Opening Doors by Daphne Marlatt
"There was nothing but parties in Hogan's Alley," a black musician named Austin Phillips reminisced in 1977, "Night time, anytime, and Sundays all day. You could go by at 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning and you could hear the juke boxes going, you hear somebody hammering on the piano, playing the guitar, or hear somebody fighting."The black ghetto of Hogan's Alley was just one of the ethnic neighbourhoods that made the historic Strathcona district the most cosmopolitan and colourful quarter in Vancouver for over a hundred years. Home to Chinatown, Japantown, the Loggers' Skid Row and Little Italy among others, it had been the city's first residential neighbourhood but became the refuge of the city's working and immigrant classes when better-off Vancouverites migrated westward around 1900. By the 1950s planners had declared it a slum slated for demolition, but in the 1960s residents united in a spirited defense that guaranteed Strathcona's survival and revolutionized city planning across Canada.
It had long been known that some of Vancouver's best stories lurked behind the closed doors of the Strathcona district (rock legend Jimi Hendrix spent part of his childhood living there with his grandmother, who is interviewed in this book.) Between 1977 and 1978, Strathcona writers Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter undertook to open those doors and collect 50 oral histories representing the best of the stories. First published in 1979 as a double issue of the journal Sound Heritage, Opening Doors has been celebrated as one of the best books about Vancouver you couldn't obtain for love nor money. To help mark Vancouver's 125th Anniversary, Harbour is republishing this underground classic as a Raincoast Monograph richly illustrated with vintage photographs.
Daphne Marlatt was born in Melbourne in 1941 and spent her early years in Malaysia before moving to Canada in 1951. Marlatt was a key figure in the 1960s West Coast poetry movement, having studied at the University of British Columbia and collaborated with many of Donald Allen's New American Poets, including Robert Creeley. Much of her postmodernist writing would focus on immigrants' adaptations, hardships, and successes. Marlatt's literary associations with the loosely linked TISH group fostered her nonconformist approach to language and etymological discoveries while she was a student at UBC from 1960 to 1964. She was the founder editor of periodics and Tessera, two literary publications.
West Coast Review, Island, The Capilano Review, and TISH were all co-edited by her. She was the first writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in three decades when she was appointed in 2004. She is currently the co-director of the Banff Writing Studio, which takes place every year. Her early work includes prose narratives on Vancouver's Strathcona district and Steveston, a historic Japanese-Canadian fishing community, as well as various poetry collections.
In 1980, she published Selected Writing: Network, a collection of her prose and poetry. Sharon Thesen curated The New Long Poem Anthology: 2nd Edition (2000), which contains more of her work. This Tremor Love Is (2001) by Daphne Marlatt is a memory book - an album of love poetry that spans twenty-five years, from her initial composition of A Lost Book, which became the opening part, through subsequent, more recent sequences. Marlatt has appeared on the Bravo!-produced Heart of a Poet series as a featured poet.
Her most recent work is The Gull, which won the renowned 2008 Uchimura Naoya Award for being the first Canadian play to be presented in the ancient, ritualized tradition of Japanese Noh theatre. Marlatt was named to the Order of Canada in 2006 for his outstanding contributions to Canadian culture throughout a lifetime. She received the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry in 2009 for her revolutionary long poem The Giving, and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781550175219 |
| ISBN 10 | 1550175211 |
| Title | Opening Doors |
| Author | Daphne Marlatt |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Harbour Publishing |
| Year published | 2011-05-26 |
| Number of pages | 240 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |