Trip to the Vancouver Public Library throws you into an ongoing fictional storyline

If you walk through the Vancouver Public Library downtown atrium today, you may accidentally walk your way right into a fictional storyline.

You'll have to look up, way up, to find the screen projecting the words of writers who are typing out live narratives while sitting in the atrium. The small screen is sitting right above the Canada Trust kiosk—a little hard to find—and don't be surprised to find yourself appearing in the text.

You might only appear as the "lady in pink" or the "woman in the white coat", amid musings of the locale as a hub for everything from performance art to pizza. When the Straight swung by this afternoon, a writer was imagining the "man in the blue tuque" was a regular who came here every Friday, while another lobbygoer was tentatively trying the library out for the first time.

None of them seemed to even notice they were the subject of such spontaneous fiction.

Don't make the same mistake. Pull up a chair in the atrium for a coffee or pizza and watch the stories unfold as part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival's free Sometimes I think, I can see you event, created by Argentina's Mariano Pensotti, between noon and 4 p.m. until Sunday (January 20), and then again from January 25 to 27 and February 1 to 3. Local writers taking part at any given time include Charles Demers, Caitlin Chaisson, Michael Turner, and Adrienne Wong. (The writing performance is taking place at the Vancouver Art Gallery foyer concurrently.)

At the VPL, head upstairs the same days and hours to the third floor to check out a "book" from the Human Library, where Asexual, Born-Again Christian, Refugee, and Child of Deaf Parents were in demand when we dropped by. Get in there early: waits were up to an hour or more.