It’s with great excitement that I announce I will be doing a reading and leading a story workshop this weekend at ArtsWells Festival of All Things Art. Billed as ‘the Cariboo’s largest celebration of music and art’, this is a festival I’ve tried to get to for so many years I can’t tell you. Somehow something always comes up on that first long weekend of August. This year I was invited to participate, et voilà, Barkerville and Wells here we come! At long last I’ll get to see Jeff Andrew, an artist (and now a friend) I have long admired. Jeff Andrew is an original. The first time I heard him, at a treeplanting party somewhere in the wilderness of B.C., I dropped everything and sat in awe and listened. He is a major talent, one of the strongest voices of his generation, politically and artistically.

So what am I up to at ArtsWells? My first session is titled, ‘The Myth of the Poet’. In it I’m going to dispel as many myths of the poet as I can with readings from my war work, some readings from my new opera, a little bit of Wittgenstein-riff, and maybe even a bit of skank from 51 shades of black & blue, a cabaret project with my collective Exegesis (Dr. Jaime Robles and Dr. Mike Rose)! The second session is a workshop, ‘Becoming Stories‘, with the Snotty Nose Rez Kids, two hiphop artists from the Haisla village, Kitamaat Village. SNRK are currently riding the wave. Pairing me, someone who works with the ‘legacy’ classical music world as a cross-cultural project, with this duo who work in a distinctly different cross-cultural project, a ‘legacy’ world originating in the urban black experience, well that should make for interesting times! While there will definitely be a Q & A session for us all, it’s going to be a work session too so participants should be prepared!!