Memoir brilliantly captures real life

Human Happiness
by Brian Fawcett
Thomas Allen publishers, 288 pages (paperback), $24.95

Reviewed by Norbert Ruebsaat

In his 2011 memoir, Human Happiness, Brian Fawcett puts the story of his parents, Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry, at the centre of the action. It takes place in Prince George, in the middle of British Columbia at the edge of the northern resource-rich frontier in a time when local cultures and regional economies had not yet been bulldozed away by transnational corporations. We’re in the post Second World War “Golden Age” of North American progress, prosperity and dreams of perpetual happiness that begins in 1945 and ends in the late 1960s. Rita and Hartley raise a family, create “a Business Empire” (as Hartley, a self-made-man of his time who likes to speak in capital letters puts it) and capture “The Good Life,” a condition no longer available to post-war boomers and Xers who might, says our author, “lead a but never the good life.”

Hartley’s in the soft-drink bottling, meat-packing and milk-delivery businesses. Rita is, as were most women back then, a housewife who devotes tender and intelligent time to her four children. She offsets the loneliness of being at home in a small testosterone-driven resource extraction town, where her husband’s at work all day and on weekends golfs with his buddies, by starting a women’s group with other local mothers. When it becomes apparent that Hartley’s a great salesman but bad accountant, she adds keeping the company books to her duties.

Hartley’s neglectful and self absorbed: when Rita contracts cancer and needs to go to Vancouver for treatment, he doesn’t accompany her; it becomes clear that their marriage is troubled, sometimes dysfunctional, but held together by a shared dedication to everyday common-sense living and no false hopes about the nature of happiness. Son Brian defines this happiness as “something glimpsed in flight,” that requires “an ability to live with ambiguity and tolerate a certain degree of physical humour,” a state of being he contrasts with the permanent compulsory happiness proffered by consumer culture and advertising.

When, in the mid 1960s, city-based corporations begin to descend on northern B.C., business-suited executives walk into Hartley’s office and announce that if he doesn’t sell his ice cream operation their consortium will dump product into his marketplace below his cost until he is bankrupt. A&W, Dairy Queen and Macdonald’s and their ilk make similar attacks on local stores and eateries. Timber multinationals, backed by the B.C. government, force local logging operations out of business to the extent that, by 1972, 600 locally owned mills and many more portable “gypo outfits” have been replaced by eight supermills and two pulp mills. Hartley, who’s thrown enough city suits out of his office to realize that he “can’t beat progress,” decides, in 1968, to sell his business and moves with Rita to the Okanagan, where he lives happily for his remaining thirty years.

Human Happiness is the best memoir I’ve read about the BC Interior during a crucial period of its history. I know of no other accounts that put personal, family, social, and economic history together so well that I understand how daily lives, family relationships, local politics and economics work together to create a unique culture. And the bonus here is that Fawcett takes the next step, which is to write a memoir not only about life but also about an idea. Happiness stands at the centre of his parents’ story: while giving us intimate news about their lives and dreams and doings, he gives us also a philosophical investigation of a key North American, perhaps universal, real-life value.

 

Norbert Ruebsaat has published in The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail, Literary Canada Review, Geist Magazine, Vancouver Review and Dooney’s Café.

Steam-punkish humour sparks Musgrave’s novel

Given
By Susan Musgrave
Thistledown Press, pp. 298.

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

Given is the second novel in a trilogy by Susan Musgrave. Musgrave is a poet, a novelist, a writer of children’s books and of non-fiction with over twenty-six books to her name. Cargo of Orchids (2001) was the first in this trilogy. However, while some of Cargo’s characters people the pages of Given, this time around they are not quite alive. Which is a clue. Another clue is the cover. Decidedly ghoulish, it depicts a mechanical model of a human body sans left leg and right forearm. The model hangs from chains, head flopped forward at an awkward angle. Pieces of electrical wire protrude from the openings the limbs once occupied. Coiled springs and empty limbs strew the dark background. A steampunk sort of image. I don’t necessarily judge a book by its cover, but steampunk stayed with me as I read.

