Providing new insights into how vividly local - but never far removed from cosmopolitan developments - the region's literary production has been, the collection features archival references to a constellation of the area's essential literary figures. The fifteen essays by established and newer voices examine creation myths among West Coast literary institutions, gender roles, and ethnicity in the region's expanding literary community, critical challenges to nationalist and ecological traditions, and also pay homage to some of our celebrated elders, including Earle Birney, George Woodcock, Robin Blaser, and P.K. Page, among many others from the 1950s onward.

CONTRIBUTIONS BY: Carolyn Zonailo, George Mcwhirter, Judith Copithorne, Susan McCaslin, Hilary Turner, Joseph Blake, Michael Barnholden, Colin James Sanders, Mike Doyle, Frances Cabahug, Paul Falardeau, Chelsea Thornton, Martin Van Woudenberg, Ron Dart, Trevor Carolan

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

Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature

This scholarly book explores the still evolving literary history of the Pacific Northwest region. These 15 distinct essays contributed by both well-known and lesser-known writers, are interpretive and critical in their nature and scope. Some essays pay homage to essential literary figures, such as Earle Birney and P.K. Page, who set the direction of a literary movement. Others examine the inevitable clash of the traditional and the newly emerging values and the new literacy of place. Readers learn of the history of the Georgia Straight newspaper, how UBC’s Creative Writing program emerged and that the new West Coast poetry derived from the Beat and the Berkeley Renaissance. On reading these essays one gains a sense of the breadth and variety of literary life in BC, and of the poetry and politics connecting Vancouver’s writing community. Brief author biographies are included.