The SoundBox Collection
Leaf Leaf/sounds)) is a multi-track sound piece remixing a digitized 1969 reel-to-reel recording of Daphne Marlatt reading from her book, Leaf Leaf/s. Marlatt’s voice is re-sounded alongside ambient guitar drones and field recordings captured by the artist Xiaoxuan Huang between 2021-2022.
University of Exeter undergraduates Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop carry out a close listening of a 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen reading from her first book Artemis Hates Romance at George and Angela Bowerings’ house. Drew and Chircop’s conversation focuses on the intimacy, sociality, and ambiguity of the recording, and how this shapes interpretation. The episode features multiple archival clips from the digitized cassette tape, alongside interview audio from Karis Shearer and George Bowering. “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings’” was co-produced by Emily Chircop and Sofie Drew as part of the Press Play project. The SoundBox Collection is part of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.
Thea Bowering (1971–) was born in Vancouver. She now lives in Edmonton where she works as a writing instructor at Concordia University of Edmonton, sits on the board of NeWest Press, and is a member of The Olive Reading Series collective. In 2014, her story collection Love at Last Sight won the Alberta Book Publishing Award for Trade Fiction Book of the Year and was long-listed for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award. Over the past few years, she’s turned from short fiction to creative non-fiction and longform bio-fiction that engages her family history.
Dr. Jodey Castricano is one of the lead researchers in the Post-Anthropocentrism & Critical Animal Studies Research Group (PACAS), a collaborative project between UBC Okanagan and the University of Exeter, supported by a UBC Okanagan-Exeter Excellence Catalyst Grant. PACAS is a network of activists, scholars, artists and writers who are invested in anti-speciesist and social justice research that advances human knowledge to improve nonhuman animal lives. Their research promotes the immediate and long-term societal changes needed to end our rapid killing of billions of nonhuman animals and the environment. They have published three books on the issues germane to critical animal studies: Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008) and Animal Subjects 2.0 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), and Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene (2021 University of Wales Press).
Born in Kaslo, BC in 1939, Pauline Butling began her life at Deanshaven, her grandparents’ home near the town of Riondel on Kootenay Lake. Her family lived there for a year, then at nearby Walkers’ Landing (now the Yosadhara Ashram) before settling in Nelson in 1942. After graduating from LV Rogers High School in Nelson, she completed a BA and MA in English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a PhD at the State University of New York in Buffalo. In 1962 she married Nelson-poet Fred Wah. In 1967, they returned to their beloved Kootenays and settled in the village of South Slocan where they raised their two daughters, Jennifer and Erika, and taught at Selkirk College in Castlegar and Nelson. They now maintain a three-season home on the former family home site at Deanshaven, which they share with their daughters, sons-in law, and grandchildren. Previous publications include Seeing in the Dark: The Poetry of Phyllis Webb and two co-authored books (with Susan Rudy), Writing in our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries and Poets’ Talk: Interviews.