The narrator has just escaped from death row in an American prison. Her crime: murdering her own child. Her two death-row friends, Rainy and Frenchy, have already died on death row — for the murders of their children. Death and death images, grief, addiction, ghosts, pain – these fill the book. Humour too. Susan Musgrave is a very funny writer even when her focus is on death. The story follows the narrator as she makes her way to a West Coast island with the help of her slightly estranged husband, Vernal. The names are clever. The penitentiary is called Mountjoy. The pet cat is Aged Orange. Vernal drives an old hearse. And throughout her escape, her arrival on the island, her sojourn to the city, the narrator notes with fitting irony an amazing number of odd and amusing events, signs, sayings in the surrounding world in which she is now a stranger. A radio caller asks Jesus for help losing weight; Rainy (now a ghost) wonders if it hurts flowers when you cut them; the drugstore is called Drugs R Us.

Steampunk is a variety of speculative fiction that appears in a number of literary, theatrical and cinematic forms. Historical steampunk generally situates a narrative in the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian era before the advent of electricity when steam power was pervasive. But steampunk also refers to a literary variety of “gas-lit” horror and fantasy that includes supernatural elements. This is how Given affected me: a melancholy narrative of grief and regret with a fantastical, almost horrific understory. Intriguing, compelling, imaginative. And real. It all depends where the spotlight lands. I had no question that the events described fell more within the range of reality than the fantastical. The descriptions of prison life, the punishments, addictions – all believable. That the child ghosts arrive in red mist – also understandable, under the circumstances. That the narrator speaks with ghosts – of course. Nonetheless, as a whole, Given is fantastical. It is funny. It is literary. It is a most unusual read. I look forward to the third in this trilogy.

 

Author Arleen Paré is a frequent reviewer for Coastal Spectator

Skidmore tells story of child migration

Patricia Skidmore (left), who lives in Port Moody, British Columbia, has written a moving book about her mother’s experiences as a child migrant to Canada in 1937. Marjorie Arnison was from Whitley Bay in northeastern England. She lived in Birmingham for seven months before being sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School in the Cowichan Valley when she was just 10. She could never properly explain her past to her children. The “mystery” caused Skidmore to write Marjorie Too Afraid to Cry: A Home Child Experience, published by Dundurn (295 pages, $30). Coastal Spectator Editor Lynne Van Luven read Marjorie’s story with great interest since her own grandfather was also sent to Canada as a “Barnardo Boy.” Skidmore’s book will be launched at the University of Victoria Bookstore on March 14 at 7 p.m. 

Can you remember the catalyst that set your mind to writing about your mother’s story?

After spending much of my childhood fighting my mother for her story, in an attempt to find out who she really was and why she was in Canada while most of her family was in England, I concluded that she was keeping some horrid dark secret from me. At 17, I gave up and left home.

It took another eight years before I faced the question again, when I was a mother myself and feeling overwhelmed. My father had died in 1957, leaving my mother with 5 children between the ages of three weeks and 8 years. My bout with one sick baby helped me realize that I was not stronger than my mother, as I had always thought. I began to see her in a different light and I wondered who was this “superwoman” who single-parented her little family and kept them together against all odds?

And I realized that I needed to find my way back to her–although I would still need to try to figure out who she was. I feared that I couldn’t be a good daughter without knowing her deeper, and if I couldn’t be a good daughter, then how could I be a good mother?

In June 1986, when I saw the Fairbridge Farm property for the first time, I was dumbfounded by the beautiful countryside. I had expected a gravel pit. It hit me that the stark image I had in my mind came from my mother’s emotional distress at feeling so alone and bleak when she was removed from her family and sent to a new country.

By this time, I had been single parenting my three sons for many years–so finding time to pursue this research was challenging. After my 2 older sons were through high school, I returned to Victoria in 1996 to complete a degree that I started there in 1969. And I found my way into Women’s Studies.

