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Trevor Carolan has published many books of poetry, non-fiction, translation, fiction and anthologies. He has also produced documentary films and held senior arts positions with the Olympic Games and Banff Centre. Co-editor of the award-winning edition Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World, and a former elected Councillor in North Vancouver, he holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and has advocated on behalf of conservation issues and Indigenous land claims in B.C. He taught for many years at the University of the Fraser Valley near Vancouver. Find out more at: www.trevorcarolan.com.
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LITERARY LOCATION:
Chinese Benevolent Association former headquarters, 500-block Main St.
In Return To Stillness: Twenty Years With A Tai Chi Master (2003), Trevor Carolan has detailed his his 23-year apprenticeship with Tai Chi master Ng Ching-Por and recalls Chinatown in the 1970s. "I met Sifu Ng, the master of these tales, after he arrived from Hong Kong. I was searching for harmony in my life and he was a Taoist of 75 who moved like a small, alert dragon. The community loved him for his humility and the supple grace of his movements--like wild rye weaving in the wind. Sifu taught a small group of disciples upstairs at the Chinese Benevolent Association--landscape scrolls on the walls, cabinets of antiquities, gongs, lion-dance costumes, and the Peking Opera band's instruments jammed every nook. He always instructed by example. Some things, he said, we can only comprehend with our heart. 'Fong sung, fong sung,' he'd repeat: 'Make it soft...' "For years we studied and moved in rhythm together like shadows after the ox, like water flowing over the mill... Our old school was like a family." Watershed conservation activist and professor of English at University of the Fraser Valley, Carolan is a Buddhist who has written many books and co-translated The Book of the Heart and The Supreme Way from Chinese.
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Trevor Carolan was born to a Yorkshire Irish family and settled in B.C. in 1957, at New Westminster. He began writing at 17, filing dispatches from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury music scene. For three years he traveled Britain, Europe and India before mastering in English at Humboldt State University in 1978. He studied with Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; was the first Executive Director of the Federation of BC Writers; and served as literary coordinator for the XV Olympic Winter Games in Calgary.
His published works include non-fiction, memoir, poetry, fiction, translation, stories for children, and anthologies. A contributor to Shambhala Sun, The Bloomsbury Review, Choice, Nguoi Viet, and Kyoto Journal, he travels widely in Asia. Active in Pacific coast watershed issues, he lives in North Vancouver where he served for three years as an elected municipal councillor. He has written as a civic affairs columnist for the North Shore News and taught English and Asian Religion at University College of the Fraser Valley near Vancouver. He has also been affiliated with the Department of International Relations at Bond University, Queensland, Australia.
His travel novel The Pillow Book of Dr. Jazz is published by Anchor. Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg At Hollyhock is a memoir of his acquaintance with Allen Ginsberg. Return to Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master (Marlowe & Co., New York) is an account of his 20 years as a student of the traditional Chinese wisdom path with Tai Chi Master Ng Ching-Por in Vancouver's Chinatown. He has collaborated with composer/pianist Mark Armanini as a librettist and has twice gathered excerpts for International Writers Calendars. He has been a research associate with the David See-Chai-Lam Centre at SFU, he has written regularly for Shambhala Sun magazine and he has edited a collection of writing from the Fraser Valley entitled Down in the Valley. In 2005, Trevor Carolan began co-producing a revival of the Pacific Rim Review of Books with Richard Olafson of Ekstasis Editions in Victoria. In 2006, Carolan accepted a new position as Banff Centre director of Literary Arts and republished The Pillowbook of Dr. Jazz: Travels Along Asia's Dharma Trail, recalling the Japanese Pillowbook of Sei Shonogan. The story follows the travels of a late-night deejay, Dr. Jazz, and his girlfriend Nori as they backpack their way through Asia including Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Nepal, Burma and Japan. Carolan resigned from his Banff position on a point of principle and returned to the West Coast in 2007.
Another Kind of Paradise from Boston-based Cheng & Tsui Publishers includes writers from Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh and elsewhere, with brief introductions to each author's works and life.
Trevor Carolan guest-edited Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World (2013), a collection of environmental writing from the B.C./U.S. Pacific Northwest region that was cited as a "Notable Special Edition 2013" by the selectors of the annual Best American Essays in the U.S. It includes work by writers, poets, and orators such as Hugh Brody, Wade Davis, Robert Bringhurst, Gary Snyder, Rex Weyler, Jan Zwicky, Susan Musgrave, Barry Lopez, Charles Lillard, Theresa Kishkan, Eve Joseph, John Schreiber and Red Pine The collection was published as special book edition of Manoa Journal from University of Hawaii in Honolulu, partly because Hawaiians share an old affiliation with B.C. Recruited by the Hudson's Bay Company in fur-trading days, and known as "Kanakas", some settled at old Fort Langley and at Stanley Park and were used in helping portage canoes up the wilder reaches of the Fraser River. Place names in the area still bear evidence of this old connection-Kanaka Bar on the Fraser, Kanaka Creek and, in Maple Ridge, there's Kanaka Drive. First Nations authors from B.C. in the book include Lee Maracle, Richard Van Camp, Eden Robinson, Richard Wagamese, Chief Dan George and Chief William K'HHalserten Sepass. Artwork is by Emily Carr from her original journals when she first visited the old native villages up the B.C. coast in the early 1900s. Permission to reprint these sketches came from the Provincial Museum and Archives.
Trevor Carolan has long balanced his literary life with his spiritual concerns. Five years after the Beatles famously hung out with the Maharishi and Mia Farrow in India, Trevor Carolan first encountered Buddhism in Calcutta in conversation with a pilgrim monk on the banks of the Hooghly River. Having since written and edited an excellent history of the Literary Storefront in Vancouver, Carolan has revisited his Buddhist affinities with New World Dharma: Interviews and Encounters with Buddhist Teachers, Writers and Leaders (SUNY State University of Albany Press 2016). Including his encounter with Allen Ginsberg on Cortes Island, Carolan has chapters on Gary Snyder, the Dalai Lama, Governor Jerry Brown and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. In a 2016 message to Alan Twigg, Carolan wrote, "This one's a kind of generational legacy document that I wanted to leave for those interested in how Buddhism has percolated into North American life in our time. I figured a good university press would have the reach to get it into libraries and SUNY in New York was excellent to work with. You'll see the preponderance of writers among the interviewees. Less theological and more cross-cultural/literary/ethical. Thich Nhat Hanh, Robert Aitken-roshi, and HH the Dalai Lama take care of the doctrinal material. Interesting to see Sulak Sivaraksa's influence on John Ralston Saul here in Canada. About Nanao, his importance to 1960s culture will probably be the focus of someone's PhD somewhere. Snyder was introduced to the southern Japanese island commune (Banyan Ashram) Nanao had gathered and he was writing about this when he returned to San Francisco during the Haight-Ashbury phase. Gary wasn't the only one talking about "Back to the Land"; just then, but he was a strong voice for that generation and the lessons he got from Nanao were important. He's also introduced Allen Ginsberg to the commune there too, and Allen later helped found a community in New York state. So it's an interesting trans-Pacific connection that a Japanese proto-hippie deserves at least some mention in that whole late-Sixties cultural revolution. Nanao also knew the rad Tokyo poet Kazuko Shiraishi, who was born in Vancouver, so he was no stranger to the town when he arrived here first time. He's certainly also been a heroic figure for some folks in Vancouver's/B.C.'s Japanese-Canadian community. I remember Takeo Yamashiro, the shakuhachi player, and I seeing Nanao off at the train station on Main St. bound for Seattle. These guys were shouting Banzais! to each other like something out of an old novel."
In October of 2019, at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver jazz guitar great Henry Young, and singer Marlowe Ferris provide accompaniment as Trevor Carolan launched his newest poetry collection, Formless Circumstance: Poems from the Road and Home.
