Former Selkirk instructor Wharton launches his latest poetry collection
By Contributor
By Tom Wayman
A graduate of Nelson’s David Thompson University Centre and former Selkirk College instructor Calvin Wharton launches his new collection of poetry, The Song Collides, at Nelson’s Oxygen Art Centre, 320 Vernon St. (alley entrance), on Thursday, Oct. 6 at 7:30 p.m.
The launch is free and open to the public.
“How good to know sweetness and humor are alive and well,” said Governor-General’s Literary Award-winner David Zieroth of Wharton’s new book.
“To read of travels from ‘sloping West Coast forest/with the terraced bank of garden’ to the Hundred Step Alley in China, to hear the universal song of the family with both its sad departures and ‘the clear joy that disturbs the placid surface of the familiar.'”
Wharton is currently the chair of the Creative Writing Department at New Westminster’s Douglas College, where he edited the literary magazine Event from 1996 to 2001.
He graduated from the writing program at Nelson’s former David Thompson University Centre (DTUC), and subsequently returned to the West Kootenay to teach graphic communications at Selkirk College’s Castlegar campus.
His other books include the collection of short stories, Three Songs by Hank Williams, and a non-fiction book on rowing with Olympic athlete Silken Laumann.
After the closure of DTUC in 1984, Wharton was one of the core founding faculty of the Vancouver Centre of the Kootenay School of Writing, which attempted between 1984 and 1987 to continue some of the curriculum previously offered in Nelson.
Wharton currently lives in North Vancouver.
