 Hello, everyone. My name is Shannon O'Zerny. I am the head of youth services at the West Vancouver Memorial Library, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the 17th annual Booktopia Literary Arts Festival for young people. I have a seed in my teeth, just a moment. Perfect. Normally, we have West Vancouver school students gathered together in the K-Meek Center, but we are so thrilled to be coming to you virtually and welcoming people of all ages from all different places to Booktopia this year. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that the library has its home on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, and in particular recognize the Squamish, Slewa-tooth, and Musqueam nations. I am grateful that I get to make my home here and that I can keep learning how to do better and be better when it comes to sharing this beautiful place. Booktopia is a very special partnership between the West Vancouver Memorial Library, our library foundation, and West Vancouver schools. In particular, I want to give a big thanks to Director of Instruction Ian Kennedy and all of your hardworking teacher librarians for helping us make virtual Booktopia happen. Our format for today, How Things Are Going to Work, I am very shortly going to be introducing author Kay Wiseman to you and turning the screen over to her. She'll be telling you all about her research for her fantastic new book, If You Want to Visit a Sea Garden. After you hear from Kay, I'll be back on to introduce artist Roy Henry Vickers who will talk more about the book's illustrations and his art. And then, for the last 10 or 15 minutes, we'll all be on screen together and I'll be passing along some of your questions. So please feel free if you are watching our live feed to enter your questions into the chat at any time. You don't have to wait until the end. We have the fabulous Lisa moderating our chat and noting questions. If you don't have a YouTube account and you're not able to enter a question into the chat, you can email it to us. Lisa will be putting our email address in the chat and you can reach us that way too. If you'd like us to read your name or what school you're from, please let us know and we'll read that out live on air. If we don't get that permission from you, we will keep your question anonymous. So I am now so thrilled to introduce you to Kay Wiseman. Kay is a librarian who has worked in both schools and public libraries. Some of you may recognize her from her past work here at the Westman Library. She has been incredibly active in her professional service, both in her library association work and as a book reviewer and column writer. Her work has been in school library monthly book links and novelist Kay is curious. She is a voracious reader, a meticulous researcher and she brings so much care and mindfulness to everything she does. If you want to visit a Seagarden is her picture book debut and I hope there are so many more to come. So Kay, thank you so much for joining us today and I am going to pass the screen over to you. Okay, I'm going to see if I can share my screen with everybody. There we go. Okay. All right, thank you very much Shannon. I'm so pleased to be here today to talk about Seagardens. To start with, I'd like to let you in on a little secret. I did not grow up in British Columbia. I come from the prayers, where the only wave action happening is in the wheat fields on a windy day. And the tallest mountain, and I put that in quotation marks is something called Charles mound. It stands 1200 feet above sea level, which is only 71 meters. So, as you can imagine, moving to British Columbia was a dream come true for me. Since I've moved to British Columbia, I have been very lucky to make some good friends in BC, among them this woman, Nicole Smith. Nicole is an independent coastal archeologist, which means that she studies Seagardens. And I'll also let you know that Seagardens are also known as clam gardens. That's that's another name for them. Seagardens is actually a better name, because there are so many different kinds of seafood that that grow there. Hey, I'm just going to interrupt you quickly. You'll our friends at home will hear my voice. We can't see your slides right now. So we can just take a little pause here while we get them up and running. It's okay. Um, share. Thank you. And in clam gardens. Island. Contagious, but I had a hard time imagining what a clam garden actually looked like. to visit a couple of actual sea gardens so that I could experience them firsthand. Now, this can be a little bit tricky because sea gardens are only visible at the lowest low tide. Now, low tides happen a couple of times a day, but the lowest low tide only happens a couple of times a month. So it turns out there are only about 80 daylight hours where you can actually see these gardens. So I was lucky enough to be able to visit a plant garden in the Gulf Islands. This garden is being restored and in other words brought back to life. The day I was there was a science and a culture camp day. So there were lots of people. There were students from nearby school, families, elders from the Hulka Minum and Wasanage communities. There were scientists and naturalists from Parks Canada. All of them were involved in helping to restore the beach, which involves