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Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature
BOOKS
Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World (Mother Tongue, 2020) $21.95 978-1-8969-4980-2
Formless Circumstance: Poems from the Road and Home (Ekstasis Edition, 2019) $23.95 978-1-77171-330-6
New World Dharma: Interviews and Encounters with Buddhist Teachers, Writers and Leaders (SUNY State University of Albany Press, 2016). $75 978-1-4384-5983-7
The Literary Storefront, The Glory Years, Vancouver's Literary Centre 1978-1984 (Mother Tongue, 2015).
Along the Rim: Best of Pacific Rim Review of Books, Volume 2 (Ekstasis, 2014) Anthology co-edited with Richard Olafson. $22.95 978-1-897430-66-8
Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) $20 U.S. 978-0-8248-3936-9. Co-editor with Frank Stewart.
Making Waves: Reading B.C. and Pacific Northwest Literature, ed., (Anvil Press, 2010) 9781897535295 $20.00
Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific, ed., Cheng & Tsui, 2009. 978-0-887276-84-2 $19.95 U.S.
Against the Shore: The Best of the Pacific Rim Review of Books (Ekstasis, 2009), anthology co-edited with Richard Olafson. 978-1-897430-34-7 $22.95
The Pillow Book of Dr. Jazz: Travels Along Asia's Dharma Trail, Ekstasis, 2006
Down In The Valley: Contemporary Writing of B.C.'s Fraser Valley, ed., Ekstasis, 2004
Return To Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master, (non-fiction) Marlowe, NY: 2003
Celtic Highway: Poems & Texts, Ekstasis Press, 2002
Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg At Hollyhock, (memoir) Banff Centre Press, 2001
The Supreme Way: Inner Teachings of the Southern Mountain Tao, (co-translation with,Du Liang), North Atlantic, Berkeley, 1997
Big Whiskers Saves The Cove, Concorde, Vancouver, 1995 (children's environmental mystery)
The Colours of Heaven: Short Stories From The Pacific Rim, ed., Vintage, New York, 1992. Foreign editions, '96 (anthology)
The Book of the Heart: Embracing the Tao (with Bella Chen) , Shambhala Pub; Boston, 1990; foreign language editions, 1994. Canadian ed., Heron Press, Vancouver, l988
Closing The Circle, Heron Press; Vancouver, 1985 (poetry)
[BCBW 2020] "Poetry" "Travel"
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Road Trips. Journeys in the Unspoiled World. Trevor Carolan.
Mother Tongue Publishing.
reviewed by John Moore
Restrictions on international travel in response to the world health emergency spawned by the Covid-19 virus will probably give a kick up the best-seller ladder to travel writing as self-isolating readers settle into their favourite chairs to vicariously hit the road in the company of veteran ramblers.
Trevor Carolan's Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World, should top the stack of everyone's Quarantine Reading List. The two dozen chapters are mostly brief, elegant essays, almost haiku-like in their reduction to essentials, but fired with a serious jolt of 'the creature', as they call moonshine in Ireland.
The stories in Road Trips dispel conventions of time and space, ranging from San Francisco in the Sixties to the Catholic-Solidarity revolution in Poland, from Nepal to Madrid, from Laos to Paris.
The constant in all these stories is the timeless-centered lives of people, whether they are French artists or Irish farmers, who live beyond the frenetic glare of neon lights and digital monitors, preserving values and skills that might actually save the world if the shit really does hit the fan.
Quite simply, it is time to give Carolan his due.
If don’t know him; let me introduce you.
Trevor Carolan has been a road-runner since he was 17 in the mid-1960s. In those days he wangled an assignment from his hometown New Westminster Columbian newspaper to report on the mysterious ‘hippie’ movement in San Francisco. A fan of Beat Generation writers who emerged in the Fifties—Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlingetti, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac—Carolan hitch-hiked a thousand miles to get his story. It was the first of many shoestring journeys in search of what would prove to be just one part of a much longer, very ancient, on-going story.
While other young scribblers for underground newspapers of the time were carving out new niches in the trade, such as ‘rock critic,’ Carolan cut his own trail, eventually becoming Canada’s pre-eminent ‘Buddhist journalist,’ freelancing articles on Buddhism, its influence on the Beats and their hipster descendants; and always traveling, looking for the story.
Along the Dharma Trail he met a lot of interesting people from the great circle of the Pacific Rim, which led to him to editing three ground-breaking anthologies that introduced contemporary writing from the Far East to readers of the North American Far West on the other side of the pool. All worthwhile are The Colors of Heaven: Short Stories from the Pacific Rim, (Vintage-Random House 1992), Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific, (Cheng & Tsui 2009), and The Lotus Singers: Stories from Contemporary South Asia (Cheng & Tsui, 2011).
The route of Carolan’s own writing was set by his first two books; Closing the Circle, a collection of poems published in 1985 by Heron Books, followed by The Book of the Heart: Embracing the Tao (with Bella Chen) (Heron, 1988), reissued by Shambala Publishing in 1990.
The freewheeling Celtic poet, descendant of famed itinerant Irish bard Turlough O' Carolan, as well as the philosopher-student of Buddhism, with its tradition of monkish mendicant road-work, are parallel rails on which the Carolan train rides—a milk-run that stops at every out of the way halt on the map and many that aren't.
I read his Return to Stillness: 20 Years with a Tai Chi Master (Marlowe & Co. 2003), while painting my house in bright sunshine and a spring wind. What could have been a drudging chore enlivened by sunburn and hypothermia was somehow transformed into a profound expression of the love I felt for my wife and children.
It took me awhile to figure out that the book I was reading during tea breaks had subtly rearranged my attitude. I often recall the Taoist saying I first encountered there: Tao resides in the hearth.
Carolan has a knack of sneaking up like the Ancient Mariner, telling a story out of the side of his mouth that changes your life, then vanishing in the crowd. His secret is that he never turns preachy but remains resolutely ecumenical, on the side of whatever works for the betterment of the world and the sense of community among its inhabitants.
He follows the ancient spiritual practice of 'deep journeying', dodging the trap of glitzy all-inclusive resorts, accepting discomfort, disease, bugs, officious commissars and cops with equal aplomb to seek out and befriend people wherever he goes.
[BCBW 2020]
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Notable Literary homes & graves
Here is a list of authors to whom Trevor Carolan has paid tribute by visiting their graves or former residences, as 2020.
Warsaw, Powazki Cemetery for the grave of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the unrivalled travel journalist whose work in Granta defined what Creative Nonfiction really is.
Hydra, Greece, way up the steps from the bay is the fabled island house where Leonard Cohen courted Marianne.
Lisbon, Belém’s Monasterio de Jeronimo is resting place of Portugal’s greatest poet, Luís de Camões, author of The Lusiads, and seadog Vasco de Gama who cracked the Arab monopoly on Asia’s spice trade with Europe, inspiring The Lusiads and kickstarting globalization.
London, John Keats’ House in Hampstead, just off the Heath where Antonioni’s Blow Up was filmed is a classic. Near Soho, stroll past P.B. Shelley’s residence at 15 Poland St. Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived at #52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury; T.S. Eliot had his office here overlooking the same lovely square; and Charles Dickens lived on the square’s NE corner. The Cheshire Cheese in Wine Office Court, Fleet St near St Paul’s Cathedral, where Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and chums caroused is still in business.
John Betjeman, the beloved poet laureate is buried at St. Enodoc’s Churchyard near Wadebridge, Cornwall. In Yorkshire, The Bronte Sisters’ legend is kept alive in the family parsonage and Black Bull pub in the village of Haworth near Bradford. Ted Hughes was raised around the corner from the still-operating clogmaker’s in little Mytholmroyd not far off, and his wife Sylvia Plath rests nearby in Heptonstall churchyard. Shakespeare’s birthplace on Henley St. in Stratford-on-Avon is obligatory, and no U.K. literary pilgrimage is complete without seeing the rocking Cavern Club at 10 Mathew St. near Liverpool docks where John Lennon & Paul McCartney launched brilliant songwriting careers with The Beatles.
