KEVIN SPENST AND CATHERINE OWEN: READINGS FROM THEIR NEW WORKS
THURSDAY, 12 NOVember 2026 | DOORS AT 19:00, MUSIC AND READING FROM 19:30
THIS IS A FREE EVENT
Poets Kevin Spenst and Catherine Owen will read from their new works, which utilize a broad range of literary voicing — verse, narrative prose, inteview, essay — and photography to inquire about the nature of home and place. The fingerstyle guitar artistry of Chika Buston will open the evening.
Books will be available for purchase — or you can buy them online at the links below.
About Kevin’s “Stanley Park Manor: a collective history”
Stanley Park Manor: a Collective History brings together dozens of voices and hundreds of lives lived in one of the West End’s most iconic buildings. With previous tenants such as Pierre Berton, Simma Holt, Trish Klein (of the Be Good Tanyas), and congregations of others up to the present, this almost 100-year-old Vancouver building is steeped in stories. With the help of the former building manager, Lyn Guy, poet and author Kevin Spenst has compiled, researched, and added to accounts from actors, artists, journalists, and others. An assortment of Spenst’s lyric essays, interviews with his neighbours, and the dozens of personal accounts from others (and photos galore) make up this hybrid collection that’s part museum of miscellany and magic, and part walking tour through the building’s generations of tenants.
An ode to the poetics of coincidence and community, Stanley Park Manor celebrates the power of people coming together.
About Catherine’s “Sixteen Homes”
You say house and wood falls over you like a cloak, your passion becomes windows. You say home and all memories gather.
In Sixteen Homes Catherine Owen pulls together the ideas, words and images that surround our understanding of home and housing. Asking questions about transience and about how long it takes to set down roots, Owen set out not to write a memoir but to reflect on a society that has priced many out of their home cities. Moving between diary entries, essays, poetry and photographs, Owen shares her path from her struggles with housing as a young mother to the security she now feels. From her parents’ purpose-built home in Vancouver – co-owned with another family – to Delilah – the century-old house she now owns in Edmonton – Sixteen Homes moves through the many places Owen has lived, considering what these types of experiences mean for our ideas of belonging. All along she invites the reader to consider what it is that turns a house into a home and who it is that gets to have one.
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