Book Launch: The Language of Family

Please join us and pull up a guest chair at the family table as contributors to the Royal BC Museum’s new book The Language of Family: Stories of Bonds and Belonging read excerpts from their stories, essays and poems and talk about family. 

What is family? Is it defined by blood and birth? Or can we invite whomever we want into that intimate embrace?

Twenty contributors from across British Columbia—including museum curators, cultural luminaries, writers and thinkers young and old from First Nations, LGBTQ, Japanese-Canadian and Punjabi communities, amongst others—share their vastly differing perspectives on what family means. 

This superb collection of personal narratives, poems and essays will provoke, tease, enlighten and infuriate. Isn’t that what family does best? 

Edited by Michelle van der Merwe

Stories, poems and essays by 
Jack Lohman, Sadhu Binning, Martha Black, Don Bourdon, Kathryn Bridge, Tzu-I Chung, Shushma Datt, Mo Dhaliwal, Zoé Duhaime, barbara findlay, Lynn Greenhough, Judith Guichon, Lorne Hammond, Joy Kogawa, Patrick Lane, Luke Marston, Bev Sellars, Monique Gray Smith, Ann-Bernice Thomas and Larry Wong

Book signing and discussion afterwards.