Ireland, Oscar Wilde was raised at #1 Merrion Square, downtown Dublin. There’s a fabulous colour statue of him across the road in the park. Graves of poets? –W.B. Yeats in Drumcliff churchyard at Sligo, Co Mayo; Seamus Heaney in Bellaghy Catholic churchyard, Co. Derry; and Patrick Kavanagh in the village of Eniskeen, Co Monaghan are Ireland’s three modern greats. Auden’s pal, poet Louis MacNiece is buried in Carrowdore churchyard on the way up to Belfast where a city plaque honours Van Morrison’s birthplace at 125 Hyndford St. For deep journeying, the grave of Gaelic poet Máirtin Ó Direáin at Inishmore cemetery in the Aran Islands takes work some getting to, but is worth it.
Brussels – A great street marker at 1 Rue de Brasseurs, still an arty area, notes where Paul Verlaine shot fellow poet Artur Rimbaud in their sensational lovers’ bust-up, 1873.
Paris, a bonanza! Check the notorious (now boutique) Beat Hotel at 9 Git-le-Coeur, just off Rue St. André-des-Arts. W.S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Edmonton’s Brion Gysin, and temporarily Jack Kerouac resided here. In Montparnasse Cemetery, find the graves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, also Charles Baudelaire. The little Square Charles Péguy honours the poet directly below the elevated Promenade Plantée section of Avenue Daumesnils—a hidden treasure. Pere Lachaise Cemetery is a magnet for literary graving: Epstein’s memorial for Oscar Wilde; Balzac’s and singer/lyricist Jim Morrison’s graves are permanently visited; Gertrude Stein made it here; Edith Piaf rests near Modigliani. The Left Bank’s Le Select, Les Deux Magots and La Coupole bistros still flourish where Sartre, de Beauvoir, Hemingway, Morley Callahan, and occasionally Henry Miller got existential.
Collioure, in this tiny southern French cemetery, grave of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, murdered by WW II fascists. Across the border in Port Bou, Spain is the wrenching memorial for Jewish art critic Walter Benjamin, forced to take his life steps ahead of the Gestapo in 1940.
Villefranche-sur-Mer, on the Riviera, a favourite haunt of novelist David Watmough. The park above the harbour is site of his naughtiest gay seduction scene in “Villefranche.”
Marrakesh, Peter Mayne, English author of the superb A Year in Marrakesh wrote daily at the Café de France on Djemma el Fna down from Katoubia Mosque and lived nearby.
New Delhi, Social justice novelist Mulk Raj Anand lived in his unusual spherical house that’s now a museum in funky Haus Khas district.
New York, The Chelsea Hotel, 222 W. 23rd has sheltered a legion of literary immortals: Mr L. Cohen wooed Janis Joplin here, and Dylan Thomas walked out of here to die. 15 Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village was home to singer/writer Dave Van Ronk; his young sidekick, Bob Dylan also crashed and worked on being famous here.
San Francisco, North Beach is a mecca for literary hounds. Centenarian Lawrence Ferlinghetti still keeps an office at City Lights Books on Columbus Ave. Caffe Trieste over the road is where he and all the Beat gang drank their coffee (you’ll see Jack Hirschman here). Jack Kerouac lit candles for his mum across the lane at St. Francis Church. Allen Ginsberg lived at 1010 Montgomery St. around the corner while writing Howl.
Toronto, The Waverley Hotel, 484 Spadina Ave. was home to nationalist poet Milton Acorn. The El Mocambo club where The Rolling Stones often opened N. American tours is at #464.
A few favourites: terrace of the Hotel Continental, Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, and terrace of the Hotel Casa Grande, Santiago, Cuba where Graham Greene wrote notes for The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana respectively. The Long Bar, Raffles Hotel, Singapore: Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and Paul Theroux all propped up the bar at this home of the Sling.
Dollarton, North Vancouver, the Tsleil-Waututh Reserve was lifelong home to orator/writer Chief Dan George. His son Chief Leonard also wrote, and poet Lee Maracle and eco-hero poet Will George hail from this same small powerground place. Drive slowly in admiration.
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LITERARY LOCATION:
Chinese Benevolent Association former headquarters, 500-block Main St.
In Return To Stillness: Twenty Years With A Tai Chi Master (2003), Trevor Carolan has detailed his his 23-year apprenticeship with Tai Chi master Ng Ching-Por and recalls Chinatown in the 1970s. "I met Sifu Ng, the master of these tales, after he arrived from Hong Kong. I was searching for harmony in my life and he was a Taoist of 75 who moved like a small, alert dragon. The community loved him for his humility and the supple grace of his movements--like wild rye weaving in the wind. Sifu taught a small group of disciples upstairs at the Chinese Benevolent Association--landscape scrolls on the walls, cabinets of antiquities, gongs, lion-dance costumes, and the Peking Opera band's instruments jammed every nook. He always instructed by example. Some things, he said, we can only comprehend with our heart. 'Fong sung, fong sung,' he'd repeat: 'Make it soft...' "For years we studied and moved in rhythm together like shadows after the ox, like water flowing over the mill... Our old school was like a family." Watershed conservation activist and professor of English at University of the Fraser Valley, Carolan is a Buddhist who has written many books and co-translated The Book of the Heart and The Supreme Way from Chinese.
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Trevor Carolan was born to a Yorkshire Irish family and settled in B.C. in 1957, at New Westminster. He began writing at 17, filing dispatches from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury music scene. For three years he traveled Britain, Europe and India before mastering in English at Humboldt State University in 1978. He studied with Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; was the first Executive Director of the Federation of BC Writers; and served as literary coordinator for the XV Olympic Winter Games in Calgary.
His published works include non-fiction, memoir, poetry, fiction, translation, stories for children, and anthologies. A contributor to Shambhala Sun, The Bloomsbury Review, Choice, Nguoi Viet, and Kyoto Journal, he travels widely in Asia. Active in Pacific coast watershed issues, he lives in North Vancouver where he served for three years as an elected municipal councillor. He has written as a civic affairs columnist for the North Shore News and taught English and Asian Religion at University College of the Fraser Valley near Vancouver. He has also been affiliated with the Department of International Relations at Bond University, Queensland, Australia.
His travel novel The Pillow Book of Dr. Jazz is published by Anchor. Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg At Hollyhock is a memoir of his acquaintance with Allen Ginsberg. Return to Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master (Marlowe & Co., New York) is an account of his 20 years as a student of the traditional Chinese wisdom path with Tai Chi Master Ng Ching-Por in Vancouver's Chinatown. He has collaborated with composer/pianist Mark Armanini as a librettist and has twice gathered excerpts for International Writers Calendars. He has been a research associate with the David See-Chai-Lam Centre at SFU, he has written regularly for Shambhala Sun magazine and he has edited a collection of writing from the Fraser Valley entitled Down in the Valley. In 2005, Trevor Carolan began co-producing a revival of the Pacific Rim Review of Books with Richard Olafson of Ekstasis Editions in Victoria. In 2006, Carolan accepted a new position as Banff Centre director of Literary Arts and republished The Pillowbook of Dr. Jazz: Travels Along Asia's Dharma Trail, recalling the Japanese Pillowbook of Sei Shonogan. The story follows the travels of a late-night deejay, Dr. Jazz, and his girlfriend Nori as they backpack their way through Asia including Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Nepal, Burma and Japan. Carolan resigned from his Banff position on a point of principle and returned to the West Coast in 2007.
Another Kind of Paradise from Boston-based Cheng & Tsui Publishers includes writers from Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh and elsewhere, with brief introductions to each author's works and life.
Trevor Carolan guest-edited Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World (2013), a collection of environmental writing from the B.C./U.S. Pacific Northwest region that was cited as a "Notable Special Edition 2013" by the selectors of the annual Best American Essays in the U.S. It includes work by writers, poets, and orators such as Hugh Brody, Wade Davis, Robert Bringhurst, Gary Snyder, Rex Weyler, Jan Zwicky, Susan Musgrave, Barry Lopez, Charles Lillard, Theresa Kishkan, Eve Joseph, John Schreiber and Red Pine The collection was published as special book edition of Manoa Journal from University of Hawaii in Honolulu, partly because Hawaiians share an old affiliation with B.C. Recruited by the Hudson's Bay Company in fur-trading days, and known as "Kanakas", some settled at old Fort Langley and at Stanley Park and were used in helping portage canoes up the wilder reaches of the Fraser River. Place names in the area still bear evidence of this old connection-Kanaka Bar on the Fraser, Kanaka Creek and, in Maple Ridge, there's Kanaka Drive. First Nations authors from B.C. in the book include Lee Maracle, Richard Van Camp, Eden Robinson, Richard Wagamese, Chief Dan George and Chief William K'HHalserten Sepass. Artwork is by Emily Carr from her original journals when she first visited the old native villages up the B.C. coast in the early 1900s. Permission to reprint these sketches came from the Provincial Museum and Archives.
Trevor Carolan has long balanced his literary life with his spiritual concerns. Five years after the Beatles famously hung out with the Maharishi and Mia Farrow in India, Trevor Carolan first encountered Buddhism in Calcutta in conversation with a pilgrim monk on the banks of the Hooghly River. Having since written and edited an excellent history of the Literary Storefront in Vancouver, Carolan has revisited his Buddhist affinities with New World Dharma: Interviews and Encounters with Buddhist Teachers, Writers and Leaders (SUNY State University of Albany Press 2016). Including his encounter with Allen Ginsberg on Cortes Island, Carolan has chapters on Gary Snyder, the Dalai Lama, Governor Jerry Brown and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. In a 2016 message to Alan Twigg, Carolan wrote, "This one's a kind of generational legacy document that I wanted to leave for those interested in how Buddhism has percolated into North American life in our time. I figured a good university press would have the reach to get it into libraries and SUNY in New York was excellent to work with. You'll see the preponderance of writers among the interviewees. Less theological and more cross-cultural/literary/ethical. Thich Nhat Hanh, Robert Aitken-roshi, and HH the Dalai Lama take care of the doctrinal material. Interesting to see Sulak Sivaraksa's influence on John Ralston Saul here in Canada. About Nanao, his importance to 1960s culture will probably be the focus of someone's PhD somewhere. Snyder was introduced to the southern Japanese island commune (Banyan Ashram) Nanao had gathered and he was writing about this when he returned to San Francisco during the Haight-Ashbury phase. Gary wasn't the only one talking about "Back to the Land"; just then, but he was a strong voice for that generation and the lessons he got from Nanao were important. He's also introduced Allen Ginsberg to the commune there too, and Allen later helped found a community in New York state. So it's an interesting trans-Pacific connection that a Japanese proto-hippie deserves at least some mention in that whole late-Sixties cultural revolution. Nanao also knew the rad Tokyo poet Kazuko Shiraishi, who was born in Vancouver, so he was no stranger to the town when he arrived here first time. He's certainly also been a heroic figure for some folks in Vancouver's/B.C.'s Japanese-Canadian community. I remember Takeo Yamashiro, the shakuhachi player, and I seeing Nanao off at the train station on Main St. bound for Seattle. These guys were shouting Banzais! to each other like something out of an old novel."
In October of 2019, at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver jazz guitar great Henry Young, and singer Marlowe Ferris provide accompaniment as Trevor Carolan launched his newest poetry collection, Formless Circumstance: Poems from the Road and Home.
*
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature
BOOKS
Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World (Mother Tongue, 2020) $21.95 978-1-8969-4980-2
Formless Circumstance: Poems from the Road and Home (Ekstasis Edition, 2019) $23.95 978-1-77171-330-6
New World Dharma: Interviews and Encounters with Buddhist Teachers, Writers and Leaders (SUNY State University of Albany Press, 2016). $75 978-1-4384-5983-7
The Literary Storefront, The Glory Years, Vancouver's Literary Centre 1978-1984 (Mother Tongue, 2015).
Along the Rim: Best of Pacific Rim Review of Books, Volume 2 (Ekstasis, 2014) Anthology co-edited with Richard Olafson. $22.95 978-1-897430-66-8
Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) $20 U.S. 978-0-8248-3936-9. Co-editor with Frank Stewart.
Making Waves: Reading B.C. and Pacific Northwest Literature, ed., (Anvil Press, 2010) 9781897535295 $20.00
Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific, ed., Cheng & Tsui, 2009. 978-0-887276-84-2 $19.95 U.S.
Against the Shore: The Best of the Pacific Rim Review of Books (Ekstasis, 2009), anthology co-edited with Richard Olafson. 978-1-897430-34-7 $22.95
The Pillow Book of Dr. Jazz: Travels Along Asia's Dharma Trail, Ekstasis, 2006
Down In The Valley: Contemporary Writing of B.C.'s Fraser Valley, ed., Ekstasis, 2004
Return To Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master, (non-fiction) Marlowe, NY: 2003
Celtic Highway: Poems & Texts, Ekstasis Press, 2002
Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg At Hollyhock, (memoir) Banff Centre Press, 2001
The Supreme Way: Inner Teachings of the Southern Mountain Tao, (co-translation with,Du Liang), North Atlantic, Berkeley, 1997
Big Whiskers Saves The Cove, Concorde, Vancouver, 1995 (children's environmental mystery)
The Colours of Heaven: Short Stories From The Pacific Rim, ed., Vintage, New York, 1992. Foreign editions, '96 (anthology)
The Book of the Heart: Embracing the Tao (with Bella Chen) , Shambhala Pub; Boston, 1990; foreign language editions, 1994. Canadian ed., Heron Press, Vancouver, l988
Closing The Circle, Heron Press; Vancouver, 1985 (poetry)
[BCBW 2020] "Poetry" "Travel"
*
Road Trips. Journeys in the Unspoiled World. Trevor Carolan.
Mother Tongue Publishing.
reviewed by John Moore
Restrictions on international travel in response to the world health emergency spawned by the Covid-19 virus will probably give a kick up the best-seller ladder to travel writing as self-isolating readers settle into their favourite chairs to vicariously hit the road in the company of veteran ramblers.
Trevor Carolan's Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World, should top the stack of everyone's Quarantine Reading List. The two dozen chapters are mostly brief, elegant essays, almost haiku-like in their reduction to essentials, but fired with a serious jolt of 'the creature', as they call moonshine in Ireland.
The stories in Road Trips dispel conventions of time and space, ranging from San Francisco in the Sixties to the Catholic-Solidarity revolution in Poland, from Nepal to Madrid, from Laos to Paris.
The constant in all these stories is the timeless-centered lives of people, whether they are French artists or Irish farmers, who live beyond the frenetic glare of neon lights and digital monitors, preserving values and skills that might actually save the world if the shit really does hit the fan.
Quite simply, it is time to give Carolan his due.
If don’t know him; let me introduce you.
Trevor Carolan has been a road-runner since he was 17 in the mid-1960s. In those days he wangled an assignment from his hometown New Westminster Columbian newspaper to report on the mysterious ‘hippie’ movement in San Francisco. A fan of Beat Generation writers who emerged in the Fifties—Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlingetti, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac—Carolan hitch-hiked a thousand miles to get his story. It was the first of many shoestring journeys in search of what would prove to be just one part of a much longer, very ancient, on-going story.
While other young scribblers for underground newspapers of the time were carving out new niches in the trade, such as ‘rock critic,’ Carolan cut his own trail, eventually becoming Canada’s pre-eminent ‘Buddhist journalist,’ freelancing articles on Buddhism, its influence on the Beats and their hipster descendants; and always traveling, looking for the story.
Along the Dharma Trail he met a lot of interesting people from the great circle of the Pacific Rim, which led to him to editing three ground-breaking anthologies that introduced contemporary writing from the Far East to readers of the North American Far West on the other side of the pool. All worthwhile are The Colors of Heaven: Short Stories from the Pacific Rim, (Vintage-Random House 1992), Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific, (Cheng & Tsui 2009), and The Lotus Singers: Stories from Contemporary South Asia (Cheng & Tsui, 2011).
The route of Carolan’s own writing was set by his first two books; Closing the Circle, a collection of poems published in 1985 by Heron Books, followed by The Book of the Heart: Embracing the Tao (with Bella Chen) (Heron, 1988), reissued by Shambala Publishing in 1990.
The freewheeling Celtic poet, descendant of famed itinerant Irish bard Turlough O' Carolan, as well as the philosopher-student of Buddhism, with its tradition of monkish mendicant road-work, are parallel rails on which the Carolan train rides—a milk-run that stops at every out of the way halt on the map and many that aren't.
I read his Return to Stillness: 20 Years with a Tai Chi Master (Marlowe & Co. 2003), while painting my house in bright sunshine and a spring wind. What could have been a drudging chore enlivened by sunburn and hypothermia was somehow transformed into a profound expression of the love I felt for my wife and children.
It took me awhile to figure out that the book I was reading during tea breaks had subtly rearranged my attitude. I often recall the Taoist saying I first encountered there: Tao resides in the hearth.
Carolan has a knack of sneaking up like the Ancient Mariner, telling a story out of the side of his mouth that changes your life, then vanishing in the crowd. His secret is that he never turns preachy but remains resolutely ecumenical, on the side of whatever works for the betterment of the world and the sense of community among its inhabitants.
He follows the ancient spiritual practice of 'deep journeying', dodging the trap of glitzy all-inclusive resorts, accepting discomfort, disease, bugs, officious commissars and cops with equal aplomb to seek out and befriend people wherever he goes.
[BCBW 2020]
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Notable Literary homes & graves
Here is a list of authors to whom Trevor Carolan has paid tribute by visiting their graves or former residences, as 2020.
Warsaw, Powazki Cemetery for the grave of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the unrivalled travel journalist whose work in Granta defined what Creative Nonfiction really is.
Hydra, Greece, way up the steps from the bay is the fabled island house where Leonard Cohen courted Marianne.
Lisbon, Belém’s Monasterio de Jeronimo is resting place of Portugal’s greatest poet, Luís de Camões, author of The Lusiads, and seadog Vasco de Gama who cracked the Arab monopoly on Asia’s spice trade with Europe, inspiring The Lusiads and kickstarting globalization.
London, John Keats’ House in Hampstead, just off the Heath where Antonioni’s Blow Up was filmed is a classic. Near Soho, stroll past P.B. Shelley’s residence at 15 Poland St. Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived at #52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury; T.S. Eliot had his office here overlooking the same lovely square; and Charles Dickens lived on the square’s NE corner. The Cheshire Cheese in Wine Office Court, Fleet St near St Paul’s Cathedral, where Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and chums caroused is still in business.
John Betjeman, the beloved poet laureate is buried at St. Enodoc’s Churchyard near Wadebridge, Cornwall. In Yorkshire, The Bronte Sisters’ legend is kept alive in the family parsonage and Black Bull pub in the village of Haworth near Bradford. Ted Hughes was raised around the corner from the still-operating clogmaker’s in little Mytholmroyd not far off, and his wife Sylvia Plath rests nearby in Heptonstall churchyard. Shakespeare’s birthplace on Henley St. in Stratford-on-Avon is obligatory, and no U.K. literary pilgrimage is complete without seeing the rocking Cavern Club at 10 Mathew St. near Liverpool docks where John Lennon & Paul McCartney launched brilliant songwriting careers with The Beatles.
Ireland, Oscar Wilde was raised at #1 Merrion Square, downtown Dublin. There’s a fabulous colour statue of him across the road in the park. Graves of poets? –W.B. Yeats in Drumcliff churchyard at Sligo, Co Mayo; Seamus Heaney in Bellaghy Catholic churchyard, Co. Derry; and Patrick Kavanagh in the village of Eniskeen, Co Monaghan are Ireland’s three modern greats. Auden’s pal, poet Louis MacNiece is buried in Carrowdore churchyard on the way up to Belfast where a city plaque honours Van Morrison’s birthplace at 125 Hyndford St. For deep journeying, the grave of Gaelic poet Máirtin Ó Direáin at Inishmore cemetery in the Aran Islands takes work some getting to, but is worth it.
Brussels – A great street marker at 1 Rue de Brasseurs, still an arty area, notes where Paul Verlaine shot fellow poet Artur Rimbaud in their sensational lovers’ bust-up, 1873.
Paris, a bonanza! Check the notorious (now boutique) Beat Hotel at 9 Git-le-Coeur, just off Rue St. André-des-Arts. W.S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Edmonton’s Brion Gysin, and temporarily Jack Kerouac resided here. In Montparnasse Cemetery, find the graves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, also Charles Baudelaire. The little Square Charles Péguy honours the poet directly below the elevated Promenade Plantée section of Avenue Daumesnils—a hidden treasure. Pere Lachaise Cemetery is a magnet for literary graving: Epstein’s memorial for Oscar Wilde; Balzac’s and singer/lyricist Jim Morrison’s graves are permanently visited; Gertrude Stein made it here; Edith Piaf rests near Modigliani. The Left Bank’s Le Select, Les Deux Magots and La Coupole bistros still flourish where Sartre, de Beauvoir, Hemingway, Morley Callahan, and occasionally Henry Miller got existential.
Collioure, in this tiny southern French cemetery, grave of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, murdered by WW II fascists. Across the border in Port Bou, Spain is the wrenching memorial for Jewish art critic Walter Benjamin, forced to take his life steps ahead of the Gestapo in 1940.
Villefranche-sur-Mer, on the Riviera, a favourite haunt of novelist David Watmough. The park above the harbour is site of his naughtiest gay seduction scene in “Villefranche.”
Marrakesh, Peter Mayne, English author of the superb A Year in Marrakesh wrote daily at the Café de France on Djemma el Fna down from Katoubia Mosque and lived nearby.
New Delhi, Social justice novelist Mulk Raj Anand lived in his unusual spherical house that’s now a museum in funky Haus Khas district.
New York, The Chelsea Hotel, 222 W. 23rd has sheltered a legion of literary immortals: Mr L. Cohen wooed Janis Joplin here, and Dylan Thomas walked out of here to die. 15 Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village was home to singer/writer Dave Van Ronk; his young sidekick, Bob Dylan also crashed and worked on being famous here.
San Francisco, North Beach is a mecca for literary hounds. Centenarian Lawrence Ferlinghetti still keeps an office at City Lights Books on Columbus Ave. Caffe Trieste over the road is where he and all the Beat gang drank their coffee (you’ll see Jack Hirschman here). Jack Kerouac lit candles for his mum across the lane at St. Francis Church. Allen Ginsberg lived at 1010 Montgomery St. around the corner while writing Howl.
Toronto, The Waverley Hotel, 484 Spadina Ave. was home to nationalist poet Milton Acorn. The El Mocambo club where The Rolling Stones often opened N. American tours is at #464.
A few favourites: terrace of the Hotel Continental, Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, and terrace of the Hotel Casa Grande, Santiago, Cuba where Graham Greene wrote notes for The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana respectively. The Long Bar, Raffles Hotel, Singapore: Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and Paul Theroux all propped up the bar at this home of the Sling.
Dollarton, North Vancouver, the Tsleil-Waututh Reserve was lifelong home to orator/writer Chief Dan George. His son Chief Leonard also wrote, and poet Lee Maracle and eco-hero poet Will George hail from this same small powerground place. Drive slowly in admiration.
