The Vancouver Stories

The city of Vancouver means different things to different people, but it is as revered and beloved by its residents as it is by the millions of people who visit every year. It's a diverse, thrumming metropolis and a calm and beautiful recreation destination; it's a young city still striving for identity and a storied settlement rich in legend. And it has been both the inspiration and setting for some of Canada's most interesting fiction.Framed by an incisive introduction from West Coast literary doyen Douglas Coupland, the wide array of short fiction collected in Vancouver Stories reveals just how varied Vancouver really is. Discover this great city through the stories of Pauline Johnson and Emily Carr, through the eyes of such 20th-century literary giants as Alice Munro, Ethel Wilson and Malcolm Lowry, and through the words of more contemporary writers such as William Gibson, Timothy Taylor, Zsuzsi Gartner and Madeline Thien.Spanning a period of nearly 80 years, the 15 stories in this collection present the experience of Vancouver-living here, visiting or just passing through-filtered through the imaginations of some of Canada's most famous fiction stylists."Sooner or later, everyone in the country came to this city by the mountains and the sea. Some just to ogle, many to stay. People here liked it with something that bordered on religious fervour." -from "City of My Dreams" by Zsuzsi Gartner

"In a sense, we haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real."--Robert Kroetsch in Creation Spanning a period of nearly eighty years, the stories in this collection present the experience of living in Vancouver as filtered through the imagination of many of Canada’s most famous writers. The romantic attitude of some of the early writers is balanced by the more sombre version of many later authors, some of whom show the city as a place of loneliness and corruption. In tone, the stories range from the grimness of Dorothy Livesay’s account of Depression misery, to the irony of Ethel Wilson’s narrative of an evening garden party, to the playfulness of George Bowering’s ellipticla story of student life. Other well-known atuhors include Pauline Johnson, Emily Carr, Malcolm Lowry, Audrey Thomas, Alice Munro, and Joy Kogawa--as well as some who have been undeservedly consigned to obscurity--M.A. Grainger, Bertrand Sinclair, Jean Burton, and William McConnell. The more prolific among the younger writers--Frances Duncan, Cynthia Flood, and Kevin Roberts--are in the process of achieving national recognition. The stories evoke a strong sense of place, of Vancouver’s essential relation to its natural setting--forest, mountains, and sea--and its existence as a modern urban centre. Individual episodes recall the great fire of 1886, turn-of-the-century loggers on Cordova Street, rum-running in the twenties, the internment of Japanese-Canadians after Pearl Harbor, the hippie era, and the modern sub-culture of beer parlours and drugs. Particular locales include downtown streets, the east end, the North Shore, U.B.C, Stanley Park, Kitsilano, and the Vancouver Aquarium. Stories of the city’s social and cultural life describe the process of growing up and growing old, family and marital matters, the Chinese community, and the legends and reality of Native Americans. Vancouver Short Stories indicates some of the ways that a particular locality has been transformed into art that, in turn, enriches our understanding of its reality and enhances our sense of identity.

Homelessness is not new to Vancouver. There have been homeless people in Vancouver since it was founded in 1886. As in other major North American cities, until the late '70s and early '80s homelessness in Vancouver followed the economic logic of boom and bust capitalism.However, since the run-up to the World Exposition of 1986, that logic has no longer been the determining factor influencing the growing number of homeless in the city. The "new poverty" that emerged in the 1980s is a product of the transition from an industrial-based capitalist economy to a post-industrial, global economy and a culture of consumerism, and the images of the homeless continue to haunt our social imagination.