The Countdown to Story Time is Over. The Whistler Readers and Writers Fest is here!

Yes, the countdown is over. Once Upon A Time is echoing from the hilltops – the 10th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival is here. It begins tomorrow. So brace yourself for an infusion of wordpower and entertainment… For anyone who has ever lost themselves in a book, in a daydream, in a blank page… the Festival has 6 reading events, 10 workshops and 3 panel discussions to ensure there’s something for every type of wordlover.  Here are some of the not-to-be-missed highlights:

Opening Night Gala kicks off with Madeline Sonik, Miriam Toews, Antanas Sileika, John Glenday, Angie Abdou, Randy Boyagoda and writer-in-residence Sarah Selecky, all MC-ed by local scribe Stephen Vogler.

The party continues at Saturday’s Creative 5 Eclectic eventwith spoken word artist Barbara Adler. This event will also host an open mic for musicians and writers alike.

Sunday starts with a lively Lit Grit Tribute Breakfast, where Miriam Toews, Wayne Johnston, Sarah Selecky and Andreas Schroeder debate careers, read from their work and answer your questions over croissants.

Sunday night closes with PechaKucha, Japanese for “chit chat” – a mixture of show-and-tell, open mic and happy hour, where 10 speakers show 20 slides in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Presenters’ topics range from architecture, graphic design and sculpture, to the PooFont. Ten dollars gets you entry, and a drink.

If the reading events inspire you to write your own words, sign up to push your characters around with Angie Abdou or go on a writing adventure with Leslie Anthony (Whistler’s Indiana Jones of the outdoor – and the written - escapade).

The festival runs from 14 to 16th October, tickets are on sale at www.theviciouscircle.ca or at the door.

Full program details available at the same site or if you’re just interested in the reading events, you can buy tickets at this
link: http://www.theviciouscircle.ca/store/category.php?cat_id=26

Where are you going to be this Saturday night? Gettin’ eclectic?

It’s so much more fun than apoplectic.

 

 

Creative 5 Eclectic is back and has teamed up with the 10th Annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. Please join us at The Elephant & Castle in Whistler Village for a lively evening featuring Vancouver spoken word artist and anti-polka provocateur Barbara Adler. Hosted as always by Stephen Vogler with Rajan Das on upright bass. Following our featured artist, the mic will be open for creators of all stripes to take the stage and do what they do best: sing, dance, rant, read, tell a joke, blow a horn … you get the picture. See you there!

Saturday, October 15, 8pm
The Elephant & Castle
18-4308 Main Street, Whistler Village
604 962-0330
Tickets $10 at www.theviciouscircle.ca or at the door.

 

 

 

Drifting Up to the Festival

by Stephen Vogler

I’m sitting in a canoe, floating around on Alta Lake at the centre of the Whistler valley as I scratch this into my notebook. It’s a sunny Saturday morning with the whisper of a late summer breeze drifting me about as I read and write. This is part of my job description as an MC for the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival: blocking out an hour here, two hours there, to do nothing but read from those old-fashioned paper creations with covers on either side. Books, I believe they’re still called.

One of my favourite aspects of the writers festival is that I get to, no, have to turn off all the emails and social media, the radios, TVs and cell phones and sit down with a book. It’s not always as extravagant as floating on the lake in a canoe. I’ve been nudging out the same time and space to read on the couch, at the dining table, in bed, in my favourite café. Sure, I always have a few books on the go, but when it’s festival time and there’s a whole new crop of authors about to arrive in town, I need to step up the pace. And it reminds me how great it is to sit down with a book and lose myself in a story. Reading and writing are some of the deepest things I do in my life, yet these days there is so much potential for encroachment on those activities.

And it’s not just the depth of experience that the written word offers. It takes me places, off on adventures far beyond the shores of this mountain lake: to Sri Lanka in Randy Boyagoda’s Beggar’s Feast, into colourful jungles and dockside human jungles, into jealousies and revenge and hard-won peace; into the intense worlds of Madeline Sonik’s characters whose dark magic simmers just below the surface of their everyday, small town and big city Canadian lives; into the quirky and vibrant realities of Sarah Selecky’s characters whose concise observations and witty dialogue linger with me long after I’ve closed the book. And there’s still Angie Abdou, Antanas Sileika, Wayne Johnston and John Glenday to look forward to.

