Fire Season: Making Sense of a Burning World | Culture @ VPL | November 20, 2024

On November 20, 2024, the Vancouver Public Library hosted a conversation with artists Liz Toohey-Wiese and Amory Abbott about their Fire Season project, moderated by award-winning writer John Vaillant.

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How can we make sense of wildfires and address the complex questions they pose for our planet?

Artists Liz Toohey-Wiese and Amory Abbott founded Fire Season in 2019 to explore the conceptual and existential symbolism of wildfires, through art and writing. They have since published three Fire Season books, which bring together creative minds from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, in conversation about this urgent topic.

Liz and Amory will discuss their latest book, Fire Season III, with John Vaillant, author of the award-winning Fire Weather.

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Liz Toohey-Wiese (she/her) teaches drawing and painting at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and is a graduate from the MFA program at NSCAD University and completed her undergraduate degree in painting at Emily Carr University. She has taken part in solo and group shows across Canada, and has undertaken many artist residencies, most recently at Klondike Institute for Arts + Culture (2024). Her most recent work explores the complicated topic of wildfires and their connections to tourism, economy, grief, and renewal.

Amory Abbott (he/him) is an American visual artist, illustrator, and author who teaches in the Illustration department at Emily Carr University, and holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a BFA in Illustration from Herron School of Art and Design. His recent research has landed him in artist residencies in Glacier National Park in Montana, and along the northwest coast of Ireland at the Boghill Centre. Amory’s creative practice primarily addresses the modern West’s relationship to landscape, with an interest in reconnecting people to a more spiritual and primeval experience of wild places.

John Vaillant is a bestselling author and freelance writer living in Vancouver, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce, won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. His second, The Tiger, was an international bestseller and was translated into sixteen languages, and The Jaguar's Children, his first work of fiction, was a finalist for the Canadian Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His most recent book, Fire Weather, won the Baillie Gifford Prize and Canada’s Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, and was a finalist the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.