Reading Copy: Paul Yee

Paul Yee is the leading chronicler of the Chinese immigration experience in Canada. He has to his credit many acclaimed books for young people, including The Jade Necklace, The Bone Collector's Son, and Ghost Train, which won the 1996 Governor General's Award. Recent titles include What Happened Last Summer (Tradewind), a collection of stories featuring Asian-Canadian teens, and Shu-li and Tamara (Tradewind), a picture book for middle readers. Saltwater City, a non-fiction book for adults, won the Vancouver Book Prize. His newest non-fiction book is Chinatown (Lorimer). Yee lives in Toronto.

Click here for
Paul Yee's
Reading Copy.

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This is a special edition of Reading Copy. It's longer (3 minutes or so, as compared to the 2 mins that the others maxed out at) and features pictures of Paul Yee performing the story Alone No Longer from his Groundwood Books collection Dead Man's Gold instead of pictures of a reading copy.

This is because Yee doesn't use a reading copy - and, given that he memorizes his stories at home, he doesn't have the marked up texts he uses as memory aids either.

I decided to use portraits of Yee because in a way, his memory (and the stories he has spooled up there) is his reading copy.

Photos: Poetry Bash

Andris Taskans, Prairie Fire editor, looks on while an audience member scopes out Victorian Trisha Cull's Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Prize ring, which was presented just before Cull's reading. And what a hunk of turquoise it is (covet covet)!

Apparently, 2006 was a good year for Cull. She was also shortlisted for the 3-Day Novel Contest won by fellow THIN AIR author Brendan McLeod.



THIN AIR Director and poet Charlene Diehl assumes her trademark "I'm a bat" pose at intermission. From the podium, Charlene lamented the end of the festival insofar as she would have to put away all her dramatic clothing until next year.



THIN AIR festival staff assemble to view General Manager Perry Grosshans' shoes.

You can't quite see it in this pic, but there's an overhanging chrome lamp in the 'living room' the authors (and in this case, festival staff) inhabit while on stage.

Poet Paul Savoie, who was originally from St. Boniface but who has called Ontario home since the 70s, gonged his head on the lamp while rising for his reading. Eek!



Poet and U of M Prof Alison Calder (in a sparkly sparkly ensemble) chats with Poet and U of M Ph D Candidate Melanie Branagan.

Calder had a busy week, dividing her time between THIN AIR campus program events at the U of M and The Prairies in 3-D: Disorientations, Diversities, Dispersals conference hosted by St. John's College.

Calder even split her Saturday, presenting her paper, Fear of Flooding: Mapping Competing Spatial Definitions in Winnipeg, earlier in the day.