Right now, as I float down the length of the lake, I’m reading Miriam Toews’ Irma Voth. It holds me entranced in a melancholic state until one of the character’s phrases pulls a language somersault and sends me into bursts of laughter.

The wind is suddenly pushing me up towards the Station House on the lake shore where Sarah Selecky and her husband Ryan are living for the fall. Perfect, I’ve been meaning to stop in and introduce myself, make the annual offer of my canoe to the writer-in-residence. No, wait, the wind has shifted again and I’m heading north, while at the same time travelling south down to Mexico City from Chihuahua with the Voth sisters. I’ll meet Sarah and her husband another day. I’ve got books to read, worlds to explore, water to wander aimlessly over.

But how will I ever get this chicken-scratched note out to the fast-paced world of social media. Ah yes! The obligatory wine bottle rolling in the bottom of the boat. I’ll stuff the page in, recork it and chuck it over the gunwale. I hope it washes up on your shore! And I’ll see you on Friday, October 14 for the opening event of the 10^th Annual Whistler Readers & Writers Festival at the Squamish Lil’Wat Cultural Centre. If the MC hasn’t shown up by 8 pm, please send out Search and Rescue.

Cheers,

Stephen Vogler

CR Avery returns to Whistler for full moon World Ski and Snowboard Festival performance

Don’t miss the full moon Creative 5 Eclectic show at Players Chophouse on Sunday April 17 8pm.

Creative 5 Eclectic hits Players Chophouse Thursday March 24

Volume 2 of Whistler’s latest creative arts experiment hits the stage on Thursday March 24 at Players Chophouse’s upstairs bar at 8pm.

After February’s debut of Creative 5 Eclectic, the cabaret-style open mic night returns for a spring fling, with writers, poets, musicians, painters, filmmakers, photographers, actors and comedians getting their 5 minutes to entertain the crowd.

Host and MC Stephen Vogler will be accompanied by Rajan Das on stand-up bass, to kick the night off with a few songs and poems.

March’s feature artist is singer-songwriter and filmmaker Mike Carter.

Then the mic is turned over to anyone who has a tale to spin, a joke to tell, song to sing, record to spin, film to screen, guitar to strum… you get the picture.

Only in Whistler. Seriously. The biggest mountains get the tallest tales.

We stumbled upon a review of Stephen Vogler’s book, Only in Whistler, in a Skier magazine from last season. Vogler has been handed the delicate task of wrangling 10 guest authors at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival’s Gala event on Saturday, October 16.

Here’s what else he can do:

Every ski town comes with a set of tales, history and legends. When these anecdoates are delivered – in a bar, a liftline, an article – we generally absorb them with a smile, a nod and often, outright dismissal. But when you find out the real story behind many of these narratives from someone who may not only have witnessed, but lived, many of them, you’re likely to find out that the tales are actually taller, the history more vibrant, and legend status more deserved than you could ever have imagined. That’s what Vogler does in this breezy chronicle of growing up in bad ol’ Whistler, bearing witness to the sea-change transformations that have sadly driven many of the people and things he describes from the landscape. And the title? It couldn’t be more apt in describing the craziness.

Vogler’s book launches in Whistler and Vancouver next week

What does a book launch in Whistler look like?

Well, there’s free beer and a risk of nudity.

Author Stephen Vogler and Harbour Publishing  celebrate the publication of Only in Whistler: Tales of a Mountain Town on Saturday, November 7, at Roland’s Creekside Pub (best local’s hangout in Creekside.)

Doors open at 7pm and Stephen will read and give a slide show presentation at 7:30pm. Books will be for sale and there will be some nibblies and beer.

If you can’t make the November 7th Whistler event, Stephen will also launch the book in Vancouver on Tuesday, November 10 at 7pm at Aphrodite’s Organic Cafe (3598 West 4th Avenue).

Naked is naughty – so Stephen Vogler’s book gets banned.

