So, I’d like to tell you a little about the book @bilycutfong, Gladys Hindmarch, & I were looking forward to launching tonight with the other wonderful @Talonbooks authors in Vancouver. The launch has been delayed for obvious reasons, but the books is a thing in the world:

It’s a book we’ve been working on for over two years, visiting Hindmarch in Vancouver and going through both her personal archives and her fonds in Special Collections at @SFU to select writings for the volume. Hindmarch turned 80 this year and it’s her first book in over 30 yrs.

Wanting Everything includes Hindmarch’s 3 previously published books; short prose; unpublished letters to writers Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Pierre Elliott Trudeau; interviews; and more. It’s over 500 pages long and was carefully seen thru the press by our editor Catriona Strang.

That last photo was when the book had gone to the printers. Here’s one where we’d just dropped off the contracts at @Talonbooks and were about to get started. Look at those faces! We had no idea how *enormous* this book was going to be. #collectedworks #60yrsofwriting

Some of the earliest pieces in the book were written when Gladys Hindmarch was an undergrad at @ubc_english. She read from her work at Congress last spring, then gave me a tour of the UBC campus, recounting what it was like in the 60s (full of poetry readings & undercover cops!)

One of my favourite pieces in the book is Hindmarch’s journals from the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Margaret Avisom, & Robert Duncan. Hindmarch’s remarkable journals have never before been published.

Deanna & I wanted to recover the work of an innovative feminist writer whose work addresses the embodied experience of pregnancy and birth, working-class women’s labour, and the intimacies of domesticity, while sustaining an engagement with local places and social economies.

Oh, and the book *also* includes Gladys Hindmarch’s totally rad writing workshop she gave at the 1983 Women & Words conference, which is *not* collected in the official proceedings. I’ll tweet some excerpts over the course of the next few days.

The image on the cover of the book is of a hard-edge painting called “Convergences” that Hindmarch’s close friend Roy Kiyooka gave her. Roy and his art practice feature in different prose pieces throughout the book, as do a # of other painters & visual artists. #wantingeverything