To celebrate the launch of issue #3 of LAKE: A Journal of Arts and Environment, the UBC Okanagan Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies will host a gala reading on Thursday, 7:30 p.m., at the Kelowna Art Gallery.  

Lorna Crozier, one of Canada’s best-known and beloved poets, will be the featured reader, along with Don Gayton and Lindsay Diehl.

Crozier will be reading from and selling her newest book, a poetic memoir, Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir.

Crozier has received numerous awards for her 15 books of poetry, which include The Blue Hour of the Day, Whetstone, and Apocrypha of Light.

She lives in Saanich on Vancouver Island and teaches at the University of Victoria. (For more on Crozier, see story on B10.)

Don Gayton is the winner of Lake’s first creative non-fiction contest, with an essay about the Ponderosa pine.  

He is the author of several works of creative non-fiction, including Interwoven Wild, Landscapes of the Interior, and the Wheatgrass Mechanism.

He lives in Summerland, where he works as a grassland ecologist.   

Lindsay Diehl’s short stories and poems have been published in Portfolio Milieu 2004 and in Fireweed, Rant, The Capilano Review, and Geist.

She is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts degree at UBC Okanagan. She lives in Kelowna.

This latest issue of LAKE: A Journal of Arts and Environment features work by all three of these writers, as well as artwork by Vernon artists Joan Heriot and Toronto artist Bill Burns. The magazine will be for sale, along with authors’ books and a limited-edition broadside of a new Lorna Crozier poem.

Proceeds of ticket and broadside sales will go toward fundraising for ths publishing project.

Tickets are $20 each, $8 for students, and are available at the door or from the UBCO’s department of creative studies.

For more information, contact Nancy Holmes at 250-764-9666 or nancy.holmes@ubc.ca.