Award-winning writer Tim Bowling is coming back to Ladner next week to launch his latest collection of poetry.
Titled Tenderman, the collection is very much about the West Coast and very much about Ladner in a lot of ways, says Bowling.
"I've sort of set out in my writing career to put as much of my experiences growing up in the fishing industry and just in the landscape, and riverscape, of Ladner into my work in a literary way," he says. "It hadn't really been there that much for me when I was a kid growing up so I wanted to put a little bit of that into our literature."
Bowling, who currently lives in Edmonton, grew up in Ladner and spent time working in the fishing industry.
He further explains the book looks at how basic industries along the West Coast have changed over the last few decades as well going into his "sense of the way North American society has moved in the last 30 years in terms of how we define freedom."
Bowling says for the purposes of the book that the "tenderman" is a worker on a salmon packing boat.
"The book is kind of a dialogue that I have, as a middle-aged poet, with a sort of a tenderman figure that I've created in my imagination. Someone I would've remembered from my childhood as representative as a character or an individual who went his own way and was able to do so in an industry like fishing."
The fishing industry was a great one for characters, he says.
"You really could be an individual, get along and make a living and have a certain amount of freedom and dignity without really having to be involved with a lot of other people if you didn't want to be."
Bowling, who's next novel deals with 19th century Ladner and pioneer salmon canner John Sullivan Deas, is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
His other awards include the Canadian Authors Association National Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction and the Stephan G. Stephansson Alberta Book Award. He has also been a finalist for two Governor General's Literary Awards for Poetry and the Nereus Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize.
Bowling will be at the Ladner Pioneer Library on Thursday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. for the book launch. The event is made possible in part by the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Admission is free.
