We invite you to join us for a walk along the shoreline of ch’atlich to celebrate the many life-giving attributes and rich resources that the ocean has provided Coast Salish peoples since time immemorial. Each Salish Sea and Me experience will be a conversation with the shoreline; a meeting between land, water, and the people who have walked here for generations. Guided by Candace Campo, you’ll explore the rich ecosystems of the Salish Sea, learning how Indigenous communities have lived in balance with these tides for millennia.
Up and down the pacific northwest coast there are stories shared of the great flood. They speak about the rising waters, the urgency to escape to higher ground and coming down to start over again after the water recedes. In my home community, Wuikinuxv, it is said the People who survived the flood climbed the mountain known as Kvauma (seat of the eagle) to escape the push of the ocean water. In making a lot of the work for this show I was thinking about the art we make and the work we do after loss…after a series of losses. What happens when catastrophe and heartbreak are normalized in our bones? Where do we place focus? Do we look at what has been taken, or to what remains and can be reclaimed?
We are bringing back Art Talks, a series of discussions that centre on issues and ideas connected to contemporary art in the 21st century. Offered online they are an opportunity to learn, share and discuss wide ranging topics that intersect with making art at this moment in time. Threading theory, practice and art, these discussions will provide a chance to delve into ideas, unpack understandings, and challenge assumptions. In the second session we will consider artists, projects and practices around the Salish Sea, and how they help connect audiences to specific sites of climate transformation.
Join us for a one-night only event in collaboration with Holy Crow Arts Society. Squamish Nation playwright Justin Neal explores the tradition of canoeing in Keepers of the Salish Sea. The play is about finding that path we all seek, a search for meaning in life, to discover answers to existential questions. A probing, searching, hilarious tale infusing Coast Salish traditions — inspired by a phenomenal cultural practice thousands of years old, nearly erased by colonization — with the pressing environmental and social issues of our day. The stage reading is directed by Quelemia Sparrow.
We are bringing back Art Talks, a series of discussions that centre on issues and ideas connected to contemporary art in the 21st century. Offered online, they are an opportunity to learn, share and discuss wide ranging topics that intersect with making art at this moment in time. Threading theory, practice and art, these discussions will provide a chance to delve into ideas, unpack understandings, and challenge assumptions. In this first session, we will look at artists and practices that consider a changing climate with a particular focus on our warming oceans.
This lecture and discussion considers how artists and curators are thinking with a rapidly changing climate. How can art provide a space for more than contemplation and awareness, towards the possibility of transformation? What creative forms and material responses invite us to consider art as a site for urgent action?
She’s is an award-winning Indigenous writer, filmmaker and musician. She and her company, Full Regalia, have produced over 30 dramatic, documentary and experimental films, which have screened Internationally. A recipient of the “Trailblazer” award, “her films have has served as a springboards & inspiration for countless other projects”. She works as creative and production consultant, and produced student films. She was the first aboriginal person to sit on the jury at Sundance Film Festival & several of her films have had US premiers there.
She currently has several projects in development. Her short films have had a renaissance of screenings, to include the acclaimed “Ladies of the Inlet.”
She’s had over 15 short stories published. She is honoured to have her ‘Henry Miller’ short story “don’tcha know” published in NEXUS the International Henry Miller Anthology, about her time with him.
Doris Good, M.J. Milne, and Pat Sullivan share their self-publishing tips for creating and marketing self-published books from cover to cover.
Come listen to readings from the finalists from the Book Awards for BC Authors contest, including:
– Daniela Elza
– Marion Dodds
– Veronica Woodruff
– Joline Martin
– Calvin White
– Susan McCaslin
AI Awareness for Bloggers, Artists, Authors & Others
with panelists: Doris Good, CPA and Author, Hilary Moses, Artist, Educator, and Animator, Ruth Rodgers, Artist and Author, Stephen Murphy, Artist, Author, and Bookbinder, and Stephen Smith, Blogger, and AI programmer.
Plein Air Workshop at Art & Words Festival.
Keep it Simple and Loose – Urban / travel sketching for beginners plus with Paddy Meade
Enjoy a 2 hour plein air sketching in the core of lower Gibsons. Pencil, markers, crayons, watercolour – bring what you have. Paint in sketchbook or on paper. Instructor will supply boards to use on lap, table, curb etc. Easel not required.
Focus is on the basic tips for urban sketching and opportunity to learn how to select subject, basic composition, and fun opportunity to create. Keep it simple and loose.
Saturday, Aug. 22, 10:30 – 12:30
Gibsons Public Art Gallery, $25
Register by email at sunshinecoastwritersandeditors@gmail.com
Whether you’re a poet or write prose only, you’ll enjoy this highly interactive workshop. We’ll ditch the lines and write beautiful/interesting/shocking/strange sentences, and like Tom Snarsky and Amy Lowell before us, compose poetic paragraphs.
2: 3:0-4:00, Saturday, Aug. 22, Gibsons Public Art Gallery
$25
Sign up by emailing sunshinecoastwritersandeditors@gmail.com
Join author and artist, Ruth Rodgers, for the launch of her latest historical fiction novel at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery as she presents this latest story about the thousands of ‘home children’ sent out from England to Canada to fulfill agricultural and domestic service roles in the 1870s to the 1930s. Joseph and Lucy, orphans from London, experience very different fates in their new homes, typical of the stories of many of those caught up in this ill-considered scheme designed to solve Canada’s labour shortage while getting children off the streets of England’s growing cities.
Saturday, August 22, 2026, 11 AM – 12:30 PM
Gibsons Public Art Gallery
Free
Explore how to write a glosa, a courtly form that steals a quatrain from another poet’s work to structure a poem of your own, in the course of which you create a glosa – or gloss on that poet’s work. Tangling with your chosen poet may allow her or his subtle influence to inform your tone and expand your expressive range.
THE GLOSA OR GLOSE is a form requiring:
a) A cabeza (or motto) – the quatrain borrowed from another poet, whose authorship must be acknowledged
b) Four 10-line stanzas, each endingwith one of the lines in sequence from the cabeza
c) A rhyme-scheme requirement that lines 6 and 9 rhyme with the final word of line 10.
Saturday, Aug. 22nd, 2026, 10:30 am – Noon
Gibsons Public Art Gallery, Joe’s Lounge
431 Marine Drive, Gibsons, BC
$25 – includes a chapbook of glosas and handouts
Register at sunshinecoastwirtersandeditors@gmail.com
