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Next up for summer fun the weekend of August 22nd:

• The Gibsons Landing Fibre Arts Festival, various venues, Gibsons
• The Powell River Annual Blackberry Festival and Street Party
• Roberts Creek Daze (11-2 August 23rd)
• The incredible Bonfire Music Festival (F/S/S) Pender Lions Park

Wow. A smashingly successful Sechelt Arts Festival that’s proving out to be a regular addition to the summer festival schedule, followed hot on the heels by the mature Festival of the Written Arts and Hackett Park Craft Festival one-two knockout punch (to wildly mix metaphors). I’m on an arts high!

This weekend was picture perfect for the Writer’s Fest and Hackett Park events, excepting a minor morning shower and the thunder rolling for about half an hour early Sunday. I have a theory about the thunder… it was created from the arc of electricity left behind by my favorite author, poet Shane Koyczan, when he absolutely illuminated Rockwood Pavilion on Friday afternoon with his spoken word poetry.

It’s funny how the words of one person can completely shock an audience into stunned, wordless silence. From the very start of Shane’s ’set’ at the Festival, until the end, I found myself inarticulate and mute with utter abandonment and admiration for his remarkable work. For anyone who thinks they ‘know’ poetry, I challenge you to find one of Shane’s 200 annual gigs, park your derriere and prepare to be amazed at what a force one person can be in the world… with poems!

This is not your mother’s poetry, nor your English teacher’s. Despite that, the pavilion was loaded with both, along with a few of the young adult set, and some free thinkers who were drawn to the promise articulated in the Festival’s brochure: “Koyczan sounds alternately like a full-throttle auctioneer and a chilled-out beat poet.”  And we were SO not disappointed.

I passed Shane at the back of the Pavilion just as Zoe Whittal’s excellent readings out of Bottle Rocket Lovers and her iconic poetry marking the age of the 70’s. I recognized him from the brochure, and thought him quite unassuming and un-poet like as he waited for everyone to clear out prior to preparing for his time on stage. But get that boy in front of a microphone and it’s like he’s jammed his thumb into the power socket of the universe - I mean he comes ALIVE. The transformation of Shane at the mike, every time he stepped away and stepped back, was remarkable. Luminous, powerful, tender, funny, he could move from charging poetry that opened my chest like a ripsaw to a troubadour, singing of the passing of family in the most vulnerable of ways.

For those who had the misforture to miss his readings, Shane makes his living 100% from writing and performing poetry world-wide. He is the first poet from outside the US to win the prestigious National Individual Poetry Slam, and almost every time he reads/performs it’s to a standing ovation (Writer’s Fest included) and a subsequent mobbing at the book table, where he once sold 83 books in under 10 minutes. In one word: phenomenal.

I would have happily bought multiple tickets to multiple Shane Shows, but had to content myself with his book and CD, and the happy knowledge that he does this kind of thing about 200 times a year and I can be sure to hook up again in the not too distant future.

Related Link: For a great article about Shane, go to Quill & Quire

We also took in the Hackett Park Craft Fair, where I saw some new and stunning work. Most arresting were the glass folded bowls depicting salmon and octopus - breathtaking - and the ceramic standing and hanging candle lanterns… and I could not get past the nut and chocolate booth, again, and emerged with my little trumpet of spectacularly rich chocolate kisses jealously clutched to my chest. Of course it meant lunging through the rest of the venue from shade patch to shade patch, but they are so worth it.