CARELLIN BROOKS

For someone barely in her 50s, Carellin Brooks has racked up a fair number of life achievements.

Born in Vancouver, she survived a tumultuous and abusive childhood, has lived in Salt Lake City, Ottawa, Montreal, New York, San Diego (where she worked on an all-lesbian construction crew), and began her writing career as a teenager at the Ottawa Sun.

Following high school, Carellin studied English and anthropology at Montreal's McGill University, where she won the national Book City/Books in Canada Student Writing Award for poetry in 1993, and hosted a weekly radio show, Dykes on Mikes, on the campus radio station.

Onward and upward, she won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1992 and was reported at the time to be the first person ever to have done so while having been out as lesbian on her application. The scholarship took her to England where she earned a PhD at Oxford University.

After completing her studies at Oxford, Carellin returned to Vancouver where she slowed down not a bit. Her life back home has included working as a columnist for for Xtra West, book reviewer for the Vancouver Sun, and managing editor of the Vancouver-based publishing company New Star Books. And somehow she found time to serve as a sessional lecturer with Arts Studies and Writing and with the Centre for Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice, and take a seat as vice-chair of the Vancouver Library Board.

Oh, and in her spare time she’s done a little writing. Okay, maybe a lot.

Carellin published the non-fiction books Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Femininity, and the Text (2005), Wreck Beach (2007)[ and Fresh Hell: Motherhood in Pieces (2013), and edited the anthologies Bad Jobs: My Last Shift at Albert Wong's Pagoda and Other Ugly Tales of the Workplace (1998) on her own and co-edited Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions (2000) with Brett Josef Grubisic.

Every Inch a Woman was a shortlisted Lambda Literary Award nominee in the LGBT studies category in 2007 and one hundred days of rain (no caps) was the winner of the 2016 ReLit Award for Fiction and the Publishing Triangle’s 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.

“My interest in writing began at age six,” she has said. “I was home schooled until grade three. They didn’t call it home schooling then. They just called it ‘keeping you home’. My mother and I did a lot of projects together. I was typing on the typewriter one day. We had an electric typewriter, which was pretty newfangled then. I realized that it was my thing. It was what I was already doing and what I was going to keep doing.

Carellin Brooks’ new book of poetry, “Learned”.

“And I’m a reader and I’ve always been a reader. A few years ago, I decided that being a reader has saved me from being a drug addict because it’s such a consuming addiction in itself. You don’t have time to develop any other sort of addictions when you’re a reader.”

Carellin Brooks’ latest volume of poetry Learned was launched last month at a celebration and reading at The Junction in Davie Village. Set in the 1990s, alternating between the storied quads of Oxford University and the dank recesses of London pubs given over to public displays of queer BDSM, Learned chronicles Carellin’s extreme explorations of mind and body.

As the media announcement said: “In these poems, the speaker trembles on the verge of discovery, pushing her physical limits through practices of pain, permission, and pleasure. But her inability to negotiate the unspoken elite codes of Oxford begs the question: how to unlearn a legacy of family dissolution and abuse?”

We eagerly await the next installment of the adventures of Carellin Brooks, and expect the unexpected.