Colin Browne on Close Listening

Photo: Charles Bernstein / PennSound

On Close Listening, Colin Browne and I talked about the founding of the Kootenay School of Writing, the limits of narrative in poetry and film and the possibilities of collage, the trickster figure in the work of Charles Edenshaw, and the overlays of personal history and cultural history in Browne’s new book about Edenshaw, a nineteenth-century indegenous artist from British Columbia.

(30:00): MP3

Colin Browne readings on PennSound:

  • Reading on February 5, 1988 Part 1 (46:46): MP3
  • Reading on February 5, 1988 Part 2 (1:39): MP3
  • Panel on Narrative, November 22, 1990 (22:59): MP3
  • Reading on January 10, 1998 Part 1 (21:39): MP3
  • Reading on January 10, 1998 Part 2 (23:11): MP3
  • Reading on August 16, 2003 (41:27): MP3
  • Reading on February 28, 2008 Part 1 (25:35): MP3
  • Reading on February 28, 2008 Part 2 (34:57): MP3

Colin Browne is the author of Abraham (Brick Books, 1987); Ground Water (Talonbooks, 2002), and The Shovel (Talonbooks, 2007). He was an editor of Writing magazine and co-founder of the Kootenay School of Writing. Browne’s films include Linton Garner: I Never Said Goodbye (2003), Father and Son (1992), and White Lake (1989). Until his recent retirement, Browne taught film production and history at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, near Vancouver. Browne’s new book from Talon, Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw, focusses on three argillite platters created in the late nineteenth century by Edenshaw, a Haida (North American indigenous) artist whose original name is Da.a Xiigang. Browne is currently working on texts for new operas.