In 1999, Professor Christine St. Peter led us to the BC Archives, which opened an avenue for research that I had no previous knowledge of. And the archives are where I found my mother’s past (in the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School records). I found a personal file for my mother, and together we discovered her immigration landing card, then her birth certificate, sent by her mother in 1948 when she wanted to get married, along with a couple of photographs. My mother seemed pleased as the research progressed: “Well they didn’t just throw me away, they kept records of me,” she said.

You have referred to your 20 years of exhaustive research on your book. What advice do you have for others who might be considering writing a family memoir?

For me, making my mother go back to that place she had buried all those years ago was a tricky business. I told myself I would stop if she became distressed. However my desire to understand the truth was so great, I wonder if I really would have.

My advice to anyone searching for a lost past is: don’t give up but don’t expect things to happen overnight.  Patience is important.

A number of factors enabled me to rediscover my mother’s past, but the most important thing was that she was with me while I did this research. I wrote my mother’s story because it was important to me to know about my past.

I am working on a sequel, which takes Marjorie through her years at the Farm School until early 1943. She was removed from the Farm School at 16 and was placed as a domestic servant in a home in Victoria. The working title for this sequel is Marjorie: The War Years. Today, my mother is offering her memories. The door is open to her past. The shame has dissipated. Marjorie now feels strong and proud about how she navigated her life and survived.

Have you or your mother heard from many other child migrants since your book was published?

Yes. I keep in regular contact with a number of the Former Fairbridgians sent to Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, as well as several from the Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) Fairbridge Memorial College, which ran from 1946 until 1962, and I keep in touch with some of the Old Fairbridgians from the Australian Fairbridge Farm Schools.

Since the publication of my book, I have had numerous new contacts, which include email  from offspring of former Canadian child migrants, now living in the United States and in Australia.

In a recent CBC interview, you said many of those transported as children, including your mother, felt “shame” about their history. Do you think Gordon Brown’s apology and the slow growth of books and stories about child migrants helps to dissipate that feeling?

Yes, but it may be that each personal journey differs – so I cannot speak for others. I saw my mother transform during her visit to England in 2010 for then-prime minister Gordon Brown’s apology. If you were not directly affected by the events that lead up to a formal apology, then that act would hold little meaning. But I will never again question the validity of a formal apology after witnessing the healing firsthand.

When Gordon Brown looked into my mother’s eyes and said, “I am truly sorry,” that formal recognition allowed for more healing than all my years of research. I believe a lot of the shame stemmed from an inability to talk about her past and what brought her to Canada. So much was hidden, she found difficult to speak openly.

 Do you think Britons and North Americans have learned anything useful about child migration since the practice first started, even since your mother’s time?

Child migration went on for so long: Britain first started “transporting” children in 1618, and child migration to Australia continued until 1974.  So many well-read people tell me that they have never heard of British Child Migration. I too was surprised to learn that child migration had a 350-year history, with the first group of children being sent to Richmond, Virginia, at the request of King James I.

I feel at a loss to understand why its history has not become better known. Perhaps the main reason is that the full history is not taught in the public schools. The Canadian government’s attitude may also be a factor.  In 2009, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said there was “no need” for Canada to apologize for abuse and exploitation suffered by thousands of poor children shipped here from Britain.

Fine Arts well represented in IdeaFest

Running March 4-15 in every corner of UVic campus, this free festival connects you to experts working on the kind of ideas that really can “make a difference.”

Here’s a quick breakdown of  Fine Arts events:

•Enacting the Artist / Researcher / Educator: Six UVic applied theatre graduate students engaged in a theatre-based PhD research project will discuss utilizing playbuilding as qualitative research, as well as a variety of theatre conventions as a way to generate, interpret and (re)present data.   2-4 pm Monday, March 4, in room 109 of the Fine Arts building

• Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards: Celebrate some of the outstanding research produced by the 2012 Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards scholars at this day-long presentation of their work. Here’s a list of who’s representing Fine Arts: Sara Fruchtman, Alexandra Macdonald and Christine Oldridge (History in Art), Stewart Gibbs, Sarah Johnson and Jennifer Taylor (Theatre), Bronwyn McMillin and Willie Seo (Visual Arts), Claire Garneau and Liz Snell (Writing).  11am-3 pm in the SUB’s Cinecenta, Upper Lounge and Michele Pujol room

