explore the collaborative potential between these two analogous fields.

Tales of Translation

Monday, June 22, 7:30 p.m.
Rolston Recital Hall , Free

Kim Echlin gives a talk and short video presentation on her experience of cultural connections through translation, using her work with Ojibway and Cambodian cultures. Echlin is an arts documentary producer with “The Journal” on CBC. Her third novel, The Disappeared, is a story of love and longing with the terrors of Khmer Rouge Cambodia at its heart. Excerpts of this widely-acclaimed novel will be presented in Spanish and Chinese by her translators, Sonia Tapia and Yu Shi, participants in this year’s literary translation residency. The evening will close with a celebration of the first annual Linda Gaboriau Literary Translation Award winner, U.S. translator and writer Rainer Schulte.

Literary Primetime:
Susan Swan

Friday, July 10
Margaret Greenham Theatre, 7:30 p.m., $10

The Writer and Popular Culture: What’s pop, what’s not, and why?

The popular Literary Journalism Conversations series goes primetime! Susan Swan kicks off the series when it moves to Friday nights with a talk in honour of Susan Sontag, who died December 28, 2004. Swan is a journalist, activist, and novelist published in 20 countries. She takes us on a tour of the writer’s role in pop culture, and tells us why LavaLife and ModernLov.com, plastic glasses, Brangelina, Queen Elizabeth, and the Pope are pop, but mail order brides, the sport cricket, Jewish kosher cooking, and the medieval sagas of Iceland are not. If you, like Swan, are attracted by pop’s energy, you may also feel like a pop victim. Swan is a pop fan and one of its sternest critics, because her tradition is literature with its ties to Gutenberg and the world of print. As Susan Sontag pointed out in her celebrated “Notes on Camp,” there’s no better person to talk about a cultural phenomenon than somebody with “a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”

Jon Turk:
The Raven’s Gift

Tuesday, July 14, 7:30 p.m.
Donation at the Door
Whyte Museum — 111 Bear Street

Renowned explorer, journalist, and author, Jon Turk gives a presentation on his upcoming book, The Raven’s Gift: A Scientist, A Shaman, and their Remarkable Journey Through the Siberian Wilderness. An academically trained scientist, Turk had his logical preconceptions turned upside down when he entrusted his injured body to the care of a 100-year-old woman, a shaman, in Siberia. Turk has widely travelled the world and yet nothing prepared him for this mystical experience. “A PhD chemist, trained in the rigors of scientific research, I inadvertently found myself standing naked on one leg in front of a Moolynaut, a 100-year old Siberian shaman who was invoking Kutcha, the Raven God, to heal my injured pelvis.”

Cabin Fever

Friday, July 17, 1:00 p.m.
The Old Crag Cabin — 211a Bear Street
Free

The Banff Centre Press launches their latest collection, Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Non-Fiction, featuring works written in The Banff Centre’s Leighton Studios as part of the annual Literary Journalism program.

Literary Primetime:
Marni Jackson

Friday, July 17
Margaret Greenham Theatre, 7:30 p.m., $10

Acclaimed journalist Marni Jackson hosts the launch of Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Non-Fiction, a collection celebrating the 20 year history of The Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism program.

Shadow Pleasures
and
Vida y Danza, Cuba

Sunday, July 19, 2 p.m.
Margaret Greenham Theatre, $12

Filmmaker Veronica Tennant introduces Shadow Pleasures (2004), featuring readings by Michael Ondaatje, as interpreted in dance and film. Tennant’s latest dance documentary, Vida y Danza, Cuba — Life & Dance (2008) traces the journey of Cuban choreographer Lizt Alfonso and her all-female company Danza Cuba.

Literary Primetime:
Michael Ondaatje

Thursday, July 23
Margaret Greenham Theatre, 7:30 p.m., $10

Ondaatje Film Night — Michael Ondaatje introduces one of his early documentaries, The Clinton Special: A Film About The Farm Show, a film that follows Theatre Passe Muraille and a group of actors into the countryside.

Literary Primetime:
Ondaatje Interview

Friday, July 24, 7:30 p.m.
Donald Cameron Hall Dining Room
Adult $20 · Student/Senior $15 · Child $9

A lion of the literary world, Michael Ondaatje is interviewed on stage by the director of The Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism program, Marni Jackson.

Novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and has lived in Canada since 1963. His works include Divisadero, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, Anil’s Ghost, The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and his memoir, Running in the Family. His collections of poetry include Secular Love, The Cinnamon Peeler, and Handwriting. He has made two documentary films: Sons of Captain Poetry (on the poet bp Nichol) and The Clinton Special (about Theatre Passe Muraille’s The Farm Show). Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.

Darwin’s Sexy Science

Friday, August 14, 7:30 p.m.
Margaret Greenham Theatre, $10

Co-host of TV’s hippest science show, “Daily Planet,” Jay Ingram talks dirty to us when he celebrates Darwin’s 200th birthday with “Darwin’s Sexy Science.”   » More