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Booked! with Timothy Taylor

The Fernie Heritage Library hosted the third event in the wildly successful Booked! Fernie Writers’ Series on Friday.
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The Fernie Heritage Library hosted the third event in the Booked! Fernie Writers’ Series on Friday. From left: Randal Macnair

By Shelby Cain

The Fernie Heritage Library hosted the third event in the wildly successful Booked! Fernie Writers’ Series on Friday when literary genius Timothy Taylor came to town.  Taylor is promoting his new novel, The Blue Light Project.  Hailing from Vancouver, this banker turned writer has received unprecedented acclaim for his work, most notably a Giller Prize nomination for his first novel, Stanley Park.  Taylor is a master of research, spending years delving so deep into the characters he is creating that you swear he must have formerly been a chef, or an architect, or in The Blue Light Project, a street artist.  Lurking in the shadows of Vancouver’s dark underbelly, Taylor studied street art and the artists who create it for years, eventually befriending several of them. It is a world few people have glimpsed, and one that is incredibly fascinating.

Taylor showed photos of paintings and murals throughout downtown Vancouver that were breathtaking.  Some of them hid in decrepit old buildings and on dumpsters.  It begged the question…why? Why create a masterpiece if almost no one will see it or know who did it?  It’s a question Taylor explores in The Blue Light Project.

There was a hush over the crowded library as we heard how once Taylor’s novel had been leaked to the street artists in Vancouver, his own character came to life.  It is the subject of a documentary entitled Hunting for Rabbit.

Once again, a big thank you to the unrelenting efforts of the Booked! masterminds - Angie Abdou, Emma Dressler, and Randal Macnair, as well as ongoing sponsorship from Teck, among others. The evening was capped off by delicious food by new Fernie caterer Krissi Hyland and her company Nourish Through Nature, and great music by Joshua Burning.  Don’t miss the final Booked! event on May 2 with mystery writer Gail Bowen.