Charles Demers – författare

Vancouver is at a crossroads in its history—host to the 2010 Winter Olympics and home to the poorest neighborhood in Canada, it is a young, multicultural city with a vibrant surface and a violent undercoat. In Vancouver Special, an alternative guidebook, writer and performer Charles Demers digs deep to examine the past, present, and future of Vancouver, shedding light on the various strategies and influences that have made the city what it is today (and what it should be). Vancouver Special is a love letter to the city, taking a no-holds-barred look at Lotusland with verve, wit, and insight.

In this unique book of correspondence, two men from different generations write to each other about the burdens, anxieties, and singular joys of parenthood. Thirtysomething Charles Demers and 80-year-old George Bowering are both celebrated authors and the best of friends, and soon both will be the fathers of daughters. The letters begin as Charles and his wife discover they will become parents; he expresses his hopes and fears of impending fatherhood, compounded by his OCD and his own father''s illness, while George recalls his own experiences raising a daughter in the 1970s and his own anxieties about bringing a child into a troubled world.

Together, their thoughtful, funny, candid missives reveal what fathers know (or don''t know) about raising daughters, as well as themselves and each other. Their combined observations make for a passionate, funny and moving portrait of fatherhood in all its imperfect, beautiful glory.

George Bowering is Canada''s first poet laureate and an officer of the Order of Canada. He is the author of more than eighty books, the most recent of which include The Hockey Scribbler, Writing the Okanagan, and Pinboy. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Charles Demers is a comedian, performer, and writer. His previous books are The Horrors (Douglas & McIntyre) and Vancouver Special (Arsenal). He lives in Vancouver, where he teaches writing at the University of British Columbia.