•Mini Film Fest: Join some of the Department of Writing’s emerging filmmakers for a screening and discussion of several recent, award-winning student films—including the Leo Award-winning web series Freshman’s Wharf, and Connor Gaston’s recent TIFF and VFF-screened short, Bardo Light, among others.  7:30 pm Thursday, March 7, in room 162 of the Visual Arts building• Sonic Lab: Join UVic’s contemporary music ensemble as they present two compositions that explore the sound itself as musical material. Imagine a brick wall with a human figure painted on it, which can be taken apart & rebuilt as a fence or a house—meaning the parts of painted body would show up in an unexpected context.  8 pm Friday, March 8, in the Phillip T Young Recital Hall

•“Have you ever had an idea?”Get in on this interactive, community-involving project aimed at enabling ideas to be more accessible and more attainable. Participants become part of Victoria’s biggest idea—a giant run-on sentence created by texting, calling or e-mailing in their ideas.  7-10 pm Friday, March 8, in room A111 of the Visual Arts building

•“Games Without Frontiers: The Social Power of Video Games”: Join professors, grad students, undergraduates, high-school students, local game designers and curious citizens of Victoria at this mini-conference to explore, discuss and marvel at the power of video-game technology to bring people together and improve the world. Faculty and students will give demonstrations and offer a Q&A about the innovative use of “gamification” techniques in their research, including games that help to improve the lives of children with autism, teach about First Nations treaties, combat obesity and explore the ocean floor, among others. Noon-6 pm Saturday, March 9, in room C103 of the David Strong building

•“Is There Still Potential for Human Creativity?” A good question which promises a lively back and forth at this Fine Arts discussion panel featuring Jennifer Stillwell (Visual Arts), George Tzanetakis (Computer Science-Music), Lee Henderson (Writing), Victoria Wyatt (History in Art), Jonathan Goldman (Music). Moderated by the Times Colonist‘s Dave Obee.  7:30 pm Monday, March 11,  in B150 of the Bob Wright Centre

•Fine Arts PechaKucha: Get a sense of what’s happening in both History in Art and Visual Art with this exciting, fast-paced PechaKucha-style interdisciplinary visual presentation. Don’t know PechaKucha? It’s like a TED talk on speed!  5-7 pm Tuesday, March 12, in room 162 of the Visual Arts building.

•Intergenerational Theatre for Development in India: After being displaced by the 2006 tsunami, a new community in India is using Applied Theatre to reconnect its citizens. The creation of an intergenerational theatre company to perform the stories of seniors and rural youth of the Tamilnadu community has the potential to create lines of dialogue across generations by positively highlighting the life experiences of residents of Tamaraikulam Elders’ Village and students of the Isha Vidhya Matriculation School. Theatre PhD student Matthew Gusul recently visited India and will tell the story of this developing project.  4:45 pm Thursday, March 14, in the Phoenix Theatre’s McIntyre Studio.

More info:  IdeaFest 2013 website

Writers on Music: This album is the Bad Boy

It Might Take Long
Mindil Beach Markets (2013)
Produced and engineered by Sean McLean Carrie

Reviewed by Yasuko Thanh

Five guys.  Energetic, solid, toe-tapping rhythms. This music swaggers.

If this CD were a person, he’d be the “bad boy.” Shock of hair covering one eye. Tough guy. But with something else about him, too. In the way he moves. Something that says, I drink alone. And when he does, he sometimes cries.

Fans who’ve come to appreciate this band’s diversity won’t be disappointed. Track 7 starts out like a lullaby.  Almost as sweet as chocolate kisses with those little foil wrappers.  But the band’s website accurately warns that “light-hearted danceable jams” are tempered by “dark rock” including “a song about the zombie apocalypse.”

