Arts and Humanities Colloquium: Kathy Page -- Waters That No Vessel Ever Sailed

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Friday, September 19th, 2014
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Well-known author, Kathy Page, from Vancouver Island University’s Creative Writing and Journalism Department, will give this fall’s first presentation in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Colloquium series. The talk is entitled Waters That No Vessel Ever Sailed. The focus of the talk is Edward Thomas, one of the renowned war poets of the First World War. Thomas, who was married with three children, died at the age of 39 on April 9, 1917, at the Battle of Arras. Page’s interest in Edward Thomas, who is increasingly revered in the UK, began when her elderly father became unable to read. “During the last years of his life,” she says, “the family read to him. Poetry was what he preferred; like many of his generation, he had memorized a great deal of verse at school, and while his memory for other things became erratic, poetry and his response to it persisted until the end. I felt extremely grateful to the poets my father loved and read further into their work and lives." For Page, Edward Thomas was fascinating both because of his unique poetic voice and because of his poignant and well-documented life-story. "Plagued by depression and creative frustration," she notes, "Thomas blossomed as a poet when encouraged by American poet Robert Frost – a development that coincided with his fateful choice to enlist and fight in France. " Page was also curious about the way his reputation gathered momentum over the decades. These interests coalesce in her current work-in-progress, a set of linked stories, three of which concern Edward Thomas. At the Colloquium, Page will present part of this work, a hybrid of story and essay that centres on Thomas’s poem “The Lane" and concerns the exact nature of his death, which, she argues, is open to question. Using the available evidence to construct several possibilities, she will explore the border territory between fiction and non-fiction, and our need to make stories of our own and other people’s lives. Page, who lives on Salt Spring Island, is a novelist and short story writer. Her works have been nominated for numerous awards, including the Orange Prize, a Governor General's Literary Award, and a ReLit award, and so it is a great privilege to have her speak at VIU. The free talk is open to faculty, employees, and the general public. Students are especially welcome and there will be refreshments. Page's presentation, which takes its title from a line in the Thomas poem, is the first of three fall talks in the Arts and Humanities Colloquium series. The theme for the term is war and its consequences, a subject fitting the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, and Page's talk promises to be a stimulating and enjoyable beginning.