My friend Molly had a bath and then went running through the house, trailing suds and puddles, yelling, “I’m naked! I’m naked!”, exhilerated to be at that meeting point of the naughty and the natural.  She was only 3.

Stephen Vogler’s equally exhilerating ride through Whistler’s underbelly, Only in Whistler, also got the ‘too naughty’ nod this week, with BC Ferries admitting that the cover was not family friendly enough for them to stock it.

Stephen Vogler has always been an anti-establishment kind of guy. Not in a lock-up-your-children kind of way… more of a ooh-he-just-asked-a-question-that-is-making-the-gentry-here-squirm-in-their-starched-pants. After all, the man drives a converted school bus with enough letters peeled away to dub it the “C OOL BUS”, has his own soapbox, and was vocal in protesting the “deforestation’ of the lot that will now house the Celebration/Medals Plaza in Whistler.

That unique and uncensored voice (in the face of vigilant cops with video cameras) is the reason Harbour Publishing chose him to pen two books about Whistler. After all BC Ferries’ concern about the naughtiness of bare bums strikes at the heart of an age-old tension in Whistler – between the free spirited and the straighter-laced, the boho-ski-bum and the  investor, the early squatter and the indignant member of the “Alta Lake Ratepayers Assocation” who kept having their toilet paper nicked by freeloading ferals. (And that was in the days before Costco.)

Enter the Olympics (TM) painting another layer of whitewash on the community, and the question arises: Will the RMOW be enacting a by-law to prevent streaking?  Why not celebrate Whistler’s proud history of nudity? It doesn’t cost a thing.

Long live a community that votes for a yearly favourite writer

Who’d want to win the Pulitzer when they could win the 2009 Best of Pemberton Favourite Writer poll?

Lisa Richardson, hype-mistress for the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, contributor to Tourism Whistler’s award-winning media room, and NBCOlympics.com correspondent, joins Cindy Filipenko (Best of Pemberton Favourite Writer 2007, 2008), GD Maxwell (Best of Whistler Favourite Writer, 1998-2005, 2006-2008), Natalie Langmann (runner-up 2008), Feet Banks (2006), Stephen Vogler (runner-up 2007), as some of the scribes keeping the local arts and culture scene kicking.

Imagine it – a place in which gravity exerts such a profound force on the local culture and economy, has so many people engaged in the power of text.

Stephen Vogler Gets Set To Launch His New Book

Coming this October – something to warm you from the inside-out, as the mercury drops  - Stephen Vogler‘s new book, Only in Whistler: Tales of a Mountain Town. “If I found myself laughing at some part of the writing day,” says Vogler, of writing this book, “I figured I was hitting the mark.

The book, which took Vogler a year to write, “following 32 years of intensive research”, offers the kind of insider’s view that not many people can offer in Whistler. In a town where a person’s credibility is contingent on how long they’ve managed to live there, Vogler has seen 34 seasons turn, enough to give him the immersion necessary to scribe authoritatively about the community that lies, layered beneath the outerskins of marketing gloss, transient residents, and institutional amnesia.  ”I don’t think my idea of Whistler has changed much since 1994 when the first pieces for Whistler Features were written,” says Vogler. “It’s still a place with a very glossed-over corporate veneer––which is what most people think of when they think of Whistler––while beneath that lies this seething mass of eccentric characters and stories that truly characterizes the place. It’s those characters and their stories that I dug into in this book.”

Anyone who has read Vogler’s debut collection, Whistler Features, knows how funny he can be. And anyone who has Top of the Pass on their coffee table knows he also has a great eye for character and a poetic perspective, capturing a place with the help of local photographers Bonny Makarewicz and Toshi Kawano “where gravity drives the economy and the lifestyle.”

The biggest difference between Top of the Pass and Vogler’s newest offering, Only in Whistler, is that this one has no pictures.

Says Vogler, “It’s all storytelling. In the last one, because it was a pictorial essay as well, I had to step back a bit with the writing so that the photos could tell part of the story, almost like a script. With this one I just dug into all the stories of growing up here and all the eccentric characters I’ve gotten to know over the last thirty-odd years. It begins in 1976 when I was 12 years old and we moved to Whistler. “