I can imagine playing this CD while driving in my car with an elbow out the window. Hanging at the beach, sand in my toes. Or cleaning empties off the kitchen table while clouds roll by outside dirty panes of glass.

There’s some great guitar work here. An I-mean-business style of playing that forces the listener to sit up and pay attention. Do not be fooled by the feel-good innocence of some of these songs. Tracks like those of a roller coaster switch quickly and the next thing you know you’re being taken on a wild ride through other sounds. Good ol’ fashioned rock, sunshine-reggae, even glimmers of punk.The songs flow into each other.  And as they do so, they inform each other. They add to the story to create a new whole.

In the past, I’ve stumbled by accident on great bands. Wandered into a gig, wet from the rain, looking more for shelter than music. This CD reminded me of those times  when I’ve not anticipated much but discovered something unexpected.

 

Yasuko Thanh’s short story collection Floating Like the Dead (M&S) was a Quill & Quire Best Books of 2012 selection.

Rita Wong to read from new book at Open Word

Rita Wong

UVic, Fine Arts Building
Room 209
Monday, March 11 at 11 am

Open Space–with Tim Lilburn
Monday, March 11 at 7:30 pm

Open Space’s Open Word: Readings and Ideas literary series continues with two public readings by Vancouver’s Rita Wong. The first reading is scheduled at the University of Victoria, Fine Arts Building Room 209, on Monday March 11, at 11:00 a.m. Later on Monday, Wong will be reading from her book forage as well as new work at Open Space at 7:30 p.m. followed by an interview by Tim Lilburn. Open Word is jointly organized by the University of Victoria Department of Writing and Open Space.

Rita Wong’s poetry excavates the minefields of childhood, family, history, and desire.  Her latest collection of poems, forage (Harbour Publishing 2007), explores how ecological crises relate to the injustices of our international political landscape. Querying the relations between writing and other forms of action, Wong seeks a shift in consciousness through poems that bespeak a range of responses to our world: anger, protest, anxiety, bewilderment, hope and love. In her words, “the next shift may be the biggest one yet, the union of the living, from mosquito to manatee to mom.”  forage is accompanied by marginalia, Chinese characters and photos that give depth to the political context in which most of Wong’s poems are situated.

Rita is the author of three other collections: sybil unrest (co-written with Larissa Lai, Line Books, 2008), forage (Nightwood, 2007), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998).  She received the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award in 1997 and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008.  Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as The Harbrace Anthology of Poetry; Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry; A Verse Map of Vancouver; Rocksalt: an Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry; Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics; and more.  Building from her doctoral dissertation that examined labour in Asian North American literature, her work investigates the relationships between contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology, and decolonization.  Rita serves as Associate Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she is currently researching the poetics of water with the support of a SSHRC Research/Creation grant in a project entitled Downstream.

Tim Lilburn is the author of eight books of poetry, including Kill-site, To the River, and Moosewood Sandhills. He has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award in Literature twice: in 1989, for Tourist to Ecstasy, and in 2003, when he received the award for Kill-site. His most recent books of poetry are Orphic Politics (McCelland and Stewart, 2008) and Assiniboia (M&S, 2012).  He is also the author of the essay collection Living in the World as if It Were Home (1999), a book on ecology and desire. Going Home, new essays from House of Anansi  (2008), continues to explore the preoccupations of Living in the World, tracing the nearly forgotten Western contemplative tradition from Plato through Christian monasticism, and considering the relevance of this tradition to both contemporary poetry and politics. Tim teaches at the University of Victoria.

Award-winning folkies do it again . . . beautifully

Long Gone Out West Blues
By Pharis & Jason Romero (2013)
Recorded by Ivan Rosenberg; mixed and mastered by David Travers-Smith

Reviewed by Jessica Benini  

Long Gone Out West Blues is an authentic folk, roots and bluegrass album uniting traditional classics alongside timeless songs written and performed by Pharis and Jason Romero. This down to earth duo has made a home in the wilderness near the hamlet of Horsefly, BC, home of Pharis’s family for five generations. Not only do they make beautiful music, they also work as a team custom building J. Romero Banjos, a company Jason started in Northern California where he originates. Their music reflects their hard working and organic lifestyle, welcoming you with a laid-back sound of blended harmonies combined with Jason’s smooth banjo licks and Pharis’s thoughtful lyrics.

Traditional songs such as “Across the Bridge,” “Wild Bill Jones,” “It Just Suits Me,” along with Jason’s banjo version of the classic fiddle tune, “Sally Goodin,” are gracefully honored with their renditions. Pharis and Jason’s own songs such as “Long Gone Out West Blues,” “Sad Old Song,” “Come On Home, The Little Things Are Hardest In The End,” acknowledges loneliness while finding inner strength when life brings you down and leaves you with a positive feel. Escaping the weight of the world, your own fears and prisons, and finding rest in the stillness where there is nothing else but you and your thoughts.

One of my favorites is “Lost Lula,” an instrumental and tribute to their dog Lula that never came home, lost to the wilderness on some unknown adventure. It echoes a haunting call into the sunset.

Their previous album A Passing Glimpse, won New/Emerging Artist of the Year at the 2012 Canadian Folk Music Awards, as well as Americana Album of the Year at the 2012 Independent Music Awards. Long Gone Out West Blues is just as strong and fantastic for any occasion–whether you are sipping on homemade iced tea on a hot summer afternoon or in a cozy cabin drinking whiskey in the middle of nowhere. And it will most likely inspire you to buy a J. Romero banjo in support of this genuine couple and their passion for music.

 

Jessica Benini is a West Coast Folk singer/songwriter and voice, guitar & harmonica teacher based in Victoria, BC.

Victoria author bares more than her soul

By Will Johnson

Yasuko Thanh is not afraid to take off her clothes.

The Journey Prize-winning Victoria author, who published her debut collection of short stories Floating Like the Dead last year, is slated to appear as Miss July in a calendar of nude Canadian authors due in 2014. The project, titled “Bare it For Books,” will raise funds for PEN Canada.

But Thanh may be the only author in the calendar who already has experience working as a nude model.

“I’m trying not to tie those two worlds together as a deliberate decision,” she said. “In my wild-child days, or whatever you want to call it, I did modeling and it was certainly of a different texture. That was working as a part of the sex industry. And that’s not necessarily something I want to relive.”

“I think I have a nudist streak in me,” she said. “Anaïs Nin has this wonderful line, in one of her stories or journals, I’m not sure. ‘As sexless as a child who thinks nothing of his nakedness’. I think of it kind of like that. It doesn’t need to be provocative in that sexual way.”

“When we do the photo shoot that’s coming up on March 3, we have some interesting ideas that are going to stay away from that. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be tongue-in-cheek,” she said.

The project, which is the brainchild of author Amanda Leduc and classical music producer Allegra Young, will feature 12 nude authors and will raise financial support for PEN Canada.

When Thanh was contacted by Young and Leduc, she eagerly accepted the invitation to participate. Victoria photographer Anastasia Andrews volunteered to take the photos.

“I said any way I can help, I’m there. I think most people have heard of PEN, and I certainly support the work they do.”

Thanh enthusiastically agreed with author Vincent Lam, who will appear alongside her in the calendar and was quoted in a recent story in The National Post as saying that it’s much more personal to publish a book than to expose your body to the world.

“Putting a book, putting your soul out there, that’s way more personal,” she said.

But she also emphasized it’s important to keep her experiences in perspective.

“Yes, it’s a little soul-baring to have a book, to put it out there and to have people saying things about it. Oh, poor me. But there are places where you’re not just putting your soul out there, you’re actually putting your life on the line or you could be looking at a prison sentence,” she said.

This is why Thanh felt so strongly about supporting PEN Canada.

“The fact that there’s an organization out there, fighting for people’s freedom of speech, well that’s great. And I want to support that any way I can.”

When asked why she thought of Thanh for the calendar, which also features a diverse selection of authors such as Miranda Hill, Angie Abdou and Daniel MacIvor, Leduc’s answer was simple: “because she’s hot stuff.”

