Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
On Saturday, July 29th at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books, and Caitlin Press for Remnants of Place: Natalie Virginia Lang with Guests Stephen Collis, Betsy Warland and Daniela Elza.
Through poetic prose, Lang meditates on the social, historical, cultural, and environmental losses suffered at the hands of infringement upon natural areas.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
Registration is free and required for entrance.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.
For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility
Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
About the book
Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller (Caitlin Press, 2023)
In Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller, writer and educator Natalie Virginia Lang offers a vision of Sumas Mountain throughout the seasons to expose the impact of toxic progress on Place. Through poetic prose, Lang meditates on the social, historical, cultural, and environmental losses suffered at the hands of infringement upon natural areas. Remnants ventures into the natural spaces on Sumas Mountain, illuminating the errors of the modern colonial approach to progress and posing philosophical queries for alternate pathways into the future.
About the author
Natalie Virginia Lang is an educator and writer, living on Sumas Mountain in Abbotsford. Lang is passionate about the environment and is dedicated to the preservation of natural spaces, wherever possible.
Lang holds a Master of Arts degree from Simon Fraser University where she won multiple awards, including the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Award, the Julie Andreyev- Animal Lover Scholarship, the Ewan Clark Memorial Award, and a Graduate Fellowship. She also has a degree in Literature and Anthropology from the University of the Fraser Valley and an Education degree from Simon Fraser University.
With readers:
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018), and A History of the Theories of Rain (2021)—all published by Talonbooks. In 2015 he was awarded the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy, after he was sued by oil company Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers entered Collis’s poetry as evidence in court. In 2019 he was the recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust of Canada Poetry Prize in recognition of his body of work.
Betsy Warland has published 13 books of creative nonfiction and poetry. The second edition of Warland’s Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing (2010), is coming out with new material in 2023. Former director of The Writers Studio at SFU, and the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, Warland was a co-founder of the Creative Nonfiction Collective. A manuscript consultant, editor and teacher, they received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2016. In 2022, an annual national prize, The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award, was launched.
Daniela Elza lived on three continents before immigrating to Canada in 1999. Her latest poetry collections are the broken boat (2020) and slow erosions (2020). In 2021, she became a founding member of the Place Mattering Matters Collective and has been actively involved in preserving the affordable housing in her community in Vancouver, located on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is also working on a manuscript on the topic.