Claudia Cornwall is on hiatus.
With three books researched, written and published since 2009, the North Vancouver writer is restoring her creative spirit.
Claudia continues to teach online courses on writing family memoirs, and on ethical and legal issues for writers. She also gives talks about her work. On Wednesday, March 19, Claudia will speak about her book, At the World's Edge, Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937- 1998, for West Vancouver Historical Society's Local Heroes speakers series.
Over the years, Claudia's requests to write about her friend were declined. "I'm not dead yet," he would remind her. When cancer removed Lang from this life in 1998, the time had come to celebrate a true renaissance character in the context of his home city and province.
A poem by Lang inspired the book's title. "Curt was always out there at the edge of everything," says Claudia, "and of course, we're living on the edge of the continent."
Lang was a painter, musician and writer, a boat builder and log salvager along the Ambleside, Bowen Island and Sunshine Coast shorelines, and a high-tech developer and entrepreneur. Blessed equally with the gifts of creativity and friendship, Lang's connections ran deep in Vancouver's avant-garde community of the time.
"Curt was always at the top of his form in all disciplines," she continues. "Each of them opened and illustrated a different part of British Columbia culture and history."
Claudia interviewed Lang's family and his fellow participants in this vibrant period of Vancouver's history, including North Vancouver poet Jamie Reid, writer Peter Trower, artist Fred Douglas and Don MacLeod, who established Vancouver landmark MacLeod's Books at 350 West Pender St., on the site of a bookstore owned by Lang, which he called The Radiant Tree.
In 2001, due to a resounding lack of interest among publishers, the Lang manuscript was consigned to a desk drawer and Claudia turned to other projects. One was a commission to write about artist and teacher Jack Hardman for the Unheralded Artists of B.C. series from Mother Tongue Press. In 2010, Mona Fertig, Mother Tongue's publisher, said she would publish Lang's story.
Claudia laughs, "This almost never happens in publishing!" Although conscious of time constraints - the manuscript had to be completed by summer 2011 for publication in the fall - she seized the opportunity to cast fresh eyes on the material and rewrote most of the book from the perspective achieved by the passage of time.
Claudia is the child of Walter and Lore Maria Wiener, who made their way to Shanghai with the Jewish diaspora resulting from the rise of Nazism. Interned by the Japanese until the city was liberated in 1945, the family was among the Europeans ousted by the Communists in 1949.
They left Shanghai on the converted troopship General Gordon (Claudia's husband's name) on Sept. 25 (the date of their daughter Talia's birth in 1987), arriving in San Francisco on Oct. 16 (the date of their son Tom's birth in 1985).
Settling in Vancouver, they established the Lore Maria Wiener fashion design business in Kerrisdale, which continued until Claudia's mother turned 90 in 2010.
Claudia and Gordon Cornwall, high school sweethearts, married in 1971 and achieved post-graduate degrees in philosophy. Gordon went into computers, eventually partnering with Curt Lang, and Claudia worked in the family's fashion business.
In 1985, after the Cornwalls moved to Canyon Heights in North Vancouver, Claudia became a writer, one who finds her subjects close to home. An article on North Vancouver's Bill Cameron, developer of a communications device for disabled people, which ultimately led to the Neil Squire Society, was the first of many medically themed pieces by Claudia published by Reader's Digest magazine.
Her parents' story inspired Claudia's first book. Letter from Vienna: A Daughter Uncovers Her Family's Jewish Past, received the 1996 B.C. Book Prize for Non-Fiction.
In 2013, Claudia returned to the medical field with Catching Cancer, expanding the intriguing premise of microbial causes of cancer she had explored in an article for Reader's Digest.
West Vancouver Historical Society presents Claudia Cornwall on Curt Lang and his city at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 19 at the West Vancouver Seniors' Activity Centre.
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. 778-279-2275 [email protected]
