Highlights for

“Joy of Canadian Words”

– fundraiser event for

“Save Kogawa House”

7:30pm

April 25th, 2006

Christ Church Cathedral

Georgia and Burrard

We
have invited actors and cultural celebrities to help us read some of
Canada's most important literary works. We started with the Literary
Review of Canada's 100 Greatest Canadian Books Ever Written, which
included Obasan and we allowed the presenters to find what moved them.

This
promises to be an incredible event.  All the pieces just fell into
place.  The actors have found some incredible moving literary
works.

Sheryl McKay starts things off with “Ann of Green
Gables” a beloved Canadian institution with contemporary parallels to
Joy Kogawa's “Naomi's Road” in that an opera has now been written and
performed, and like Anne's House in PEI, people are now making
pilgramages to Kogawa House.

Joy Coghill is a treasured actor
and arts advocate.  By choosing to read Emily Carr's Klee-wyck,
Joy has found a parallel in that Emily Carr's childhood home has been
turned into a heritage site.  Hopefully Kogawa House will be the
same.

Doris Chilcott has chosen to read some poems by Alden
Nowlan, who had been a writer-in-residence at many places throughout
Canada.  We hope to create a Writers-in-Residence program for Kogawa House.

Dorothy Livesay wrote “Call My People Home”, for a CBC radio documentary that critized the internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians in 1949.  This will be read by actors Bill Dow, Manami Hara, Hiro Katagawa,
Maiko Yamamoto

Thomas
King wrote an incredible short story about the mythical Coyote playing
havoc with the internment of Japanese Canadians and the confiscation of
their property in “Coyote and the Enemy Aliens.”

Leore Cashe is
an incredibly gifted jazz and gospel singer. She has picked two songs
by Leonard Cohen to perform.  “Hallelujah” and “Dance Me to the
End of Love”

And then there is Joy….