Articles: 5 Articles for this author
Return to Stillness & Giving Up Poetry
Article
In the late 1960s, Trevor Carolan travelled throughout Europe and Asia. Upon his return to Vancouver, he could only find a job filling graves. "The job couldn't have been quieter,"; he recalls, "and was custom-made for daylong meditations on the transience of this physical world.";
In 1978 Trevor Carolan attended a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg and was advised, "Forget about ambition. Just write for yourself and for your friends and anyone who'll listen. Forget about ambition. It's better to be a loser.";
Taking Ginsberg's advice to heart, Carolan eschewed ego and expanded his awareness of eastern philosophies by trying to take Tai Chi classes at a suburban high school. A cigarette-puffing Chinese instructor discouraged his entry. 'Too full, too full! No room!' he coughed.
Then Carolan found Ng Ching-Por.
"It was a rainy Tuesday,"; he says, "and I arrived at an overcrowded classroom with desks piled up against the walls. An elderly Chinese gentleman who spoke no English led the class."; After ten weeks with Ng Ching-Por, forty-nine students had dwindled to two. The school was slated for demolition; there would be no more classes.
The 75-year-old Ng offered to teach Carolan-at the master's own house. After a trip to New York, Carolan decided to take Ng up on his offer but had lost his teacher's address. "I was utterly unable to locate Master Ng... Searching the phone books drew a blank. The school where he'd taught was a vacant lot heaped with rubble.";
One afternoon Carolan took refuge from the rain in a Chinatown restaurant. "I barged in and took my regular booth. Fifteen minutes later, slurping hot broth, I noticed a pair of hands lower a newspaper two booths farther down. With a holler, I threw my arms wide for joy: Master Ng was beckoning me to join him.";
He began classes: five hours a week in Chinatown, half-days on Sundays, and an hour each morning at home. Ng Ching-Por was affectionately called Sifu, or master, by his students. Carolan recounts his 23 years studying with Sifu in Return to Stillness (Marlowe $14.95 US). In thirty chapters, described by Carolan as 'small epiphanies,' Master Ng is both companion and idol. "This man had become as dear to me as the grandfather I'd never had.";
Often the sole western student in Master Ng's classes, Carolan talks about the roots of Tai Chi, his motivation to study, and how he dealt with frustration and competitive urges. "When the chi is flowing, and the music of the spheres is in attunement, we experience the sacramental.";
Carolan had a similar, but briefer tutelage with the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) that resulted in Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg at Hollyhock (Banff Centre $16.95), an account of a week-long retreat at Hollyhock Farm on Cortes Island in 1985. The memoir begins with the grandfather of Beat poetry propositioning Carolan, a Taoist translator, in the swimming pool. It includes vignettes from Ginsberg's friendships with writers such as William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
Carolan grew up in New Westminster, having immigrated with his family from Yorkshire, England in 1957. He attended California State U and reported on the Haight-Ashbury music scene in San Francisco during the 1960s. He first traveled to Asia at age 23, and worked as the literary coordinator for the Calgary Olympic Games. He was elected as a municipal councilor in North Vancouver (1996-99) and is a research associate with the David See-Chai-Lam Centre at SFU. He writes for Shambhala Sun magazine. Return 1-56924-487-1; Giving 0-920159-83-4
[BCBW 2003]
On the Trail with Nanao Sakaki
Article
Trevor Carolan's first encounter with the Zen poetry of Nanao Sakaki (1923-2008) was back in 1985 when he heard Gary Snyder read an unforgettable poem entitled "Break the Mirror"; by his friend Sakaki.
Five years later, Carolan wrote to Nanao and asked if he could include that poem in an anthology. Nanao graciously replied and mentioned he hoped to one day see British Columbia's wilderness.
Then in 1995, when Trevor Carolan found himself standing in an Albuquerque airport line-up, he noticed a lively looking Japanese elder coming towards him. This stranger asked Carolan about his unusual, gnarly walking-stick. Something about the old man's long white hair and beard seemed familiar.
"Nanao?";asked Carolan.
Sure enough it was him. The two men compared mythologies en route to Phoenix. It turned out that Nanao was meeting Snyder to go desert-walking near Tucson; and Carolan had just been desert-walking near Santa Fe.
"A few months later,"; Trevor Carolan recalls in his new book, New World Dharma: Interviews and Encounters with Buddhist Teachers, Writers and Leaders (SUNY Press 2016 "Nanao landed in Vancouver with a backpack filled with outdoor gear: ice crampons, all-weather clothing, the lot. Ten memorable days followed, filled with snow-country hiking, herb-picking, rascally dharma talks, singing and chanting, joking with the kids, and living well. Nanao lived the dharma without talking about it much. Alas, even vagabond dharma bards need dental work, so Nanao and I collaborated on a piece of writing to pay some of Nanao's bills.";
Joseph Roberts at Common Ground magazine originally published the following article called How To Live On The Planet Earth.
[Including his encounter with Allen Ginsberg on Cortes Island, Carolan's new book also includes chapters on Gary Snyder, the Dalai Lama, Governor Jerry Brown and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others.]
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by Trevor Carolan
In l945, Nanao Sakaki, a young radar officer in Japan's Imperial Navy, tracked an American bombing raid headed successfully for Nagasaki. A short time later it was feared an earthquake or even a volcanic eruption had struck. Within days, Japan lay in unthinkable defeat. The nation's samurai code demanded mass military suicide but, at American command, the emperor intervened to reverse the order. Radarman Sakaki was spared his life. Demobbed from service, he viewed atomic bombsites where human beings had been vaporized into shadows on cement. In revulsion at anything remotely connected to militarism, Sakaki abandoned mainstream society; since then, with but a brief war-end stint in publishing that introduced him to many writers, he has led a vagabond life in the tradition of Japan's wandering Zen poet-storytellers. For five decades he has walked the length and breadth of the Japanese islands, writing poems and speaking out against nuclear technology and industrial degradation of the environment. In doing so, Sakaki emerged long ago as the underground leader of his nation's anti-establishment culture-no small thing in Japan's ultra-conservative society.
During the early l960s, Sakaki also befriended American writers Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg in Tokyo's Shinjuku district and the three became lifelong friends. Snyder himself joined Sakaki in building a loose, ecologically-attuned agricultural community on a volcanic island in the East China Sea, and his account of this "Banyan Ashram"; in Earth House Hold became a critical text in North America's cultural revolution of the late '60s.
A vivid, weather-bronzed figure of seventy-two, Sakaki is an outstanding naturalist and a seasoned raconteur. A careful listener, he responds in good, musical English. His renowned humor is offbeat and infectious, yet there is no escaping his essential commitment to retooling the engines of modern culture, east and west.
Clear as creekwater and rich in nature wisdom, Sakaki's poetry reads like medicine. His sense of presence is palpable and, almost unconsciously, people around him become more mindful of small communal responsibilities. It is difficult to describe precisely why this happens, but as Kolin Lymworth of Vancouver's Banyen Books put it after an informal meeting, "Maybe Nanao just reminds us of that wonderful, wise older person we all seem to want, or need, to know.";
A recent hike in southwestern British Columbia's Cascade Range offered Nanao an opportunity both to study the local vegetation and to elaborate further on what his work has to say to contemporary readers. En route, Sakaki relates that his passion for the wild began after reading Sir Laurens Van der Post's classic Sands of the Kalahari. "I was so excited after reading it in the British Council Library that I couldn't sleep for almost three days,"; he says. "It was so new, so different. Here's this hostile desert environment of lions and poisonous snakes. But Van der Post wants to understand the bushmen so much he finally comes to comprehend their philosophy, which is, "There is a dream that is dreaming us."; That's very interesting to me! It's also a little similar to Chuang Tzu's butterfly dream in Taoism. So, as a young man, I had to think, what's real?-because the evolution of this idea is that we must go with the dream; there is no other choice.
