Wordfest Presents David Beers & Steve Burgess

Wordfest Presents David Beers & Steve Burgess

Hosted by Shelley Youngblut

This pairing is guaranteed to be a total trip! Join veteran journalists David Beers (The Tyee and Mother Jones) and Steve Burgess (The Tyee and Swerve) in conversation with longtime collaborator (and major fan of both authors) Shelley Youngblut. Expect lively insights into travel, current affairs, and broad-based culture, all delivered with intelligence, humour, and more than a little irreverence. The show starts at 7PM MT and will be followed by an audience Q & A and book signing. Owl’s Nest Books will be on site with copies of both books. Ticket holders can also pre-order here for pick-up at the event.

We are grateful to Douglas & McIntyre and Greystone Books for making it possible to connect you with these provocative thinkers.

About Points of Interest: In Search of the Places, People, and Stories of BC

Take a trip across British Columbia with this enchanting collection of essays from 30 local writers, edited by David Beers and andrea bennett.

What makes wandering the vibrant land called British Columbia really special? Encounters with locals who are ready to share, over a coffee or a beer, quirky tales and powerful truths rooted in place and time. Consider this book a meet-up with 30 such storytellers, the perfect road companion for your journey real or imagined. The Tyee is the province’s oldest and most-read independent source of online news and ideas, renowned for its range of voices on politics, culture and nature.

This anthology (marking The Tyee’s 20th anniversary) includes pieces published over the last two decades and includes the distinct perspectives of some of the region’s most celebrated writers, including J.B. MacKinnon, Alisa Smith, Cúagilákv (Jess H̓áust̓i), Arno Kopecky, Harrison Mooney, Michelle Cyca, Christopher Cheung, Andrew Nikiforuk, and many more, as well as illustrations by Nora Kelly. Pull up a chair and get their inside scoops on the places they call home.

About David Beers

David Beers is the founding and current editor-in-chief of The Tyee, the highly awarded independent journalism site launched in Vancouver in 2003 before Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, wireless and a bunch of other big internet stuff happened. He is co-editor of a new collection of essays by Tyee writers published over the past two decades: Points of Interest: In Search of the Places, People, and Stories of BC.

About Reservations: The Pleasures and Perils of Travel

Steve Burgess mixes brooding insights with brooding humour – Paul Theroux meets David Sedaris – as he roams the world in search of adventure, meaning, and love." –Andrew Coyne

A personal investigation into the real price of our holidays.

Travel was once a marker of sophistication. Now the tourist is just as likely to be viewed as one locust in an annihilating swarm. Tourists face tough questions: When does economic opportunity become exploitation? How do we justify the use of climate-changing jet fuel? And can we be sure our tourist dollars aren’t propping up corrupt and brutal regimes?

Now, as the world returns to travel, Steve Burgess asks: Is satisfying our own wanderlust worth the trouble it causes everyone else? Or is the tourist guilty of the charges – from voyeurism to desecration – levelled against them by everyone from environmentalists to exhausted locals to superior-feeling fellow tourists who have traded in the tour bus for “authentic experiences”?

In this smart and sharply funny interrogation of our right to roam, Burgess looks into the traveller’s soul, sharing the stories of some of his most personally significant travels, from Rome to Tana Toraja, and looking to studies and experts around the world for insight into why we travel and how we could do it better. And throughout, he tells the story of a month in Japan – his first trip outside North America – and the whirlwind cross-cultural romance that brought him there and took him on a journey around the country in search of wonder and maybe even love.

About Steve Burgess

Steve Burgess is a writer and broadcaster whose honours include two Canadian National Magazine awards. Burgess is a contributing editor of The Tyee and an award-winning documentary director. He is the author of Who Killed Mom? (Greystone, 2011) and his stories have been featured in publications including Reader’s Digest, Maclean’s and The Globe and Mail. He lives in Vancouver.

About Host Shelley Youngblut

Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. She was also a former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM. Follow her on Facebook @ShelleyYoungblut and Instagram/Threads @youngblutshelley.

Curiouser?

• • The War on Journalists (The 2023 Southam Lecture)–David Beers, The Tyee
  • The Best of David Beers Archive. –The Tyee
  • David Beers's poignant, eloquent autobiographical memoir of growing up in Silicon Valley during the 1960s is a stunning eulogy for the middle-class American Dream. –Publishers Weekly
  • Are Influencers Ruining Travel? (Book excerpt) –Steve Burgess, The Toronto Star
  • Review: Volatile voyage. – Environmental concerns of travel bolstered by author’s personal reflections and wicked wit. –Winnipeg Free Press
  • Review: Tourism may be ‘irresponsible collective behaviour,’ but Steve Burgess can’t hide his wanderlust in Reservations. –The Toronto Star
  • Why Travel Needs to Change. –CBC Radio
  • Is Wanderlust a Sin? Steve Burgess on His New Book –The Tyee