As part of 49th Shelf's #Fest2Fest, Julie Wilson is speaking with authors across the country (and abroad) who are appearing at literary festivals to promote their latest books.

For all our #Fest2Fest updates, bookmark www.49thshelf.com/Festivals.

Gillian Wigmore (Dirt of Ages) will appear at the Vancouver Writers Fest.

For all details, go here.

This year's festival runs October 16-21, 2012.

Julie chatted via Skype with Gillian about her poetry collection Dirt of Ages and the results are hilarious and, at times, not safe for work, unless your work understands that if you can read "swears," you can say them out loud. (Ed: If Hal Wake, the festival's creative director, can say he's a fan of Gillian's potty mouth—and he has, via Facebook—then so be it! So are we!) (Ed: It's really quite tame.) (Ed: You can't cut the funny bits! Those are the best parts!)

Enjoy!

About the book: Dirt of Ages is the highly anticipated second book of poetry by Gillian Wigmore, whose debut collection Soft Geography (2007) captured the ReLit Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize.

In Dirt of Ages, everything meets in "the perfect v" of the valley: where rivers meet in an "exchange between sky and water," where rural runs into urban,"where art and work meet,""the rush and rattle," where fog and smog converge as "foetid fall inversions," and where "two chafe so close together."

Wigmore expands both her curiosity and command as a poet from personal observations and relationships with wilderness to a universal, societal energy that flows through time, place and every one of us."Notions of deeper rivers" do not reveal a romanticized "true north" but rather a meth dealer accidentally entreating a mother with child on the streets of a pulp-mill town, and "burned out buildings that are a calling card of the heart's."

Among so many other interstices, human interaction with our natural environment is expressed as "rotten lumber stacked and waiting in the woodlot floodplain" and "our wallets open, hoping wealth / will rain down after winter," while the "the earthen hum of bugs at work" goes on: the dirt of ages.

About the author: Gillian Wigmore grew up in Vanderhoof, British Columbia, and graduated from the University of Victoria in 1999. She has been published in Geist, CV2, filling station and the Inner Harbour Review, among others. Wigmore won the 2008 ReLit Award for her work Soft Geography and was also shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in British Columbia. She lives in north-central British Columbia with her husband and two children.

About the Vancouver Writers Fest: For the past 25 years, the Vancouver Writers Fest turns reading into a community experience, bringing people together to share thoughts, explore ideas, and witness brilliant conversations.

The Festival is a celebration of story, told by authors, poets, spoken word performers, and graphic novelists.

For six days in October, this celebration takes place in the cultural oasis of Granville Island, and continues throughout the year with the Incite reading series at the VPL, special events with leading writers and the Spreading the Word education programs at Lower Mainland schools and in small BC communities.

Through Spreading the Word, the Festival can reignite a teacher’s passion for teaching, mesmerize a teenager who rarely looks up from her phone or engage a child who is a reluctant reader. Festival events can encourage discussion and reflection, and connect old friends and introduce new ones.

Ideas create books, but people create the Festival. The Writers Fest brings people of all backgrounds together—writers, children, adults, staff and hundreds of volunteers—all of whom love to read. They also love what reading represents: the stirring of ideas, the sparks of recognition, and the realization that we are all connected.

Follow them on Twitter as @VanWritersFest.