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Category Archives "Culture"

Deja View

August 3, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Bowen, Culture 4 Comments

When we published our Cultural Master Plan for Bowen Island back in 2017, I had the observation that the best way to make a living as an artist on this island was to sell Bowen Island to Bowen Islanders. It seems that every household has paintings of the scenes that lie just outside their windows. Songs I have written about life on the island have been taken up as markers of our collective experience. Poems about the place always make people nod with approval about the beauty and deep currents of the place.

And then there is The View.

Jackie Minns and David Cameron are two of our cultural treasures (link opens in Facebook). They are playwrights and actors with a particular knack for capturing the absurd and funny and the tender in their satires about island life. These last two weeks they have remounted their production of The View, originally staged in 2007 at the Legion, before we had a performing arts centre to work in. This week, finally – after 30 years or so on the island and numerous productions staged in pubs, parks and pop-up venues – they brought it home to our new performing arts centre. Under the direction of their son Andrew Cameron and featuring two other stalwart Bowen Island actors, Kat Stephens and Fraser Elliot, The View was unleashed upon us.

The play is about neighbours. A new couple from well to do West Vancouver, Deborah and Kenneth, begins building a house on the west side of the island and find themselves next door neighbours to Zorg and Angel, long time islanders who practice tantric yoga, chakra healing and chainsaw sculpture. The fifth character in the play is the never-seen Douglas-fir that grows on their property line. Zorg and Angel love the tree, Deborah say it blocks her view of the sea and wants it gone. Kenneth just goes along with whichever person is yanking his chain at the moment.

Somehow, on a single set, with merely four actors, the cast finds a way to skewer almost everyone on Bowen. The old timers, the newcomers, the artists, the community builders, the wealthy and the just-scraping-by. The developers and the eco-greenies. The stoners and the sophisticates. It is a feature of the play that every single person in the audience has at least one little squirm, all the while having a good belly laugh at who we are.

There was truly something for everyone. Little cultural anomalies like “Just take my truck. The keys are in it and you can leave it in the Cove…” The cast themselves aren’t spared either. Ironies such as the fact that the hapless Kenneth, the stunned but up-for-it newcomer to the island is played by local real estate agent Fraser Elliot. Jackie Minns is a yoga teacher. David does many of the things that Zorg does for a living. Kat is the furthest thing from her character. She grew up on Bowen, acted since she was a little kid, babysat the director Andrew when he was small, and survived as the only girl a well-loved family of fastball-playing brothers.

Every community needs its bards and storytellers. On Bowen we are lucky to have these ones. They capture a little piece of our character, tender self-deprecation, that lightens the sometimes intensely specific conflicts that can divide a small community. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you aren’t doing it right. These folks help us do it right.

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When We Cease to Understand The World

July 30, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Culture, Featured 4 Comments

I just finished Benjamín Labatut’s remarkable book When We Cease To Understand The World. It’s a book that blends non-fiction and fiction, that tells the stories of scientists of the twentieth century and teh price they paid for their discoveries. It is a subtle book, neither a collection of short stories or a single novel, but it is all tied together. Remarkably, the book begins in the world of non-fiction and gets more substantially fictional until the end. The last piece in the book is the most concrete – and teh most fictional- and references all the stories that were told before in a very fine-grained way. It is a book about uncertainty, singularity, probabilities and the price of seeing the world as it is.

Benjamin Labatut on his book:

What fascinates me is not so much science per se, but the limits of science: those ideas and discoveries that we are unable to fully comprehend. Science is a theme, but the larger theme is mystery. What I believe is captivating about these stories is not just their information content, but the enigma which lies at the heart of them. They seem to point past us, towards what is incomprehensible, or marvellous, or, indeed, monstrous. What I admire most about science is that it is completely unwilling to accept the many mysteries that surround us: it is stubborn, and wonderfully so. When it comes face to face with the unknown, it whips out a particle accelerator, a telescope, a microscope, and smashes reality to bits, because it wants – Because it needs! – to know. Literature is similar, in some respects: it is born from an impossible wish, the desire to bind this world with words. In that, it is as ambitious as science. Because for us human beings, it is never enough to know god: we have to eat him. That’s what literature is for me: putting the world in your mouth.

You say that ‘the quantity of fiction grows throughout the book’ – why is that? 

Several reasons: the ideas become increasingly complex and abstract as the book moves along, so it was necessary to increase the fictional content to captivate the reader, and to make very complicated (and usually very boring) ideas come to life. Another reason is that I was not merely interested in the outward development and impact of science, but on the personal cost of these strange epiphanies, and only fiction can delve into that particular void, the inside of the human mind. There is a lot of fiction in all the texts of the book, except the first, where there are only six lines. But it is a very specific type of fiction, one that tries to approach what non-fiction cannot achieve. I use it reluctantly, not merely as an ingredient to sugar the pill, but as a chemical fix, a shot in the arm that allows the reader to crawl into the strangest areas of reality, those deranged landscapes that, even if where to bump into them head-on, in plain daylight, with both your eyes wide open, you would have a hard time believing they are real. 