removing all that green stuff that you can see at the edge and rolling rocks out to the edge where the plant garden is, the plant wall. Here you can see Skye Augustine. She's also part of the plant garden network and she is the plant garden project coordinator for Parks Canada. She's here with some students that were at one of the science and culture camps in the Gulf Islands. I also had a chance to go to Quadra Island and see some of the plant gardens there. Now this experience was a little bit different from the Gulf Islands one because these beaches are not currently in use. That the crew was composed of scientists and first nations of servers but there were no children, there were no elders and there were no fresh clams at the end of the day. As a side note, I should point out that all clan garden research involves having at least one knowledge holder from a local first nation present at all times. They're there to help interpret what is found for the people who are not part of that nation. Now there are lots of projects that are going on in the clan gardens and again, I was only there for one day so I'm sure that I didn't even see half of what was going on but I did see some ecologists who were working on measuring how fast baby clams grow in sea gardens. Now what you're seeing here is kind of a mesh basket. They put the baby clams in there and then they come back a few weeks later and measure them and see how much they grow. They have to be in these baskets because they wanna make sure they're measuring the clams they put into the reef and not some other clan. You'll be glad to know that they have discovered that the clams that are grown in these walled beaches grow faster and produce about four times as much food as non walled beaches. I also saw researchers trying to learn more about the two walls that are at this particular beach. I found out that the sea level changed over time and the second wall which is the one out near the water's edge there was built later to accommodate for that change. These two researchers are working at the first wall, in other words, the sea was higher a long time ago and they were trying to figure out how old it was. This woman, she's facing the back, she's the same woman that you saw in the previous picture is Christy Newdorf. She is a geologist which means she studies rocks and her specialty is something called optical stimulated luminescence. Now I know those are all really big words but the main idea is she tries to figure out how old something is by figuring out the last time it was exposed to sunlight. In other words, a rock that has been inside this wall since the clam garden was built. Christy spent an entire morning digging a trench, you can see it right here in this wall, it's really hard work. And then afterwards she covered it over with this foil blanket. These are actually four of those foil blankets that they tell you to take with you if you're gonna go driving in the mountains in case you get stuck and you need to stay warm. She taped them all together. You can see that she put sand around the edges so that no light would get in. And then after it was all completely dark, she went inside there and she dug further into the wall to find a rock that hadn't seen sunlight. She wrapped it up in tin foil and then she reemerged just before the tide and completely filled up the entire trench. It was amazing. Here you can see some of the rocks that she covered. She had to cover them in foil so that they wouldn't be exposed to light when she took off the covering. The bottom line is, it turns out this wall is over 2,000 years old. And there are some sea gardens in this area that are over 3,500 years old. Now, I should explain a little bit. Sometimes they use this optical stimulated luminescence dating, but they also use another kind of dating which is called carbon-14 dating. You may have heard of that. In order to use carbon-14 dating, you have to find something in the wall that was once alive. And in this case, it's the barnacle shells that are on this rock, little white circles and things that are on the rock. The carbon-14 dating showed that this wall was also 2,000 years old. So the scientists were very glad that both of the dates agreed about this wall. I've talked a lot about science because science is something that I understand and feel comfortable with. But when it comes to writing about clan gardens, science isn't enough. Science doesn't convey the magic of these places. It doesn't take into account that there are many ways of knowing and that Western science isn't everything. This is first and foremost a First Nations story, a story about traditional ecological knowledge, the people that developed and engineered these walls, the people who modified their beaches to promote the growth of all kinds of seafood that provided them with a dependable and sustainable source of protein that enabled them to feed large communities. It's a story about working together and transmitting that knowledge to the next generation. Truly, these are magical places. Now, I am not First Nations, so I can't tell this story from an indigenous perspective. You'll notice that I don't say in the book if this child is a boy or a girl. I don't say if they are a First Nations child or not a First Nations child. I did that on purpose so