Program

Free Association is a collective of likeminded creative entrepreneurs with expertise in music production, live events, merchandise design, graphic design, installation art and much more. Underpinned by a team of dedicated experts, Free Association empowers Vancouver’s diverse creative sector by creating unique event experiences, activations and meaningful connections with the business and hospitality industries.

Rebecca La Marre is a Montreal-based artist working with performance, writing and ceramics. She exhibits and publishes internationally, and has done so at such venues as The Serpentine Gallery, PS1 MoMA and the Darling Foundry.  She is an Emeritus Commissioning Editor for EROS Press and holds her Masters in Art Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Sarah Thompson is a Vancouver-based writer, clown and anthropology student. She runs Paper Innards Distribution and manages Great Wall Tea Company in New Westminster. She likes to make and experience things that are delightful and funny and helpful and weird.

Björn Engberg is an artist based in Stockholm. His practice often revolves around the decay of human civilization and the mysticism of wild nature, themes that he treats either separately or explores the relationship between. Engberg is also the founder of the independent publishing house Moon Space Books.

Norma is a studio for objects, moveables and spaces. From its offices in Los Angeles and New York, the studio pursues research, fabrication, interior and curatorial projects rooted in explorations of form and material. Norma seeks out commissions from and collaborations with patrons and peers both local and international, with the consistent goal of creating narrative-based outputs rooted in generosity, candor and delight.

SAD Mag is an independent Vancouver publication featuring stories, art and design. Founded in 2009, it publishes the best of contemporary and emerging artists with a focus on inclusivity of voices and views, exceptional design and film photography. Enter its orbit at sadmag.ca.

Meghan Bell is the publisher of Room magazine. Her writing has appeared in literary journals across Canada, most recently in The New Quarterly, The Puritan, Grain, and Carousel, and is forthcoming in Tesseracts 21 and SADMag’s SPACE issue. She was the project lead for Room‘s anthology, Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine (Caitlin Press, 2017). Currently, Meghan is concerned about the half-second last August when her eclipse glasses slid down her nose and she stared directly into the sun.

Esther Chen is a writer and student currently pursuing her BFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. More of her writing can be found online at Ricepaper and Poetry Breakfast, and in the latest issue of Poetry Is Dead. Esther spent this year’s solar eclipse gazing wistfully out her office tower window, watching the world turn dark.

Anne Denning is a Pisces who would, generally, rather be on her bicycle. She would like to gratefully acknowledge growing up on the traditional territories of the Mississauga of the New Credit First Nation, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, and Huron Peoples in what gets called Toronto. When the solar eclipse happened she was sitting in the backyard with her partner discussing climate change half-heartedly, distracted by trying to keep an eye on the light.

Joy Gyamfi is a black queer student at UBC, where she studies Psychology and English Literature. Joy is truly an Aries, although she hates being the centre of attention, she loves knowing that people are talking about her. Like many other significant events, Joy slept through the eclipse. She was recently published in The Garden Statuary—UBC’s Undergraduate Literary Journal.

Jessica Johns is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation, working and studying on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She was this year’s winner of Saltern’s Short Forms contest and was shortlisted for the 2017 Glass Buffalo Poetry contest. Jessica is an impetuous Aries, and spent last month’s solar eclipse taking Snapchats of her butt eclipsing a floor lamp to Bonnie Tyler’s greatest hit, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Keri Korteling is a writer and editor and recent MFA grad. Her work appeared in the Red Rock Review. True fact: she spent some pre-teen years obsessing about sun spots because of a PBS documentary series about space. Keri is a pretty typical Sagittarius. If you want to know what that means, the poet Dorothea Laskey, AKA astropoets, tweeted about Sagittarians: “you will make a home in the night but you won’t always live there.”

Justyna Krol is a graphic designer. She is also a Gemini and can locate her stars—Castor and Pollux—in the night sky. (Her father taught her when she was seven; he loved astronomy and would have had second thoughts if he’d known she would use this power for astrology). Her first piece of creative nonfiction will be published in next issue of Hayo magazine. Like most Geminis, she prefers to have the last word.

Winston Le is a Vietnamese-Canadian poet who resides in Langley, BC. He recently completed the Creative Writing Program at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. His poetry has been most recently featured in Pulp Magazine and Ricepaper Magazine. When not writing, he coordinates literary events as the Outreach and Publicity Intern for Pulp Literature and the Literary Events Coordinator for Ricepaper Magazine. When writing a poem, he approaches language as if it is nonluminous matter, and so the poem itself is an extradimensional identity resonating cadences of cosmic query.

David Ly is a writer, poet, Master of Publishing graduate from Simon Fraser University, and a stereotypical Scorpio who ended up with Labrythnitis days after August’s solar eclipse. His journalism has appeared on Daily Xtra, NUVO, and VICE, and his poetry on Ricepaper, Westender, The Puritan, in ImageOutWrite, and in Black Moss Press’ Erotic Haiku Anthology. His first chapbook is forthcoming from Anstruther Press in 2018. He is currently the Marketing Assistant at UBC Press.

Claire Matthews’ poetry has appeared in a bunch of Canadian literary journals. But, more importantly, she’s a Pisces, her closest friends are Aquarians, and she knows exactly what these two things say about her. She once read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and only understood the conjunctions.

Aja Moore is a Lunar Aquarian.

Jocelyn Tennant is a fiction and screenwriter living and working in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Room Magazine, and is forthcoming in SAD Mag. Her short story “Narcisse” was nominated for the 2017 Writer’s Trust Journey Prize. She’s a self-conscious Leo and loving parent to ten healthy houseplants.

Bryce Warnes lives in Vancouver, within the traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, and went to the University of British Columbia. His writing has appeared in words(on)pages, Joyland, and Geist. In August he drove down to Oregon to watch the total solar eclipse. He didn’t go blind, but the experience freaked him out more than he expected. Now he worships the sun.

Beni Xiao is a half-alien crybaby whose first ever poetry collection, Bad Egg, will soon be published by Rahila’s Ghost Press. Beni has a Mercury and Mars in Libra, and is therefore thriving this Libra season.

SiteFactory was created by Leah Weinstein in 2016 with the assistance of a BC Arts Council Grant and mentorship with Vancouver interdisciplinary artist Laiwan. The mobile framework of a bus introduces freedom in location, off-grid possibilities and new contexts to explore. Positioning the bus as a mobile art site in the rapidly changing Vancouver landscape is an active response to gentrification and prohibitive real estate costs. Hovering between private vehicle and public space, social sculpture and gallery, SiteFactory is a moving centre—a vehicle of interdependence—presenting events in streets, parking lots, fields and other partnering sites, generating diverse art experiences throughout Vancouver.