LOCAL WRITER / MUSICIAN / HYPESTER Michael Turner has taken enough time away from organizing his popular reading series at Vancouver's Railway Cub to produce his second book, Hard Core Logo (Pulp $12.95). Hard Core Logo's semi-autobiographical conversations, letters, interviews, and journal entries provide glimpses of a punk rock band reunited for one final show and their subsequent impromptu tour of Western Canada. The book, says Turner, "attempts to demystify the romance of being in a band". It loosely coincides with Turner's professional musical life from the early 1980s to the present with the folk-rock group Hard Rock Miners, which released its first major album two years ago on the Sony label. His first book, Company Town, about his experiences working in a fish cannery on the Skeena River, was short listed for a B.C. Book Prize for poetry. Turner's monthly series of readings, entitled 'Reading Railroad' (complete with the familiar locomotive logo from Monopoly) has redefined poetry readings. The success is due largely to Turner's relentless enthusiasm, the same perpetual energy which led to him being named one of 'Vancouver's 100 most creative people' by Step magazine.
Barely into his 30s, Turner feels lucky to be alive. Five years ago he was found to have cancer. He had two operations and four treatments of chemotherapy. Turner was nursed back to health by Ingrid Percy, his mate of six years and his main partner in Hard Rock Miners. At the end of it all I realized there was really no end," he says. "1 would forever be a cancer patient and therefore would have to come to terms with a lot of things I normally took for granted." 0-88978-265-2

[BCBW, Summer, 1993]