BC AUTHOR TALK: Eve Joseph, Terence Young & Patrick Friesen
Description
Gather Bookshop is hosting an evening to celebrate the new works of three prolific, award-winning British Columbia authors: Eve Joseph, Patrick Friesen and Terence Young.
Attendees can expect to hear excerpts of written works, and to gain insights and inspiration from this much-anticipated panel discussion around their new books.
Join us in celebration, and take the opportunity to meaningfully connect with these visiting Authors during our audience Q&A session and book signing.
Registration is free, books will be available for purchase during the event and light refreshments will be provided.
Learn more about these talented writers and their beautiful new published works below!
Author Lineup
EVE JOSEPH
EVE lives and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples. Her first two books of poetry The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Her nonfiction book In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. Her most recent book of poetry Quarrels (Anvil, 2018) was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award, The ReLit Award and won the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.
TERENCE YOUNG
TERENCE lives in Victoria, B.C. He is a co-founder of The Claremont Review (1992), an international literary journal for young writers that ran for 25 years. His first book of poetry, The Island in Winter (Signal Editions, 1999), was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Since then, he has published several books: a collection of stories, Rhymes With Useless (Raincoast, 2000), which was one of two runners-up for the annual Danuta Gleed award; a novel, After Goodlake’s, which received the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2005; and a second collection of poetry, Moving Day (Signature Editions, 2006), which was nominated for both the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and The City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for 2006. In 2008, he was awarded the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence. A second collection of fiction, The End of the Ice Age, was released from Biblioasis Press in the spring of 2010. A story from that collection, "That Time of Year," was included in Oberon Press's edition of Best Canadian Stories 11 (2012). More recently (2019), he received a National Magazine Award (Silver) for his poem "The Bear." His third collection of poetry, Smithereens, came out in March, 2021, from Harbour Publishing, and most recently, in 2025, Signature Editions published his third collection of short fiction, Give Us This Day.
PATRICK FRIESEN
PATRICK was born in Steinbach, Manitoba, now living in Victoria, has published more than a dozen books of poetry, a book of essays, stage and radio plays, videos and several CDs of spoken word and music composed by his son Niko. He has co-translated, with Per Brask, six books of Danish poetry. His play a short history of crazy bone was awarded Most Outstanding New Work by the Winnipeg Theatre Awards in 2018. His most recent book is Sightings (with CMU Press). His daughter Marijke designs all his books. Over the past two years he has produced two videos with Niko composing the soundtrack and nephew Camren shooting the videos.
Their New Works
DISMANTLING - Eve Joseph
DISMANTLING - EVE JOSEPH In Eve Joseph’s latest book, the poet is occupied with the idea of poetic imagination and how that often elusive thing can transform the mundane into the mysterious. In a book where fish are classified as bees and rivers are legally people, things are not always as they seem. As the title suggests, sometimes the act of taking something apart and building again from scratch allows a poem to find its true form. Dismantling contains new works of prose poetry, along with a series of centos – poems built entirely on the lines of other poets. Old voices engage with new ones. Tomas Tranströmer and Ocean Vuong speak about a great unsolved love while Audre Lorde walks with Ahmad Almallah and César Vallejo as the grass bends, then learns to stand again. Joseph’s poems are about language; how lonely it is until time enters the poem and places it where it is meant to be.
GIVE US THIS DAY - Terrence Young
Give Us This Day is a striking collection of short fiction that explores the weight of the past through a kaleidoscope of voices and styles. From retired grandparents thrust into unexpected childcare parenthood to young labourers adrift in mines and road crews, from teachers struggling to find meaning in their classrooms to couples at a crossroads, these stories capture the quiet reckonings of everyday existence. Whether intimate or expansive, meditative or urgent, each story reveals how missteps and circumstances shape identity, and how, for many, the past is never truly left behind. Give Us This Day is a profound meditation on regret, resilience, and the fragile beauty of human connection.
SIGHTINGS - Patrick Friesen
The poems in Patrick Friesen’s latest collection, Sightings, move between the visible and invisible, between the contradictions of human history and the immediacy of a complex present. Friesen examines memory and music, rivers and personalities, open to all possibilities and sceptical of wisdom. Instead, these poems rely on the kind of knowledge that comes from experience: tremors and fragments riding on the movement of thinking. The distance from Friesen’s first book, published fifty years ago, to this one, speaks to what it means to have known the world through poetry.
Tickets for good, not greed Humanitix dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity
