NOT TO BE MISSED
A very special night at the Hummingbird Pub
Saturday, April 22nd, 7pm
The Hummingbird has very generously offered to host an evening of story telling and poetry with Hilary Peach, Rosemary Georgeson, and Geoff Inverarity.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. #BringingTheArtsToLife
We acknowledge the support of the League of Canadian Poets.
Rosemary's wonderful exhibition “The Water We Call Home” was displayed at the Yellow House in 2022. This is how Rosemary described the project:
I have always been a curious person and always needed to know the things people talked about but never said. Growing up you always knew that something was missing, not where it should be. There was a part of you that wasn’t there. That is the curiosity that fed this work, that led to it all. History denied us the right to know each other. I have spent a lot of my life thinking about this: “Who is my family? Who do we belong to?”. There was knowing you belonged here but not knowing how or where. Who was your family? Being out even around this coast and seeing someone–– “boy that person looks just like me”–– but not knowing who they were. But it was more than that. It was about the way we lived, the things we did.
Those of you lucky enough to hear Rosemary at the October 2022 will know that's she's a highly skilled story teller.
This is how Rosemary describes herself:
I was born and raised in the commercial fishing industry, spending the first half of my life fishing around Galiano Island and the Salish Sea, sometimes as far as Prince Rupert. Since leaving the industry, I’ve worked in the arts community as a writer, storyteller and researcher. Recognized in 2009 by the Vancouver Mayor’s award for emerging artist and in 2014 as the Vancouver Public Library’s Storyteller in Residence, my work is deeply rooted in my family history on Galiano Island.
While many of you are already familiar with Rosemary and Geoff's work, only those with very long memories will remember appearances by Hilary Peach at the Gulf Islands Poetry Festival in the 90's. At that time, Hilary was singing her strange and wonderful poetry acapella; since then she has released three audio-poetry projects, Poems Only Dogs Can Hear, Suitcase Local, and Dictionary of Snakes, and a collection of poems, BOLT (Anvil Press 2019). For twenty years she worked as a welder for the Boilermakers Union, dabbled in blacksmithing, and produced unusual art projects on Gabriola Island. She is now a boiler inspector for the provincial safety authority and is writing a novel. She’s recently published”Thick Skin: Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood.” It’s a collection of stories about her working life as a welder — a woman in a traditionally male trade.

“Thick Skin” has already gone into a second printing, and has had a huge and positive response from other women (and men) in Trades. In “Thick Skin” she spins hilarious and significant stories of her years as a woman in a traditionally male environment. A recent reading in Vancouver, organized by the BC Tradeswomen's Society was packed and raucous. She doesn't pull her punches, but she's also fiercely protective of all her co-workers, male as well as female. It's a fascinating, moving, often hilarious window into a working life that outsiders are not privy to. “I wanted to write a book that showed respect for tradeswomen as tradespeople, not just as martyrs going in and toughing it out against these bad attitudes. I also wanted to write a book that was respectful of men because it’s the men who were our teachers and our colleagues, the people who showed us all the stuff,” says Peach.

“This is a wonderful book – not just funny but a rare, insider’s look at the life of a travelling welder – the good, the bad, the ugly, and always, the fascinating. A collection of hilarious stories by a master (mistress?) of repartee, it is also an homage to the trade she loved.”
— Kate Braid, author of Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman
“The best writers make readers interested in a subject they never imagined they might be compelled by. … Peach takes the reader into a rarely seen world and we leave with new knowledge and respect, her style sparking as brightly as a welder’s torch, seaming disparate pieces of the universe together.”
— The British Columbia Review
As a sort of, not quite, belated book launch, Geoff will be reading from his 2021 collection, “All the Broken Things,” a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Fred Kerner Book of the Year Award. The judges had some nice things to say about the work:
“All the Broken Things is a collection of poetry that doesn’t so much make sense of the world as scrutinize the nonsensical and display it in all its disordered and sometimes gorgeous complexity. From the atomic to the galactic, these poems help us celebrate the oddity, difficulty and marvel of human existence now and through the centuries. The wide-ranging subject matter and diversity of style make for an accessible and engaging collection full of surprises”.
"All the Broken Things is an original and sublimely startling rumination on what it means to be human in all its heartbreaking and complicated beauty, in years gone by, now and beyond. This debut poetry collection mesmerizes with its refreshingly unexpected take on life, death, grief, relationships, illness, aging, history, family and yearning—a stirring revelation of the both the current brokenness of things and the unyielding power of hope.”
You'll laugh, you'll cry. But not necessarily in that order.
#BringingTheArtsToLife
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