Vancouver Writers Podcast

Vancouver Writers Podcast sounds like what it is: readings from a writing group, recorded with the chatter at the edges intact. Several people read in each episode. Most begin informally with a chapter number, a genre label or a quick reminder of who a character is, and then hand the rest over to the text. One reader skips the preamble altogether and asks if it is fine to just read. Malcolm Van Delst is a recurring voice. His passages come from 'Do the Wrong Thing', a novel he describes as opening with a woman who tries to kill herself and then explains herself by telling her life story. He also says roughly how far into the book each excerpt falls, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way through. The narrator's world is small and vivid. She has a crush on Greg that she first brushes off and then confesses, friends named Emily, Johnny and Ben, a trip to a soup kitchen at St. Anne's, and a place called Nerd and Doof that she decides is what cool looks like. There is wit in it too, as when she sets herself an experiment to write something bleak in a happy style. A second serial runs alongside it. 'The Second Undoing of Marlowe Poore' is introduced as a psychological thriller about a 25-year-old man who fakes his own death by leaving his shoes and a suicide note on a bridge, then turns a stranger's real jump from the other side to his advantage. The chapters heard here circle a dream about finding a book in a library and cover the day before and the day after it. A third, 'Without Repentance', is science fiction: Jillian, who is in the military, lives in a world where a blast wiped out every superpower except Canada, and in one chapter her family gathers to hear that she is expecting. The one-off pieces are harder to predict. A dystopian scene follows Alistair into a soundproof prayer closet in a city where going to temple would mean an escort. A hunter sets out to find a beaver lord and save a pine tree from certain death. A countdown story built around a drug lab on Edgar Street stops to ask whether it is wise to send information to the past just because it was received. Elsewhere, a first-person memory of vomit frozen to the family car gives way to weeks of silence from the narrator's parents, and a sardonic passage compares a figure in Pacific Northwest publishing to Harvey Weinstein while mocking wealthy dabblers who decide to write a novel. Pieces are read as they stand: one reader stops mid-scene because the text has been heavily edited since it was printed, and sums up the missing part instead. For a first listen, 'Tears' lays out the Marlowe Poore premise in full, and because Malcolm Van Delst restates his novel's setup before each passage, any of his instalments works as a starting point.