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Savour short stories at NIC

Savour our region — rich in stories and storytellers — and enjoy authors Bill Gaston and Dede Crane.

Savour our region — rich in stories and storytellers — and enjoy authors Bill Gaston and Dede Crane.

They will read as part of North Island College’s Write Here Readers Series this Thursday at the Stan Hagen Theatre at the college's Comox Valley Campus.

Dede Crane’s nationally acclaimed Sympathy was a finalist for the Victoria Butler Book Prize, and her most recent books are Great Expectations (which she co-edited), a collection of essays about the experience of giving birth, and The Cult of Quick Repair, a collection of stories.

The Cult of Quick Repair is a vivid, witty, ultra-smart and smarting collection of short stories. Mothers and daughters, men and women, betrayal, generosity, forgiveness, the heart-snatching fears and lusts and loves of being alive and attentive. It’s all here. Crane is wise and hilarious,” writes acclaimed Canadian author Lisa Moore.

Crane has also created two novels for teens, The 25 Pains of Kennedy Baines and Poster Boy. Her first published story was short-listed for the CBC Literary Award, and she has since published stories in numerous literary journals, as well as reviewed books for The Globe and Mail, The Shambhala Sun, and The Times-Colonist.

Bill Gaston has published six novels and five collections of short fiction, including Sex is Red, The Good Body, Mount Appetite and Sointula.

His fiction has been nominated for the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award and the Ethel Wilson Prize and has won the Relit Award, the Victoria Butler Prize, and the CBC Canadian Literary Award.

The 2002 Giller Prize Jury commented, “Gaston is a writer of great empathy, capable, it seems, of getting beneath the skin of anybody ... His language is pure, his concerns humane.”

In addition to his Giller Prize nomination in 2002, he was the inaugural recipient of the Timothy Findley Prize, awarded by the Writers' Trust of Canada to a distinguished male writer for a stellar body of work. His short fiction has appeared in Granta, Tin House and Best Canadian Stories and has been broadcast nationally on the CBC.

Husband and wife authors, Gaston and Crane met at a day of silence at a Buddhist retreat.

Gaston has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton and, for a time, editor of Canada's oldest literary journal, The Fiddlehead.

Crane is a former professional ballet dancer and choreographer.

The pair now leads a settled existence in Victoria, where they reside with their four children.

NIC’s Write Here Readers Series welcomes readers and authors together to think about locality as both specific and universal. The college invites you to consider our North Island home as an important and valuable literary stage.

Bill Gaston and Dede Crane’s reading will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday.

North Island College acknowledges the support of the Canada Council in presenting this free, public event.

For further information about the reading or the Write Here Readers Series, contact Susan Auchterlonie at 250-334-5271.

— North Island College