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The Homestead
MYSTERY, DESPAIR AND LONGING
» Thursday 6 May 2010 | 5 pm
» Bohemian Café, 524 Bernard Avenue, Kelowna
An informal afternoon hour showcasing ideas
and people in the Okanagan creative economy. Join us as writer Colin Snowsell and photographer Gary Nylander celebrate the release of their remarkable new book The Frollet Homestead with a reading and photo exhibit.
» $2 at the door. Refreshments are available at a modest cost.
» Seating is limited, please reserve yours HERE
Writer and Photographer Reveal an Astonishing and Stark Ghost Story
A lamentation for a lost country and a work whose humour belies a sharp and sustained critique of the modern world, The Frollett Homestead is a remarkable new book by writer Colin Snowsell and photographer Gary Nylander. The book is being hailed by Caterina Edwards - winner of the Writers Guild of Alberta's 2008 Wilfred Eggleston Award for Nonfiction - as a "a joy to read: a puzzle, a ghost story, and a psychological study. It is both amusing and thoughtful, challenging our expectations and simple understandings. Like Nylander's photographs, Snowsell's prose is masterful and individual. And he is more than a promising writer: he is a full-blown talent."
On Thursday, April 29th at 5 pm the ongoing weekly Okanagan Institute Express series at the Bohemian Café, Kelowna presents The Homestead: Mystery, Despair and Longing. Join us as writer Colin Snowsell and photographer Gary Nylander celebrate the release of their remarkable new book The Frollet Homestead with a reading and photo exhibit.
What starts out as a simple newspaper report on a decaying farmstead and the family that once lived there, turns into a tour de force of writing at the hands of Colin Snowsell. "I found it impossible to regard the Frollett Homestead and not hear the chants of the ghosts of children, children who play there no longer. Children grown old. Children passed on. The day I visited the Frollett homestead I kept looking at my octogenarian host, only to see beside me a boy not yet eight." The text is accompanied by a suite of photographs by Gary Nylander that shadow the tone and temperament of the writing, and the story.
 Colin Snowsell teaches media and cultural studies at Okanagan College, and has published a range of popular and scholarly essays, mostly on popular culture, in national magazines such as Maisonneuve and This Magazine, as well as in popular online sites such as PopMatters, as well as Rhetor: Journal of The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric. He's also spoken and written extensively on the subject of former Smiths frontman, Morrissey, and has contributed a chapter to a forthcoming book on Morrissey by UK publisher Intellect Books. Snowsell is the fourth generation descendant of Edwin Snowsell, a pioneer settler of the Okanagan Valley who arrived in Kelowna in 1925 and whose family owned and operated orchards throughout the Glenmore Valley. In 2010 Kelowna City Council honoured Edwin Snowsell and his descendants by renaming a segment of Glenmore Drive as "Snowsell Street".
"Already respected as a sharp, sly observer of present-day pop culture, Colin Snowsell reveals himself here as an expert spinner of tall tales and mind-twisting historical mysteries. The Frollett Homestead pulls you in with skill and charm, and I finished it longing for more of its ineffectual journalist hero, Allan Mow, and his world in which newspapers and crusty old country folk still matter. This little book is a genuine delight," writes Will Straw, co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop.
 Gary Nylander was born in Victoria, BC in 1958, and began his interest in photography when he was 15 years old and started as a photographer at a weekly newspaper, the Goldstream Gazette in 1976. After a four-year stint at the Brampton Daily Times, he returned to BC in 1983 as a staff photojournalist at Kelowna's Daily Courier. Gary has received numerous awards and special recognition including the 2003 Canadian Press News Picture of the Year, and had his work displayed in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. His photographs have been the subject of various one-man and group exhibits.
Wendell Phillips, Canada's best and best-known photojournalist says, "Over the past twenty years Gary Nylander has accumulated an extraordinary body of landscape photographs that provoke emotions and
discussion among many viewers. Gary's ability to blend light and shadow while organizing composition and space, reveals the beauty of nature and celebrates it. His images have also raised a quiet
awareness towards the preservation of the fragile environments he works in and cares about. I've had the opportunity to watch Gary work in a few occasions. His patience, dedication and remarkable talent to
find art in places many of us miss or can't see. There's a long list of professionals, myself included, that would place Gary among the best landscape photographers in Canada."
The Frollett Homestead is published by the Okanagan Institute in a limited edition of 500 copies, numbered and signed by the author and photographer. Copies will be available for sale at the event.
FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO REGISTER ONLINE CLICK HERE
The Homestead: Mystery, Despair and Longing takes place at the Bohemian Café, Kelowna. This marks the 137th event the Okanagan Institute has held since the Express series got underway in July 2007.
Express has played host to many Okanagan luminaries, including former deputy secretary general of Amnesty International Derek Evans, artists Lee Claremont and Gary Pearson, BC Book Award nominee Don Gayton, CBC Literary prize winner poet Harold Rhenisch, distinguished editor and author Jim Taylor, poet laureate and professor John Lent, creative entrepreneur Nikos Theodosakis, animator and filmmaker Jim Cliffe, community activist Don Elzer, dancer David LaHay, architect Jim Meiklejohn, culinary artist and writer Heidi Noble, broadcaster Marion Barschel and many others from a wide range of creative fields.
The Okanagan Institute is a group of creative professionals that has gathered around the goal of providing events, publications and services of interest to enquiring minds in the Okanagan. We partner with individuals, organizations, institutions and businesses to achieve optimal creative and social impact.
Our mission is to ignite cultural transformation, catalyze collaborative action, build networks and foster sustainable creative enterprises. We invite the participation by all members of the creative community.
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