that hopefully any reader can put themselves into this story. After I finished writing this book, I was lucky enough to have one of the Clam Gardens scientists show it to clan chief Adam Dick, who was also known as Quaxi Stala in order to get his feedback. Quaxi Stala was one of the last people to be trained in the ways of Clam Gardens by his elders. In the early 2000s, people started noticing these gardens when they were flying over the coast during low tides. But no one could explain what these features were or who built them. Much of what we know today about Clam Gardens is because Quaxi Stala shared his knowledge with us. And so when he said she got it right, I felt very humbled and grateful. After that, it was time for illustrations to bring this story to life. I will always be grateful to Groundwood Books for handing that formidable task over to Roy Henry Vickers, the renowned Canadian printmaker, sculptor and illustrator. And now I'd like to cast things back to Shannon so that she can let Roy tell you about the story. Thank you so much, Kay. And thank you also to our audience. We're already having questions roll in. So please keep sending those and we will get to as many as possible. Kay will be back on screen with us for the Q&A. But as Kay mentioned, I am now so excited to introduce you all to Roy Henry Vickers, illustrator of If You Want to Visit a Sea Garden. I came to Roy's work through his picture books and my job as a children's librarian. But he is also a renowned artist, speaker, designer, storyteller and leader in the indigenous community. He very graciously tried to coach me through the pronunciation of his chieftainship and any errors I make are all mine. But Roy carries the chieftainship to La Quigula from the House of Waukes in Wicano. His art is instantly recognizable. People of all ages and from all backgrounds know his work. It can be found in collections all over the world. And people often make the mistake of thinking that illustrated books are just for kids. But more than anybody else, Roy's books are truly accessible by everyone, they're for everyone. And we are so honored to have him as a part of Booktopia this year. Roy, thank you so much for being here with us. And I am going to turn the screen over to you. All right. Thank you very much. It was wonderful listening to both of you and Kay to hear some of the background of the book and things that I've grown up with all my life. I guess I should start by saying that I am on the lands of the Gixxen people of the Skeena River. I live near a place called Hazelton where I grew up from the age of nine, about three hours from the coast. And my early childhood here was traveling back and forth to the coast to go fishing with my grandpa in the summertime. So the coast village of Catala is my home village. And it's been proven by archeologists to be lived in for over 5,000 years continuously. So one of the oldest sites on the coast. And I feel it every time I'm there and every time I leave, there's a part of me that stays behind, but I'm not that far up from the coast and living on the Skeena River, which runs almost to my village of Catala. So as a child growing up before the age of nine, in this time of the year, one of my responsibilities was to go with the people out to the clam beds and stand by the boat and keep an eye on the boat. So when the tide starts coming back in, I have to keep pulling the boat in a little further and a little further. So I was always intimate with the beaches and clams and seaweed and whales swimming by our village. They would come every year at the same time. Eagles who came around, we even had a pet eagle for a while. Ravens who are incredible teachers, if you watch them, they can show you fortifying clams, even cockles. So my early childhood, and I guess the basis for my becoming an artist was being so close to the wind and the tides, knowing that there are two tides a month, knowing that we don't harvest clams until there's a month with a R in it. So September, and usually we don't touch them in September because it's still warm on the coast. And there's something called red tide that moves and can contaminate some of the seafood. So we always left the clams and cockles until October and November and December. Well, I wasn't gonna tell this one, but sometimes things just pop into your mind that are really part of the story. I was probably six or seven years old and it was October and people were down on the beach right in front of our village digging clams. So I asked my mom, could I go down there and dig some clams? So I went down to the beach and worked and worked and worked and I filled a big sack that I couldn't even lift up full of butter clams. And I made my first dollar in my life, digging clams. There's a cute story and I always think about how proud I was to dig those clams and actually make a dollar. Now I think of the value of the sack full of those clams and I just can't help but laugh. But today, one of my favorite seafoods continues to be clams and cockles. And this is the time of year. So I go down to the coast from Hazelton here, spend three hours and I get on my boat and I go back to my village and I go with my friends and I look after the boat and they dig the clams. So I get pretty easy and it's nice to be an elder, an elder in the