North Shore Reads: Ivan Coyote in Conversation with Shelagh Rogers
Channel: West Vancouver Memorial Library
Date: 24/10/2022

Recorded on October 19, 2022.

North Shore Reads—a collaboration between North Vancouver City Library, North Vancouver District Public Library, and West Vancouver Memorial Library—invites you to a heartfelt and dynamic conversation between Ivan Coyote and CBC’s Shelagh Rogers, followed by a Q&A session. Our program will begin with a traditional Indigenous welcome from Carleen Thomas of səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nation. The North Shore libraries are also offering several opportunities to read and discuss Care Of before this special event. See below for more information and to register.

Making meaningful connections. Reaching a hand out to a stranger, or across the generational divide. Finding healing and peace with our past, our family and friends, our grief, and with ourselves. We need these things more than ever, and we invite you to join us for a special evening with celebrated author Ivan Coyote in conversation with CBC’s Shelagh Rogers.

In the early days of the Coronavirus lockdown, like every artist and creator, writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote was faced with a calendar full of cancelled shows and a heart full of questions around “what now?” To keep busy while figuring out what to write about next, Ivan began to answer the backlog of mail and correspondences that had come in while they were on the pre-pandemic road: emails, letters, direct messages on social media, soggy handwritten notes found tucked under the windshield wiper of their car after a gig, all of it. In Care Of, Coyote combines the most moving and powerful of these letters with the responses they’ve sent in the months since the lockdown. Topics include finding peace within a complicated family; struggling to figure out one’s identity and working to build and repair community; the challenges of being a teen, and of becoming an elder; grief, joy, and everything in between.

About the Presenters:
Ivan Coyote is the award-winning author of thirteen books, the creator of four short films, and they have released three albums that combine storytelling with music. Ivan is a seasoned stage performer, and over the last twenty-six years has become an audience favourite at storytelling, writer’s, film, poetry, and folk music festivals from Anchorage to Australia. Ivan often grapples with the complex and intensely personal issues of gender identity in their work, as well as topics such as family, class, social justice and queer liberation, but always with a generous heart, a quick wit, and the nuanced and finely-honed timing of a gifted storyteller. Ivan’s stories remind us of our own fallible and imperfect humanity while at the same time inspiring us to change the world.

Shelagh Rogers is a veteran broadcast-journalist at the CBC, currently the host and a producer of The Next Chapter, the award-winning national radio program devoted to writing in Canada. In 2011, she was made an Honorary Witness for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Also that year, she was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2016, she received the inaugural Margaret Trudeau Award for mental health advocacy. This year, she was named the 2022 Symons Medallist. Shelagh is Chancellor Emerita of the University of Victoria, and a proud member of the Métis Nation of Greater Victoria. She is thrilled to be hosting North Shore Reads with Ivan Coyote. They gave Shelagh the last great hug she had before the pandemic lockdown. Shelagh feels Care Of is a remarkable work of comfort and compassion, and such a beautiful feat of storytelling. Shelagh is also delighted to be working with the superb North Shore Reads team once again.

For more information about our upcoming programs, visit westvanlibrary.ca.