by Eva van Loon

Words have been diligently watered over the summer in Powell River, with spectacular new results: a second anthology of our kids’ peace poems, several totally local books out of two new publishing houses, and a wave of word-wrighting activity in the community.

Live Poets’ Guild have published PRIPPA 2009: Can You Hear Peace? This is Powell River’s first totally locally written, edited, published, and manufactured perfect-bound book. Not only does it make a great memento of Powell River or Christmas gift, it is the first step in affordable, accessible community publishing.

A new local publishing house, The Pack Press, has published glasstown, a poetry collection by young local poet Katje van Loon, a 23-year-old VIU student. The Pack Press accepts submissions of literary work and intends to publish a literary journal commencing 2010.

Another new publishing house, situated in Nanaimo but owned by a Powell Riverite, Motley Crew House, has published Bitters, by local author Kaimana Wolff. This suspenseful novella features art by Powell River painter Skye Morrison on the cover and recently brought world-famous Frank Deiter, of Okanagan Spirits, to host an absinthe tasting in honor of launching the book. Like Can You Hear Peace and glasstown, the book is available at Kingfisher and Breakwater  bookstores and at Paperworks. At under $20 retail, both books are outstanding examples of local initiative in literacy and publishing, demonstrating to the community the affordability and accessibility of publishing eco-friendly real books right here in our town.

Next on the press are The Pack Press’ Parallel: forty-nine Canadian poets speak to Obama. In this book, some of Canada’s best poets tell Obama something of what it means to be Canadian. Stuff we thought he should know.

Beyond suirvival: a journal of cultural creatives, will be a quirky local periodical from the genius of long-term PRiverite Martin Rossander (see his invitation on next page).

Local writers can now access the services of Eva van Loon as editor/publisher and CMG Printing (Corey Matsumoto) as designer/book-manufacturer to put out club and family histories, memoirs, cookbooks, how-to books, poetry, or the Great Canadian Novel without spending a fortune or committing to thousands of books that may never sell.

This way, the writer or creator has the choice of becoming one’s own publisher, submitting to a publisher, maintaining control over creative and design input, printing 50 or 5,000 books, and test-running a book via digital publishing before committing to a big, expensive letterpress run. Community publishing rocks!

PR Live Poets’ Guild took a new step in assembling a board for International Peace-Poem Walkers’ Society, a group dedicated to “peace and poetry at a human pace.” The idea is to walk the International Peace Poem from community to community, holding peace- and literacy-related activities at the target community. A banner was created and the Peace Poem took its inaugural walk down Marine Avenue at the Blackberry Festival Street Party (narrowly avoiding clunking merrymakers in the noggin with the poles of the dratted banner, may it be noted for next year. There must be a better way!).

Powell River Writers’ Conference (the former Festival of Writers) will be held April 30 and May 1, 2010. PRWC are on Facebook, ready to receive imput from any other group wishing to participate or hook up activities. The spring conference, mentored by the heads of the Canadian Authors’ Association and the BC League of Writers, promises to be bigger than ever before.

Not only is our Writers’ Conference, as one sponsor put it, “the little conference that could”, Powell River is joining the vanguard of a revolution in publishing.