"In my work later on,"; he continues, "I came in contact with Aboriginal people from Australia and Tasmania, and with Navajo people from the American Southwest who share almost this same idea. They live in timeless landscapes. That's good for me, you see, because I'm crazy for wild landscape; always I wish to see the desert or volcanoes, or Alaska-big space, pure like [the] empty mind of Buddha. But Japanese business[es], for example, they are cutting down Tasmania's forests for toilet paper. Terrible!";
Sakaki is uncompromising in his defense of nature and has worked for decades at heightening awareness in Japan of his nation's environmental policies. Few things have been as effective as his campaigns in the US when literary friends such as Snyder and, formerly, Ginsberg have rallied other prominent writers and artists to spotlight events needling Japan's hyper-sensitive government. The external media pressure gets results.
"Our work for the twenty-first century will be reversing dams and big energy projects, replanting forests and cleaning water,"; Sakaki says. "Already in Japan we are seeing legal cases where representatives of endangered species are suing the government. Japan, remember, still has rich wild spaces and two thousand black and grizzly bears, where in an island ecology like Britain's they have disappeared.";
The critical shortsightedness typical of commercial planning leaves Sakaki at a loss. Remote Banyan Ashram for example, which drew visitors from around the world, is no more. Its low-tech success tempted Yamaha Corporation to offer local islanders the promise of jobs, enabling Yamaha to buy up the commune site for a glitzy tourist resort. Beauty is relative, however; what worked for remote islanders and back-to-the-land longhairs didn't translate quite as well when visiting Tokyo honeymooners found themselves subject to periodic showers of volcanic ash. Now, both projects lie defunct.
Here, the inevitable question seems to be, "What does this say, then, of our Western myth about Oriental societies taking a longer, shrewder, generational view of things?";
"About Asia, I'm not so sure,"; replies Sakaki. "The one example I have seen of this is among the Hopi people. They believe you shouldn't make an important decision unless you think through its effects for seven generations. This means we have to imagine how we, and the consequence[s] of our actions, fit in the scale of things. If you think of trees, they usually live longer than humans: harvesting a tree can be like meeting your own great-grandfather. So rightly, we should think, what's the appropriate thing to do here?";
Discussion of right practice and livelihood leads inevitably to the consideration of what role Buddhism, or Japan's Zen path, may have for modern Western culture. Sakaki's response is enlightening.
"Most Japanese Zen is uninteresting to me,"; he says. "It's too linked to samurai tradition-to militarism. This is where Alan Watts and I disagreed: he didn't fully understand how the samurai class with whom he associated Zen were in fact deeply Confucian; they were concerned with power. The Zen I'm interested in is China's Tang dynasty kind with its great teachers like Lin Chi. This was non-intellectual. It came from farmers-so simple. Someone became enlightened, others talked to him, learned and were told, 'Now you go there and teach; you go here, etc.' When Japan tried to study this, it was hopeless. The emperor sent scholars, but with their high-flown language and ideas they couldn't understand.
"Today,"; he adds, "many young people have lost their way. They're looking for salvation, checking many gates. They read Zen anecdotes, see Zen pictures-it seems perfect! Then they think about achieving enlightenment, but it's not so easy . . . About enlightenment I always say, just forget about it. Everybody's already enlightened: people work at their jobs, the traffic moves along, so things are okay. A mother looks after her children, she makes their lunch, does her job well. That's enlightenment: just doing a good job.";
For Sakaki, this version of right-mindedness extends without compromise to the last inning. "Once, hitchhiking in Southern Japan,"; he says, "I met my cousin who told me my father was very sick. Okay, we went to the hospital where I saw my father. He was surprised to see me.
"I said, 'So you are going to become Buddha!' You see, in [the] Amida sect of my family we say that when you die, you're becoming Buddha. My father, he kind of half-smiled. His face brightened. He said, 'Yes, I'm going to become Buddha, looks like!'
"So when my friends tell me, 'My father is sick, my mother is dying,' I say, congratulations! They are becoming Buddha!
"That's it,"; he concludes. "When it's time to sleep, just sleep; when you're sick, just be sick; when you're going to die, just die! Enlightenment!";
About the specific values that Buddhism may offer the contemporary West, Sakaki answers in terms of compassion.
"This is a big subject,"; he responds. "Tibetan, Zen, Pure Land-there are many good gates in Buddhism to the empty space within. You see, in original Buddhism there is no competition, but Western society is strongly rooted in just this thing; it moves aggressively onward. Real compassion goes beyond human society-to animal life, trees, water, rock. It's easy to relate to the environmental movement. Buddhism says we are all the same and the West, I think, is missing this. There is an Indian Sutra teaching-Paticca Samupadda-that discusses the perfect wholeness of all things and how they are joined. The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Diamond Sutra, they all talk about this.";
And the way to compassion?
"Slow down,"; Sakaki smiles. "Slow down the metabolism, the whole mental image. Compassion is like a shadow-like the Hopi thinking seven generations on.
"After all, how we work out our difficulties is a social question, not spiritual or mental,"; he explains. "As a society, if we have no vision, all we're left with is bureaucratic process. That's too sad! Artists, poets have a responsibility for landscape, for wild nature. As a poet I feel my poems are also Sutra, in the way that a painter's good work is also drawing Sutra. And as listeners, if we meet a good poem, or discover a new landscape, we must have a good answer. In the end it becomes spontaneous, like question and answer. It's like hearing good music, really; it calls to me, I start humming, moving-I find I'm dancing! That's Zen: not thinking, not stopping halfway, not copying landscape but finally becoming the landscape.";
Deep Cove, BC
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[Nanao Sakaki's Collected Poems were published in 2014 (Blackberry).]
PULL QUOTE:
"Oriental people say two ways to escape and be happy. Downtown-very busy, crowded place. Just be lost among many people, stay in a slum. Another is in high places. Live in a mountain cave. I've tried both...Try walking mountainsides, the north. I love walking these places. That's me personally. Probably there is no solution. It's a good idea: no solution! Much wider perspective. If you have a solution, you're trapped in solution network."; -- Nanao Sakaki
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Banff Centre appointment
Press Release (2006)
B.C. writer Trevor Carolan appointed Banff Centre director of Literary
Arts
The Banff Centre has appointed B.C.-based writer and educator Trevor
Carolan to the new position of director, Literary Arts, responsible for
overseeing all literary programs and the Banff Centre Press.
The Literary Arts department has a distinguished history at The Banff
Centre, dating from the days when W.O. Mitchell led it. In recent years,
innovative programs such as Wired Writing, the Banff International
Translation Centre, Literary Journalism, and Science Communications have
been developed, leading to the current rich array of course offerings.
In announcing Carolan's appointment, Vincent Varga, executive artistic
director of Fine Arts, noted, "Trevor Carolan brings such a broad range
of experience - from journalism to poetry to teaching and publishing -
which will be a real asset. He also has an ability to encourage a
deepening of national and international collaborative opportunities for
the Centre's arts-based learning culture."
Carolan began his career in the arts as a printmaker, going on to
complete a Master's in English Literature from Humboldt State University
in California in 1978. He recently completed interdisciplinary PhD
studies in International Relations at Bond University in Queensland,
Australia.
The Literary Storefront: The Glory Years (Mother Tongue $29.95)
Article (2015)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Edward Albee. Tennessee Williams. Earle Birney. George Faludy. Brian Moore. Margaret Atwood. Audrey Thomas. All appeared at Mona Fertig's Literary Storefront in Vancouver from 1978 to 1984. Trevor Carolan has produced a richly illustrated history, The Literary Storefront: The Glory Years (Mother Tongue $29.95), to enshrine the community centre for posterity. It's an intriguing tribute, only missing the true story about the time Al Purdy urinated in the sink. One of Fertig's two locations in Gastown will be added to the forthcoming Literary Map of B.C.
