Storyteller Ivan E. Coyote

For Immediate Release: September 1, 2009
Storyteller Ivan E. Coyote presents an evening of stories and a writing workshop

The WordStorm Society of the Arts and Vancouver Island University’s Out On Campus club are hosting Chest Air: an evening of stories with Ivan E. Coyote. Ivan E. Coyote is an award-winning author, storyteller and spoken word artist who will share stories based on her own experiences. Those experiences are deeply personal, funny, poignant and heart felt. Be prepared to laugh, be entertained, become unsettled and in the end touched by everything that makes us human.
Opening for Coyote will be Leigh Joseph of the Squamish First Nation who lives in Victoria. She tells stories of her own experiences through songs she composes in a “folk singer/songwriter” style accompanied by a resonator guitar called a dobro. The dobro was designed to project over brass instruments in the days of the big band.
The songs and storytelling performance will take place on Saturday, September 12 at 8 p.m. at Building 356 (Education/Social Sciences), Room 109 at VIU. Tickets are $5 for students and $10 general admission. They are on sale at the Student Union office at VIU; Falconer Books at Port Place Mall and the Black Dog Café in Lantzville.
The WordStorm Society of the Arts hosts popular monthly reading events in Nanaimo offering a venue for writers to perform and read their work. The Society promotes visiting writers and performing artists by bringing them to Nanaimo to be enjoyed by local audiences. Out On Campus is a club geared towards Vancouver Island University’s GLBTTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, two-spirited, queer) and queer-friendly community.
A workshop called “Turning Real Life into Stories” takes place on Friday, September 11 from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. in Room 7/8 at Beban Park. The workshop is designed to get all those "remember whens" out of your head and on to the page. Coyote is the author of six books, four of which are short memoirs pulled from the writer's life. She will touch on tips for translating "told" stories into a written form, how to transform ideas into outlines, and some of the challenges and rewards about including real people in your work.
To register for “Turning Real Life into Stories”, go to www.wordstorm.ca or telephone Mary Ann Moore at 250-729-2630. The workshop fee is $35.
The events are sponsored by the Canada Council, The Writers’ Union of Canada and The Buccaneer Inn.
Born and raised in Whitehorse in the Yukon, Coyote is the author of four collections of short stories, one novel, two CDs and four short films. Her first love is storytelling and over the past 13 years, she has become an audience favourite at music, poetry, spoken word and writers’ festivals from Anchorage to Amsterdam.
The Globe and Mail called Coyote “a natural-born storyteller.” Ottawa X Press said: “Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture.” The Vancouver Sun said: “Ivan E. Coyote shapeshifts between female and male, between fact and fiction, appearing at a scene of iniquity to find something hopeful there.”
Coyote is a columnist for Xtra West! Magazine, writes regularly for The Georgia Straight and CBC Radio, and pops up in periodicals all across the continent. Her first novel, Bow Grip, was released in the fall of 2005 and was awarded the Relit award for best fiction and named by the American Library Association as a Stonewall honour book in literature.



Contact:
Mary Ann Moore
Vice-President
The WordStorm Society of the Arts
250-729-2630
flyingm@interlog.com