I love a book that says what it needs to in 200 pages or so. More often than not a writer needs to rely on both dense narratives and rich language to do this, much as a movie maker uses image and plot, or a lyricist use the music and the words. It’s remarkable to read a book in translation that preserves this richness.

Samantha Harvey’s book Orbital was the last book I read that does something like this with imagery and a rejection of traditional narrative structure. I found both through the Booker Prizes website, which seems to be revelling in this type of literature these days.

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July 28, 2025: quiet, prayers, and landscapes of war and peace.

July 28, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Being, Culture, First Nations, Practice, Travel No Comments

Anchored at Xwth’itsetsen. A fire burning in the Nanaimo River valley provides the accents.

I’m travelling this week, through the Gulf Islands with friends on a lovely Catalina 35 sailboat. This is a trip we do every year, not so much sailing (there isn’t usually much wind at this time of year) but rather to hunt for the little anchorages and warm swimming water of the central Salish Sea. I live amidst magnificent Islands, what I call “the Canadian Hebrides” not so much for their geography but more for the fact that every island has it’s own little culture, different from the island I live on, and these cultures are both settler cultures and deeply historical. In our travels north from Swartz Bay to here, a journey of about three hours motoring on a flood tide with a steady wind behind us, we passed through the territories of Tseycum, the Cowichan Tribes, and we are now anchored in a little bay off Xwth’itsetsen, a small island in Penelakut territory. On our way up here we passed through some incredible historic sites, including Hwtl’upnets, known in English as Maple Bay, where a massive tribal battle was fought in the early 1830s between local Coast Salish Tribes and the Lekwiltok who hail from further north. This battle ended a long standing conflict, and mostly ended the Lekwiltok raiding era. The ripples of this battle still resonate today in traditional relationships, governance conversations, and protocols between these tribes.

My friend Cal is an Anglican priest. I adore their theology, their inquisitiveness, their infatuation with music and Sufi teachings and the deep spirituality of good Christian practice, not that shit peddled by Christian Nationalists. There comes a time when a preacher writes their sermon on prayer, and Cal hits it out of the park with this one: “Perhaps prayer is not saying, “This is what I need,” but “This is what I am: yours. Please let me tell you about what is on my heart. I want to, because I love you.”

Patti Digh is reading, and at least one of the books on her list, A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michell Porter is on hold for me at the library for my next read. I am well taken with books that challenge traditional narrative structures and where a bit of magical realism is at play. I enjoy artists who use their forms and media to do things uniquely suited to their art and genre.

I’m going to go read now. One of the things I most cherish about be able to get onto the land or the sea is the spaces of true quiet one can find. This is an increasingly important issue in urban areas. Silence is disappearing, and not just because people can’t afford expensive bluetooth devices to connect to their phones (yes this is an issue). Guardians of silence in urban spaces need to be vigilant.

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From the Parking Lot: July 14-18. 2025

July 18, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Being, Bowen, Community, Complexity, Containers, Culture, Featured, Football, Leadership 2 Comments

The view from the ferry this week as I headed into Vancouver.

This weeks notes and noticing:

  • July 14, 2025: transform: transforming conflict, dialogue and community
  • July 15, 2025: people doing things they are good at: handy apps, polymaths and women’s football
  • July 16, 2025: seeing the treasure: local placemaking and the Golden Ratio
  • July 17, 2025: I’m in awe..: complexity, constraints, governance and amazing medical science
  • July 18, 2025: the threat to beauty: AI, and the threat and promise of true creativity.

Let your curiosity carry you. And if you are a blogger sharing links and little notes like this, the part of me that chases rabbit holes would like to add you to my blogroll.

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From the Parking Lot, July 7-11, 2025

July 11, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Bowen, Community, Culture, Democracy, Featured, First Nations, Football No Comments

Summer nights at the football. Our little band of TSS Rovers ultras celebrates one of the 9 goals our teams scored on Wednesday night.

The summary of notes and links published on the Parking Lot blog over the past week:

  • July 7: heavy lifting. A new phone, a new US political party and a new season
  • July 8: annals of democratic renewal: political violence, democracy, youth engagement and the role of community foundations
  • July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading: A review of Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light and short story season begins
  • July 10, 2025: playing at home: my Rovers win big and send a couple of players off to the professional leagues.
  • July 11, 2025: the Kanesatake resistance: personal reflections on the events of this day, thirty five years ago.

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