Writing the Okanagan

George Bowering was born in Penticton, where his great-grandfather Willis Brinson lived, and Bowering has never been all that far from the Okanagan Valley in his heart and imagination. Early in the twenty-first century, he was made a permanent citizen of Oliver. Bowering has family up and down the Valley, and he goes there as often as he can. He has been asked during his many visits to Okanagan bookstores over the years to publish a collection of his writing about the Valley.

Writing the Okanagan draws on forty books Bowering has published since 1960 poetry, fiction, history, and some forms he may have invented. Selections from Delsing (1961) andSticks & Stones (1962) are here, as is Driving to Kelowna” from The Silver Wire (1966). Other Okanagan towns, among them Rock Creek, Peachland, Vernon, Kamloops, Princeton, and Osoyoos, inspire selections from work published through the 1970s and on to 2013. Fairview, the old mining site near Oliver, is the focus of an excerpt fromCaprice (1987, 2010), one volume in Bowering’s trilogy of historical novels. Desert Elm” takes as its two main subjects the Okanagan Valley and his father, who, as Bowering did, grew up there. With the addition of some previously unpublished works, the reader will find the wonder of the Okanagan here, in both prose and poetry.

George Bowering is a major Canadian literary figure and one of the most prolific writers in the country: more than eighty books to date, not including editions he has edited or contributed to, or his thirty-three chapbooks. He is a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award and has been shortlisted for the Griffin Prize for Poetry, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and B.C.’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. In November 2002 he was appointed Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate. That same month he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2004 he was awarded the Order of British Columbia. In 2011 he received the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and the UBC Alumni Achievement Award. He is a respected poet, novelist, essayist, critic, teacher, historian, editor, and tireless supporter of fellow writers.