community where you don't have to do some things like digging clams. So as far as the artwork goes for this book, one of the most exciting things that happened happened right at the end. And I was working throughout a year on different images for the book and we didn't have a cover. And my friend, Cyril from Kit Katla, Cyril Astor is his last name. He sent me a picture on Facebook of a sunset. Now Kit Katla looks straight up an inlet and when the sun goes down, it goes down in the west and the inlet, you're looking directly west when the sun goes down. And he saw this incredible sunset and as he was going home, he had the presence of mind to look back and he could see the waves from his boat and the change of the light on the water, the smooth waves, kind of like the waves Kay was talking about, that when you see the wheat fields and I've seen that on the prairie where it looks like waves, same thing, the wind causes the waves to happen. Well, Cyril made a big U-turn with his boat and went back and he snapped a picture with his iPhone and then went home and he sent me the picture and that's what inspired the cover from the book. So a beautiful story about how you wrestle with things but when you're working really hard at something and your heart's in a good place, then the magic happens and working with everybody on this book, so much magic has happened. And another little story, and you can just give me this one, it's time for me to finish. Another little story is the whole time that I was working on this book, I kept thinking of clam gardens and I kept remembering in my mind seeing these rock walls at low, low tide. And I went back to my grandmother's village a few years ago and I was trying to find where the village was and I couldn't find it and it was in a group of islands called the Esteven group, not far from Hartley Bay on the coast, mid coast. And I went on to the beach and I went at low tide because I was looking for fishwears and I found these, what I thought were fishwears and it turns out that they weren't fishwears but I didn't learn until I started working with Kay and the group at Groundwood that these were clam gardens. These were sea gardens that people had built thousands of years ago because there was no creek coming out where the fish would go up. It was just in a big expansive beach. So for me, being part of this book and visiting sea gardens has been not only an eye opener but a heart opener. And the way I think of it is my mind's full of all of these places that I've been since I was a child on the coast and all of these rock walls that I saw and wondered what they were. And now I never have to wonder anymore and just know that it's the magic of people who've lived for thousands of years having gardens. So I always said that we weren't gardeners on the coast. Now I know that's not true. We had clam gardens. So it's a beautiful story about my connection to the coast and what inspired the different images. It was easy to think of a child and an older person in a boat going along the coast because I'd done it so many times. And clams and cockles. Yeah, won't be long before I'll be heading down to the clam gardens here in the next few weeks and going to get some clams and cockles myself. So that's some of my recollections as an artist and I've always been an artist since I was a child. I just stubborn and didn't wanna do anything else. So I just kept doing my artwork and I'm thankful to be part of this book, part of visiting all of you people who are watching this and hope that we can share knowledge with more and more people. Thank you so much. Fantastic, Roy, thank you. We are all going to be on the screen now. We have so many questions rolling in from schools and students. We probably can't get to all of them but we will get to as many as we can. Roy, before we do, would you be able to tell us the pronunciation of your chieftainship again? So we have some school classes who can say it right and I wanna hear it one more time too because I wanna get it correct. Okay, this is... This is a lesson. Forming the words is really difficult and we always had to do it just by listening and then I learned to do it by listening and looking at the person's mouth who was saying the words and gradually I learned to pick up the language and use the same pronunciation. So, flakwa, gila, flakwa. That's a very difficult one. One of the most difficult ones for a tongue that's not used to doing this. But what you're doing is putting your tongue on the roof of your mouth just behind your front teeth and you're saying the T and as you're letting the tongue come down, you say the L so they're rolled together like flakwa. Flakwa gila. Flakwa gila, flakwa gila. Actually interpreted means copper man or he makes coppers or he wears a copper on his back. Three different interpretations. So maybe we'll just say that one more, can you say it one more time? Cause I think we have some classrooms and we have groups of 20 or 30 kids all mastering that. So, flakwa gila. Flakwa gila. Flakwa gila. