Evely Lau - 1989

 

19 September 2026

In 1989 I was called by a publicist called Nancy Flight asking me I would photograph a brand new 18-year-old poet called Evelyn Lau. The book was called Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. I accepted. Flight asked me how I would photograph her. I told her I was going to do it on her bed. Flight was shocked. I told her, “She is still a teenager and she probably has a funny bedspread”. She did, it featured red balloons.

Today I went to room 

C225 at the Vancouver campus of University of British Columbia for the launching and the reading from her new book Parade of Storms. The book features poems related to what all people talk about these days- the weather.

Halfway through the talk Lau asked us to try to write a poem. A few of us did.

I decided to take the advice of:

 Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658) was a Spanish Jesuit priest, Baroque philosopher, and writer known as a master of conceptismo, a literary style characterized by witty, terse, and subtle expressions.

Here is my poem:

Evelyn

Eevelyn

Runaway returned

Balloons on the bed

A beginning

Deserved