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Baird Bowering Collection

The Baird Bowering Collection is composed predominantly of Bowering’s published monographs and chapbooks, with notable inclusion of literary serials, such as Tish 1961-1963 and Imago 1964-1974 to which Bowering was any and all of contributor, editor, or publisher. All of these items were either gifted from Bowering to his partner, Jean Baird, over the course of many years, or collected by Baird through other channels, for several decades before the couple knew one another. The relationship between Baird and Bowering extends to one of shared creatorship through writing, manifest in their 2009 co-edited work The Heart Does Break.2 and the selection and editing of Writing the Okanagan. Both books were Jean’s ideas.

The Baird Bowering Collection is housed at Okanagan Special Collections and Archives, UBC Okanagan Library. A full bibliography of its contents is available upon request or in the library catalogue.

Baird Bowering Collection

BOWERING AT THE SOUNDBOX COLLECTION

The AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan houses projects that engage in the work of the humanities–adding value to cultural artifacts through interpretation and analysis–-in a digital context, with an emphasis on audio media and/or poetry.

The announcement about the Baird Bowering material can be found here.

SoundBox Collection

GEORGE BOWERING FONDS, LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA

"At first my literary papers were sold along with those of Al Purdy to the Queen's University library. Years later the renowned book dealer Bill Hoffer made a deal with the National Library to collect my papers, and eventually they gathered my stuff at Queens. I was pleased to be collected in the National Library, because that is where my hero Phyllis Webb's papers and Joseph Plaskett's portrait of her are. For decades I have been pouring my books, magazine appearances, CBC radio tapes, letters, drawings, award souvenirs, diaries, notebooks, books and articles about my work, hate mail, you name it, into what is now called Library and Archives Canada. There are a few exceptions, some correspondence in the Earle Birney fonds at UBC, some correspondence in the University of Texas library, early stuff (before I started saving copies) and handwritten stuff here & there. I am particularly glad about the few copies of graduation dissertations from Canada and other countries. I wish that they were all there. Ah, well."