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you for that. All right, let's get to this list of questions. Some are for one of you and some are for both. Kay, we have a question from Nathan from Hollyburn. How rare are sea gardens or do you have a sense of how many there are? Is there any kind of sea garden census or someone who counts all of the sea gardens along the Pacific Northwest coast? Oh, and Kay, you're just muted. So if you unmute yourself there, perfect. There we go. Actually, there are tons of them. There are so many, once you know what you're looking for, it is hard to find a beach that is not a walled garden or was not at one time. That's one of the problems that the clam garden ecologists had when they were trying to find a non-walled beach, in other words, a beach that was not a clam garden to use for their, they're the other part of the experiment to show, they couldn't find enough of them. So they are all over the place. And interestingly, they're all over the place here, but they are nowhere else in the world. They go from about the Seattle area, north into Southern Alaska and nowhere else in the world. Wow. Thank you, Nathan, for your question. Roy, a question from you from Division 15. We have the grade ones and twos at Tecumseh Elementary watching. They are wondering what materials you use to make your pictures and how you make these, this is their words, how you make the superimposed images in your artwork. Oh, that's a long story of trying to shorten it. First of all, when I'm painting, I use acrylics on paper or acrylics on what's called a birch canvas. It's actually birch wood, but it's so thin. It's like paper, like birch bark canoes and it's stretched over a frame. And I love acrylics because they dry fast and their waterproof ones, they dry, and they don't smell like oil. So I love using acrylics. What was the second part of that question? The superimposed images. I think they're thinking of the silhouettes and how you make those happen. Yes. Well, years ago, as a young artist, I discovered that people couldn't afford $300 for painting. So I was having a hard time and nobody knew who I was, so people weren't buying my paintings. And then I got the idea to do limited edition prints that I could sell for $15 each. And so I started doing limited edition prints. And that whole experience gave me an insight into how I could stretch the way I do things. So one day I was doing this painting in Skidget and it was a village and the village was gone. But I had seen many photographs of the village and I could see it in my mind. And when I visited this place, I was very sad because all of those beautiful totems were gone. There was one old eagle left in the bushes covered in moss and you would have missed it if you weren't looking really hard. And I walked out on the beach and sat on a log looking out at what the people in the village used to look at. And I was crying. And my friend who was with me grabbed his camera and just snapped a picture of me sitting on the log. Well, that picture that he took wound up being an image called Skidget. And when I did the image, I was doing the whole painting, I thought, well, how could I put an image in the sky with silk screen prints that was transparent? And the answer was really easy. It was not putting more pigment into the paint so it's kind of clear. So now I use that in varying degrees all of the time and that's how I get those ghosted images. And I love them in some of the books we've done because some of them are covered with a slight thicker coating of plastic of some sort so you can actually touch them and feel them. Very cool, great question. Thanks, grade ones and twos. We're so glad you're watching. Kay, a question for you and let me just make sure I credit the question asker here. This is a question from Charlotte from Westcott Elementary. When did you start writing books? Oh, I have always written, but this is the first one that's been published. I suppose I wrote something when I was in third grade, grade three, it was not good. A question for both of you. How long did the whole process of this book take? From Kay, you writing it to actually having a finished product? How they, the exact question is how long did it take to complete the visual and language components of the book together? Well, I'll start because we worked separately as is the case in most times with children's books anyway. I wrote, I visited the gardens and then wrote the book about five years ago. And it takes probably two years, but it took a while to find just the right illustrator. And I'm glad they waited because they got the right person. And Roy, for your artwork, how long was the sort of process from beginning to end of getting all of the images together for the book? I really couldn't say it's been a long time, probably over 12 months, I'm guessing more than a year. So a very long time to get that all together into the book that people can actually hold. Let's see, we have so many great questions here. Kay, do you have any favorite books as an author? Books that you really love now that inspire you to write? And this is a question from Mesa at Cedardale. Interesting. You know, I have lots of books that I love. I am lucky enough to spend a good part of my time reviewing books, new books that have been written. So there are always new titles coming out that I love. Just recently, I really like Skunk and it's a new one that's... It was Skunk and Badger. Skunk and Badger. I think that's a tremendous book. Amy Timberlake. Yes, thank you. But there are too many to name anyone in