978-1896949529
BCBW (Autumn)
Curriculum vitae 2016
Trevor Carolan began writing at 17 for The Columbian, filing dispatches from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury countercultural scene. He travelled Britain, Europe and India before mastering in English at Humboldt State in Arcata, California in 1978. A literary journalist, poet, critic and anthologist, his teaching and writing career has been punctuated with service as the first Executive Director of the Federation of B.C. Writers, as Literary Coordinator for the XV Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, and as Coordinator of Literary Arts at the Banff Arts Centre.
A veteran community activist, he was elected Municipal Councillor in North Vancouver for three years following campaigns on behalf of Pacific Coast watershed, First Nations land-claim and international human rights issues. He continues to write there as a political columnist. Carolan earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at Bond University, Queensland, and has taught English and Creative Writing at University of the Fraser Valley since 2001.
The International Editor of the Pacific Rim Review of Books, Dr. Carolan's publications have appeared in five languages and include many books of poetry, fiction, memoir, translations, anthologies, writing on East-West spiritual life, and a broad range of nonfiction articles and interviews. In 2003 he received the Spirituality & Health Journal Best Books of the Year citation for his Return to Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master (NY: Marlowe), an account of his 20 years as a student with Master Ng Ching-Por in Vancouver.
His current works are The Lotus Singers: Short Stories from Contemporary South Asia, and a companion volume Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific (Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 2011 & 2009). Other books include The Pillow Book of Dr. Jazz; Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg At Hollyhock; and Making Waves: Reading B.C. and Pacific Northwest Literature.
Selected Publications
The Lotus Singers: Contemporary Stories from South Asia, Ed. Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 2011 - Making Waves: Reading B.C. and Pacific Northwest Literature, Ed. Vancouver:
UFV-Anvil Press, 2010
Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific, Ed. Boston: Cheng &
Tsui, 2009
The Pillow Book of Dr Jazz, Ekstasis, 2006
Down in the Valley: Contemporary Writing of the Fraser Valley, Ekstasis, 2004
Return To Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master, Marlowe, NY: 2003
Celtic Highway: Poems & Texts, Ekstasis Press, 2002
Giving Up Poetry: With Allen Ginsberg At Hollyhock, Banff Centre Press, 2001
The Supreme Way: Inner Teachings of the Southern Mountain Tao, co-trans.
with Du Liang.Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1997.
Anthologies (in):
A Verse map of Vancouver, ed. George McWhirther. Vancouver; Anvil Press
Rocksalt: 108 P.C. Poets, eds. M. Fertig & H. Rhensich. Ganges: Mother Tongue, 2008
Imagining British Columbia: Creative Nonfiction from the Federation of B.C.
Writers, Daniel Francis, ed. Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2008
Not Turning Away: The Practice of Engaged Buddhism, Boston: Shambhala, 2004
A Lifetime of Peace: Essential Writings On Thich Nhat Hanh, New York: Marlowe, 2003
Nanao or Never: Festschrift for Nanao Sakaki, Nobleboro, ME: Blackberry Books, 2000
Selected Presentations
Presenter, "Group of Seven Master Frederick Varley: the B.C. Wilderness Years";. B.C. Elders Council for Parks. Heritage Centre, Mt. Seymour Provincial Park, 2011.
Presenter, "On Creative Non-Fiction";. At Applying Technology to Your Writing: the 89th Annual Conference of the Canadian Authors Association. Victoria, B.C. 2010.
Presenter, "Ecosystems, Mandalas and Watersheds: The Dharma Citizenship of Gary Snyder";. At Tools of the Sacred, Techniques of the Secular: Awakening, Epiphany and Doubt in Contemporary English Language Poetry. Université Libre de Bruxelles. 2010
Moderator, "Politics and the Page."; Banff-Calgary Writers Festival. With Anita Rau Badami, Rewi Hage, Yusef Saadi. The Banff Centre, Alberta. 2006.
Doctoral Research Presentation: "Reconceptualizing Ideas of Citizenship, Community and Commonwealth: Some East-West Intercultural Models for the Global Age."; Dept. of International Relations, Bond University, Queensland, Australia. 2005.
Presenter: "Translators of Literature: The Natural Advantage."; Creative Writing Master's Series. With Robert Bringhurst and Genni Gunn. University of British Columbia, Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry and journal Educational Insights. 2004.
Other
The Music of the Stones, libretto, with composer M. Armanini & Vancouver Classical Chinese Ensemble. Vancouver Arts Council commission, Jan. 1992. CD production, 2000.
Essays, Reviews, and Commentary
Shambhala Sun, The Bloomsbury Review, Choice, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald, Far Eastern Economic Review, Kyoto Journal, Modern Chinese Literature, Manoa, New Asia Review, Everwild, Nguoi Viet, Chinese Pen, Contemporary South Asia, Printed Matter Tokyo, Common Ground, TV Week, Western Living, Travelscene, The Columbian, Arts West, Performing Arts Canada, Influential Business, Westworld, New Ideas In Psychology, Georgia Straight, Arts Alive, Event, Outlook, North Shore News, Canadian Composer, Transit, Turning Wheel, Beat Scene, Shared Vision, etc
What the Critics Say
The Lotus Singers
"Let me do some numbers for you. The Lotus Singers gives us nearly 20 contemporary pieces of short fiction from a number South Asian nations mainly India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh; stories either written in English or translated by various hands from the Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Bangla and Marathi...Their subjects are pressing: hunger, rape, feudal oppression, struggle among castes and social classes, the struggle of women to achieve a modicum of equality, civil war; overbearing matters, yes. But there's some incidental joy here, too, And there's the bliss that comes with understanding...No tour like a serious anthology such as this one to show you how a distant part of the world seems so foreign and yet so close to home."
~ Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, Washington, USA
Making Waves: Reading Literture from British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest
" As the planet goes through unprecedented climate chaos brought on by rampant materialism, the Newtonian-Cartesian ethos of reductionism, and the abandonment of the sacred, it will be the ethos represented well in many essays of Making Waves that survives. In the editor's parlance, it is a "Dharma Citizenship"; that must take root...Making Waves is a primer into the quickly maturing regional literature that can lead a new global culture deeply into this Third Millennium.";
~ Paul Nelson, Pacific Rim Review of Books
Giving Up Poetry: with Allen Ginsberg at Hollyhock
"Carolan's compressed account brings the grandfather of Beat poetry and poetics vividly back to life in a portrait that is at once intimate and instructive. Writing not as a recording secretary but as one bent on capturing the essence of Ginsberg's wide-ranging, deeply informed and illuminating discourse, he humanizes him as Plato did Socrates in The Symposium.";
~ John Moore, The Vancouver Sun
The Colors of Heaven/Rim of Fire
"Suggests the East will remain inscrutable only if we choose not to know it."
~ Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The stories have been scrupulously chosen...While none are directly about politics, all are about political facts which shape local lives."
~ Donald Richie, The Japan Times
"An enormously impressive and important book...Has its sights set on tyranny of any hue."
~ South China Morning Post
"Vintage should expand this interesting anthology into an annual series."
~ Charles Solomon, Los Angeles Times
"An introduction to Asian-Pacific literature at its very best...fascinating, breathtaking reading."
~ Ryszard Kapuscinski
"An extraordinary collection of marvels. Enough to satisfy the most inquisitive and best-travelled reader."
~ Alberto Manguel
The Book of the Heart
"Destined to be a modern classic of Taoism. This lucid and subtle translation can be read again and again: for guidance, for simple, direct contemplation.";
~ Diane di Prima
Closing the Circle
"Clean, clear poems out of the New World -- Asia and western North America -- they embrace large space and fine detail."
~ Gary Snyder
"The Calgary Suite" (Celtic Highway)
"A Canadian breakthrough rare in the beauty of its presentation of contemporary images and scenes of life on the west coast."
~ Patricia Osoki, Victoria Times Columnist
