Finalist BC Book Prize (Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize)
Finalist City of Vancouver Book Prize
The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its shocking social ills, and the notorious distinction of holding the country‘s “very poorest forward sortation area of all 7,000 postal prefixes,” Bart Campbell dismantles our hard-held notions about poverty, the disenfranchised, substance abuse, and the nature of charity.
The Door Is Open is one man’s story of a transformative journey into the complicated and complex world of poverty.
Bart Campbell's essays about the downtown eastside of Vancouver and his experiences there as a soup kitchen volunteer have appeared on CBC's Morningside, and in Next City, True Life, Canadian Forum, and frequently in The Vancouver Review. A “non-fictional” excerpt from Bart's historic novel about the 4,000 Relief Camp Strikers who occupied Vancouver in the spring of 1935 appeared in Canadian Geographic Magazine, spring 2001. Bart lives in Vancouver and works as a medical laboratory technologist.
