Fed launches Events Calendar

November 12th, 2014

On October 15th, Doug Gibson was puzzled.

Arguably the country’s greatest editor, Gibson had flown to Victoria from Toronto to perform portions of  his one-man show about dealing with authors such as Robertson Davies, Peter Newman, Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod, Mavis Gallant and Jack Hodgins, to name but a few.  His show is based on his book Stories about Storytellers (ECW 2011).

Doug Gibson

As someone with a rare pan-Canadian knowledge of the writing world, Doug Gibson has developed close contacts in every province. His one-man show is a proven hit. In fact, he’s working on another one… So he presumed he would once again delight another crowd of more than a hundred people.

He couldn’t figure out why attendance was so low. After all, he had the support of Munro’s Books for the gig. What the hell happenened?

Only later did Gibson find out that his event clashed with annual gathering for the City of Victoria Book Prizes at the Union Club. Unlike the B.C. Book Prizes gala, the Victoria Book Prizes is a non-dinner affair for only twenty bucks per person. It’s a big annual draw for Victoria’s literati. People go to feel a sense of community, whether they are nominated or not.

So it bordered on daft to hold a one-nighter for Gibson on the same night.

Such scheduling conflicts occur frequently because there is simply way of knowing who the heck is planning what on our increasingly complex B.C. literary calendar….

That’s why the new BC Writers’ Calendar being launched by the Federation of B.C. Writers is a a great idea.

BCBookLook was going to do it when we designed this site, but doing ten jobs at once already borders on insanity, so adding an eleventh was bonkers.  We postponed the idea due to lack of personpower (ie. zero funding when we decided to just go ahead and do it), hoping somebody else would eventually step into the events calendar realm.

It seems simple enough. Just get people supply their own info.

But it’s not.

A site like the BC Writers Calendar will require a watchdog, an editor, and it will take several years of dogged nagging to get everyone around B.C. familiar with it and routinely contributing their event info. Meanwhile, the Federation of B.C. Writers has made a start.

Here’s what their site looks like….

Or you can visit it directly if you want to submit your own event info.

http://bcwriters.ca/bc-writers-calendar/

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