The Pacific Rim Review of Books and its editors have taken on the seemingly gargantuan task of nation building in a post-national era. Contradictory? Perhaps, but this is a large vision and contains multitudes, as Walt Whitman would say. What is contained in these pages reinforces this notion for North Americans, and discourages the kind of thinking often forced on us by cultural and political centres back east, and the industry-generated culture they answer to, whether those centres be New York, Toronto, Washington D.C. or Ottawa. The action is here on the Pacific Rim and the editors know it. The twenty-five essays in this book give you a sense of the breadth and depth of that action. This is not to say that all the material here comes from the Rim itself, but it is surely shaped by an emerging Pacific ethos. An ethos strengthened by Pacific Rim-based movements such as the the San Francisco Renaissance, West Coast Eco-Dharma Lit, and the importance of Asian art and culture.

Trevor Carolan was born in Yorkshire. His family emigrated in l957 and he grew up in New Westminster, British Columbia. He has travelled extensively and lived in California, Alberta, and Britain. He began writing professionally at 17, filing dispatches from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury music scene. Widely published as journalist, literary critic, anthologist, poet, and translator specializing in East-West arts and letters, his work has appeared in five languages.

Dr. Carolan has worked as media advocate on behalf of international human rights, North Korean famine relief, Bosnian refugees, Canadian Aboriginal land claims, and Pacific Coast watershed issues. He served as literary coordinator for the XV Olympic Winter Games in Calgary; and has been Coordinator of writing programs at the Banff Arts Centre. He holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Bond University, Queensland. For more than 20 years he has lived in North Vancouver where he served for three years as an elected municipal councillor and later wrote as political columnist for the North Shore News. He now teaches English at University of the Fraser Valley near Vancouver.

His current works are Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific (Cheng & Tsui), and Against the Shore: The Best of Pacific Rim Review of Books, which he co-edited with Richard Olafson. The Pillow Book of Dr. Jazz, an autobiographical novel, and Celtic Highway, a collection of poetry, are published by Ekstasis Editions. Giving up Poetry, a memoir of his acquaintance with the late poet Allen Ginsberg is published by Banff Centre Press. In 2003 he received a Spirituality & Health Best Books of the Year citation for his Return to Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master (Marlowe), an account of his lengthy studies with Master Ng Ching-Por in Vancouver’s Chinatown.

Trevor Carolan's profile page

Richard Olafson is an editor, poet, book designer and publisher. A long-time Victoria resident, he is active in many community organizations. Olafson has published a number of books and chapbooks, among them Blood of the Moon, Cloud on My Tongue, and There Are Some So Unlucky They Do Not Even Have Bodies. He attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in its second year of operation and was much influenced the following year by taking classes from Warren Tallman at UBC’s English Department. He is also the publisher of the Pacific Rim Review of Books. He lives in Victoria with his family.

Richard Olafson's profile page