“The point of BIFB, in addition to raising funds for PEN, is to introduce Canadians to writers they might not have encountered,” said Leduc. “Yasuko is a great writer, a young writer, and maybe not as well known as some of the others in the calendar.”

When asked how she feels about appearing alongside Yann Martel, bestselling author of Life of Pi, Thanh beamed happily.

“It feels friggin’ awesome,” she said.

 

Writer Will Johnson is back in Victoria after stints in Vancouver and Nova Scotia. 

 

VIMA’s eclectic scene ready to roll

The Vancouver Island Music Awards (VIMA) is gearing up for the 9th Annual Awards show on April 28th. Some of this year’s nominees include the Tequila Mockingbird Orchestra, Steph MacPherson, Woodsmen, Man Made Lake, and Carli and Julie Kennedy.  Andrea Routley recently talked with James Kasper, the founder and producer of VIMA, about what to expect.

So, 9th Annual Vancouver Island Music Awards, and you’ve been there from the beginning. You must have heard hundreds of submissions by now, and across such diverse categories like rock/metal, jazz, pop, spoken word . . . Have you noticed any musical trends over the years, or recurring themes? Is there a way to describe “Vancouver Island Music”?

There is definitely an eclectic scene here on the Island, with everything from blues to metal. But probably what I hear most is a kind of vocal-based organic roots-rock sound. I think it’s been like that here for years, from what I’ve observed.

Is there a particular artist or group that stands out over the years? Why?

Any artist who works hard and doesn’t give up despite the challenges and adversity . . .  Any artist who treats other artists and fans with respect and kindness no matter what level of success they achieve . . . Those are the artists who stand out to me.

The Awards show is a huge production. You’ve got 1,000 tickets for sale, up to dozens of performers, advertisers, media–camera crew, artist collaborations . . . So quick:  Best VIMA show moment ever?

Oh wow, where to begin . . . I like the moments where the audience is so excited to hear the winner’s name that people begin screaming even before the presenter is finished reading the card . . . This happened in 2011 when Aegis Fang won for Male Vocalist, and in 2012 when Lindsay Bryan won for Song of the Year. And really, the whole event is just a rush. I spend 8 months of my year preparing for the main event, and it’s pretty exciting to see it all crystallize into a 3-hour show.

Now, Worst VIMA show moment ever:

Hm, well, the cue cards have presented some interesting challenges over the years, including the first awards presentation in 2011 when the cue cards weren’t ready, and the presenters were left to improvise until I sent the hosts out to do damage control, which they they did just fine. It was stressful at the time, but some people told me later they thought it was all part of the act. Ha. Also, several years back, when David Gogo and David Lennam were hosting, they were asked to give out a door prize and they somehow procured an actual honest-to-goodness door in the rubble backstage and brought it out as a “door prize.” At that point, I shook my head and thought to myself, “I have completely lost control of this show.”

James, you are also a prolific musician, both as a touring musician and a recording artist. What can awards do for a music career?

I always advise independent musicians to just take advantage of any opportunity they can to expose their work and build their network of contacts. A music awards show is one such opportunity. And the Island Music Awards have always been much less about competition and much more about community, celebrating the Island’s music scene, and a way for a diverse array of musicians and music industry representatives to come together on one night and network with each other.

Last summer, VIMA’s put out a call for community support, seeking donations from businesses in order to continue into 2013. The goal was $100 from 50 island businesses. What happened with that?

To be honest, it wasn’t the result we were hoping for. There were some donations from a couple of businesses and a couple of musicians, which we were very grateful to receive, but the event is still in dire need of financial sponsors in order to stay afloat. Any Island business wanting to support this event can reach me at info@jameskasper.com . . . because if we can stay afloat, it would be nice to have a 10th anniversary next year!

The 9th annual Vancouver Island Music Awards show takes place Sunday, April 28th at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, downtown Victoria. Tickets are available now. Contact info@jameskasper.com.

For the full list of 2013 nominees, visit islandmusicawards.wordpress.com.