by Gillian Blore
Geist magazine combined the launch of its most current issue with the final evening of the Memory Festival for 2011 on Friday, November 18, at the Roundhouse Community Centre.
The Memory Festival, an initiative of the Vancouver Memory Collective, is a free-floating series of public events which capture the subjective act of memory through: photography, video instillations and public readings. The combination of events was a timely one as the focus of Geist’s 82 issue is Vancouver’s radical literary climate of the 70s.
Geist staff kicked off the event with a selection of readings delving into the archives of Vancouver’s independent publishing houses for samples of the city’s outré literary heritage. PRISM international editor, andrea bennett read a Margaret Atwood piece selected from poet bill bissett’s experimental literary periodical: blew ointment while Jordan Abel, also an editor at PRISM as well as a contributor to Geist, read some selections from TISH, a poetry newsletter established in 1961.
