Ted Chamberlin will read at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt next Saturday, Sept. 27.
Chamberlin has had a strangely divided career. On the one hand, as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Toronto with an interest in Oscar Wilde’s London, and on the other, as senior research associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. He was poetry editor of Saturday Night, and also advisor to governments and Aboriginal communities on land claims in Canada, the U.S., Australia and Africa.
Many of his divergent interests converge in his If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? (2003), including the idea that stories, particularly those stories that “tell us who we are and where we belong,” offer the possibility of common ground between contending cultures. Chamberlin’s latest book, Island: How Islands Transform the World (2013), exhibits a similar breadth of interest and intellectual reach, exploring the geology, archaeology, geography, biology, history and culture of islands.
Chamberlin is a gifted speaker and storyteller, invited to deliver such prestigious lectures as the Pratt Lecture at the University of Toronto and the Garnett Sedgewick Lecture at UBC. Yet he is rarely heard publicly here on the Sunshine Coast, where he now lives with his wife, the Jamaican poet, Lorna Goodison.
Come and hear him at 8 p.m. on Sept. 27. Admission is by donation, courtesy of the Canada Council.