particular. And Roy, what role does reading play in your life? I know you're an artist, but are you a reader? Do you find inspiration at all for your work in books? Oh, yes, over and over and over and over. As a child growing up, I didn't know that my dad was Haida and Simpsons and Quaggules and my mom was white. I didn't know that. They were my dad and my mom. And I was in my teens when I realized that my father's people came from this incredible culture and that's what spurred me to study even harder. But I've always read, we didn't have television when I was a child, we read books or we played music and sang songs together. So books have been part of my life since I was a little boy and all of the information like this one about Clam Gardens is available for people like me who are inspired. Emily Carr inspired me. Her writing, I think her writing for me was more artistic than her actual art. And her art speaks volumes to millions of people around the world. And another question for you, Roy, from Summer in grade one, she's wondering about the role of Eagles in your family. And she says, how did your mother become part of the Eagle Clan? Oh, that's a good, good, good question. Okay, so when my mom went to the little village of Kit Kappa and she met my dad, that was the end of her traveling anywhere in the world. She wound up marrying dad and I was their first child. And my mother learned the language. She sang songs in the language. She became a cultured as anyone can. And the old people, when they knew that she was going to have her first baby, me, they all got together and her name was Grace and they said, we have to make Grace part of this community because she is part of this community and her children need to grow up with a crest. Well, the chief of the Eagles, Matthew Hill from the village of Kit Katla, adopted my mother and that's how we got to be Eagles. Well, that's a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing that. A question for both of you. We have lots of people asking if you have any tips for becoming an author or any tips for becoming an artist. I don't know if each of you want to speak to any wisdom you would like to pass on to aspiring authors or illustrators or both. Don't give up and keep editing. Keep editing. Kay, can you just talk a little bit about what editing is or what the process of editing your book was? Some people might think it's a short picture book. It can't be that hard to edit. Yes, well, the text ended up being pretty similar although I had a refrain in the book which was let go along the way. Edited. You have to make sure that you say everything precisely. You have to make sure that what you have said is exactly what you mean and that people won't be confused by it. And you have to make sure that you choose just the right word. Also, my book needed to be edited first by the scientists to make sure that I had understood what I saw when I visited the clam gardens. And then after that, it went to Quoxistala to make sure that I had the right sensibility to what I was saying. And then it went to a book editor. So there were many changes along the way. For the better. Roy, do you have anything to pass on to kids who hope to be an artist like you one day? Well, I'm an author also. I have kids that are out there and we've had a bestselling book in the top 10 bestsellers in British Columbia for nine years. Incredible. So what I encourage people to do so whether you're an artist writing or whether you're an artist painting whether you're an artist teaching you always go with the passion or the excitement that you have inside you. And my art teacher when I was a young boy in high school just when I was leaving, he said, well, Roy, I want you to think about something like who you are and where you come from because you might have five or six brothers and sisters but every one of you is different. So if you can come to understand who you are as a person and then create whatever you're going to create as an artist, then you will be doing something only you can do. So that's really important. Always work from inspiration or passion is what I call it. When you do then your emotions, you emote into your creation and the people looking at it will actually feel your emotion. It's like you said earlier, Roy, about making something that's eye-opening and heart-opening, which I think you both have done so beautifully with this book. I can't believe it, but we are out of time. The bell at some schools is about to ring. Thank you so much Kay and Roy for joining us. We are going to be coming back with more Booktopia presentations in January, February and March of next year. So for everyone watching, please stay tuned to wvml.ca slash Booktopia for more information. For everyone watching live, we would love to hear your feedback on this event and it helps us plan for future virtual events. You'll find a link to a very, very quick survey in the description and Lisa will also put the link in the chat. If you're watching as a class, everybody in the whole class can fill out their own evaluation or you can fill out one together as a class or just your teacher can do it, whatever works for you. Roy and Kay, thank you again for joining us. It was such a pleasure to talk about Sea Gardens today. Bye for now everyone, see you next time.