There and Back Again: BC Authors Report From America

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Wednesday, September 9th, 2026
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

As we come up to municipal election time, join us at the Duncan Showroom for a timely and thought provoking literary evening with readings from Gabriola writer Bill Gaston (author of Spying on America) and Victoria writer Richard Johnson (co-author of Democracy's Second Act). Kindly moderated by Cathy Robertson of Community Futures.

A little bit about their books!

On a June morning in 2022, author Bill Gaston drives off the Victoria–Port Angeles ferry in a rented Dodge Charger with his two sons. Born in the USA but “Canadian through and through,” Gaston is on a road trip to Tabor, Iowa, the town founded by his great, great, great-grandparents as the westernmost hub of the Underground Railroad. Both a sideways glance at contemporary American culture and a mordant yet tender account of the true meaning of ancestry, Spying on America is an unpredictably insightful exploration of family, Canada’s neighbour, and the “American bald ego.”

In Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public, Richard Johnson and Peter MacLeod argue that the first act of democracy – anchored in voting rights and representative government – has achieved extraordinary gains. Free elections, near-universal suffrage, and the peaceful transfer of power reshaped societies and expanded human freedom. But these achievements represent the promise of democracy, not its completion. Drawing on groundbreaking citizens’ assemblies in Ireland, Canada, and France – as well as democratic innovations from more than a dozen countries, their book offers a hopeful, clear-eyed vision for what comes next.

About the authors:

Richard Johnson is a former journalist and current policy director at MASS LBP. His writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, The Walrus, Reader’s Digest, This Magazine, The New Quarterly, and many others. A former Fellow in Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, he was also a longtime writer for the award-winning podcast Trailblazers, with Walter Isaacson.

Bill Gaston was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew up in Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen as a teenager to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. He has lived and worked, mostly as an itinerant scholar, all across Canada, in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Toronto, Vancouver and, finally, Victoria. Gaston is the author of numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including The World, winner of the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction; Gargoyles, winner of the Victoria Book Prize and finalist for a Governor General’s Award; Mount Appetite, finalist for the Giller Prize; and the memoir Just Let Me Look at You, finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize. He lives, grows food, and writes, with the writer Dede Crane, on Gabriola Island, in the Salish Sea.