Bruce Serafin, RIP

I never met Bruce Serafin, who died last Wednesday, according to Vancouver critic, writer, and bookseller Christopher Brayshaw. (A celebration of his life will be held on June 17.)

I never had the chance to tell him that he had an impact on my life. When I moved to Vancouver, still young and green and wondering how you go about becoming, like, you know, a writer, I was transfixed by a literary city.

Vancouver then was alive with bookstores. Off the top of my head, there was a place called Belly Button Books down by the Woodward's building (Woodward's was still a department store then, back in the '80s). There were feminist bookstores—the forbidding Women's Bookstore downstairs off Cambie, and the welcoming Ariel in Kits. Had Black Sheep opened yet? Maybe that was still in the future. There were genre stores and general-interest stores. And there were Duthie's everywhere you shook your stick—though the best and brightest (upstairs at least) was the one at Robson and Hornby.

And there were publications that gloried in writing. Max Wyman was editing the Saturday Review for the Sun and it was clever and bookish. Duthie's published an in-store magazine on beautiful stock called The Reader, for which Celia Duthie paid contributors in store credit. And then there was the Vancouver Review.

Serafin edited the Vancouver Review. I don't remember for how long, and he wasn't alone, but there was a time in the early '90s when the Vancouver Review brimmed and thrummed and strobed with writing, with arguments and internecine battles and accusations and camaraderie and comradeship and love, yes love, for books and their authors. I would read these, wonder how my own life would unfold and whether it might measure up someday to these giants, and feel glad I'd set my wagon westward.

Vancouver Review folded. (It returned a few years ago in a new form.) All but one of the Duthie's closed. And now Bruce Serafin has died, young for death. I've been scouring the house for my copy of Serafin's first book, Colin's Big Thing. No luck but I know it's somewhere. It's not a thing I'd have thrown out. As I scan the shelves, I've had this mantra tickertaping through my head: Littera scripta manet. It was Duthie's slogan: The written word remains.