Daniel Canty: Photo by Benoit Aquin, 2017
The first public lecture in his series La Mise en Livre (The Book as Living Form) takes place on September 24 at 5pm in the Coach House, Green College UBC. All are welcome. Details are here: https://greencollege.ubc.ca/civicrm/event/info%3Fid%3D1001%26reset%3D1
I have come to Green with books in mind – the three I am working on, that will anchor my days and work at the College, and all of those that feed into their streams of thought and story. My manuscripts will serve as departure points for each of the end-of-the-month talks I will be hosting this semester, welcoming guests from green BC and blue Québec. I hope, through this lecture series – entitled La mise en livre – to communicate to you some of the method, the vivid disorders, and the precious exchanges that go into shaping works to come. I have also integrated an empirical component to the endeavour: shaping, over the course of the series, four posters designed to fold into a booklet that will be offered on the last installment.
Books, one writer said (and I chose to believe) must be read with the same care that was put into writing them. I would add that they can also be made that way. The glow of an idea, or the beauty of the object, is not enough to spark a book’s life: it’s the humanity that counts. These lawns and halls are, as you know, conducive to the chance, and very human, art of conversation. Writers are universal dilettantes, who have chosen to pursue a form of lucid unknowing. I hope that, from our diverse purviews, we can engage a wider reflection on the ecology of narratives, and come to see the book as that meeting place, beyond discourse, of being and things, where we learn to live by the lights of language.
Please, then, don’t hesitate to talk.
– Daniel Canty, Writer in Residence 2019