Active Voice Presents: Ivan Coyote,"Care Of"
Writer and performer Ivan Coyote has spent decades on the road, telling stories around the world. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members—letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Then came Spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events cancelled. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered.
Those letters and Coyote's responses have since been gathered and transformed into a book, entitled Care Of, which will be released on June 8, 2021 by McClelland and Stewart.
Please join Western's Alice Munro Chair in Creativity as they read selections from this collection in a moving performance that celebrates the cathartic and transformative power of letters, and the lives and stories they honour and remember. This event will be graciously hosted by poet and current Simon Fraser University Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow, Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek.