I have been hosting Planet Earth Poetry workshops in my home and garden for the past 8 years or so. It is a glorious time for me, feeding creative spirits and having poets roaming around the property.
This year the workshop was led by Jenna Butler, who kindly and carefully led poets of all levels of experience through some difficult environmental territory, under the theme “Songs for a Changing World: Writing Our Hope and Grief About Place”.
Participants spent some time introducing themselves and reflecting on their relationship with land (and water) before embarking on studying poetry models and being sent off at intervals to write.
My role in these events is Chief Eavesdropper and Provisioner, and it gives me a chance to do some recreational cooking and try out some new recipes. It’s also an opportunity to relive a past life: long ago I spent weekends and holidays enjoying the warmth of the kitchen at Strawberry Creek Lodge in Alberta, cooking alongside my remarkable mentor Tena Wiebe at workshops, retreats, wedding celebrations and meetings.
There’s a favourite New Yorker cartoon of a kitchen, captioned “So this is where the magic happens“. Here’s my version, showing my PEP workshop catering preparations.
One of my tasks is to provide a lunch to the poetry mentor, and this was Sunday’s lunch for Jenna: Watermelon Gazpacho, Pepperwiches, and Plum Panna Cotta (with fresh blackberry sauce). I was relishing the opportunity to use some summer ingredients, including plums from my garden, some salad vegetables and local blackberries. My nutrition training also influenced the menu which was strong on colourful vegetables and containing no ultra-processed foods. Tena taught me the powerful lesson that serving food made from scratch, with love, is a truly satisfying way to live (and eat)!
I’ll be lifting off on Monday – first trip off Vancouver Island since 2019 – and flying to Saskatoon, where I’ll be reading at 7pm on Tuesday evening with two fabulous Saskatchewan poets, Mari-Lou Rowley and Katherine Lawrence at McNally Robinson Booksellers. It will be livestreamed for those who can’t make it! The event link is right here on Facebook.
A virtual and geographically diverse launch event on Sunday June 5 at 11am (PST): Rhona McAdam launches Larderfrom Victoria; Mari-Lou Rowley launches Catastrophe Theories from Saskatoon; and Lisa Pasoldhosts us from Paris.
It’s a joint presentation by our BC publishers, Caitlin Press (Qualicum) and Anvil Press (Vancouver) through the magic of livestream technology.
No matter your time zone, enjoy brunch with us (11amPST) or lunch (12pmCST) or late lunch (2pmEST) or aperitifs (7pmBST) or supper (8pmCEST)— and let us feed your minds!
It will be livestreamed on Zoom – the link is here: https://fb.me/e/3d9qGnweE
(you don’t have to be a Facebook user to find the details there)
I am looking forward to Sunday’s installment in the Dead Poets Reading Series in Vancouver, when I will have the delightful task of reading Maxine Kumin’s work. Here she was, back in 2008, reading three of her poems, including one of my favourites, Apparition.
I’ve been to a few poetry (& other) readings since my return to Victoria, and even given one, and time to report on a bit of that with more on the horizon.
It’s gratifying to have the recognition: most of us are small fish in a small pond and it can make for a life of overcrowded isolation. These were the first reviews in any media that I’d had for the book, and I’m delighted. Not least because my last collection. Cartography, of which I remain very proud – a dozen years in the making – garnered not a single print review, nomination or mention since its publication in 2006. That is, until social media struck most kindly again in December last year, and then out of the blue this month with a warm and thorough online review.
Chris Levenson (poetry)Cathy Ford (poetry)
So. Returning to Victoria after the infinite literary delights of London… I have been more regularly attending Planet Earth Poetry, our local weekly readings series, than I had been able to over the last couple of years while travelling up and down Vancouver Island in search of nutrition training. We’ve had some great readers passing through from near and far, among them Christopher Levenson from Vancouver, Cathy Ford from Sidney,George Szanto from Gabriola Island, and Julie Paul from Victoria.
George Szanto (fiction)Julie Paul (fiction)
Swiftly ollowed by Lorri Neilsen Glenn who took a cherry blossom break on the West Coast from a truly ugly Atlantic winter in Halifax to read us a mixture of poetry and memoir; and by Alice Major, taking a green break from a prairie winter in Edmonton, who read mostly new and unpublished work.
For my own part, I gave a local reading back in February, in the friendly performance space at Gorge-ous Coffee. The place is fully booked with events of all kinds, musical, poetic and beyond, so was delighted to find an open slot.
Coming up soon: April is National Poetry Month, and I have three performances booked for that. The first is billed as a Read Local BC event, Poetry Without Borders, and takes place on Wednesday April 8 at the very lovely Munro’s Books in downtown Victoria. I’m reading with local poets Patrick Friesen, Beth Kope and Inge Israel. Next up is Poets Converse With Street Art – a poetry tour organized by Victoria’s own newly crowned Poet Laureate, Yvonne Blomer, which will be a poetry tour of Victoria, with poets strategically placed to read works inspired by public art; look for me beneath a sculptural streetlight, as I’m engaging with a pair of hands that were part of The Hands of Time, a project that marked Victoria’s 150th anniversary in 2012. That takes place on Saturday April 25, with morning and afternoon strolls planned. On Wednesday April 29 I’m part of a Food, Farming & Fishing Poetry Potluckat Haliburton Community Organic Farm, with Brian Brett, Linda Rogers and Dennis Reid.
And that’s the poetry bulletin for today. Next time I’ll do a little food security/urban agriculture update. My interests and involvements are like a spreading pool, so I have to keep track of the rivulets and my inner librarian is trying to create order in all this. You’ll find most of my hands-on, face-down food writing taking a decidedly nutritional vein, over at the Go Local Nutrition site. I’m also tweeting @iambiccafe and @golocalnut, and Facebooking at Digging the City, Go Local Nutrition, and Rhona McAdam (my writer page) (please Like these pages rather than trying to Friend me if you don’t know me personally).
Before I left Vancouver we took a spin around a newish supermarket in West Vancouver: Osaka (the nineteenth store to be opened by T&T Supermarkets) is huge with a mind-boggling selection of just about anything Asian – from soya sauce to rice and noodles, and vast quantities of everything in between. There were large fish tanks offering shoppers live seafood: king and Dungeness crab, lobster and abalone as well as several varieties of oysters, clams and fish, and a bakery with all manner of Asian pastries and decorated cakes. While we browsed, reading labels as best we could, I couldn’t help but wonder what effect all these ultra-processed foods, high in sugar, salt, fats and all kinds of preservatives, will have on the much-studied Japanese life expectancy. We calmed ourselves at Bene with a couple of platters of sushi, including this vegan roll in a cheerful soybean wrapping.
Back in Victoria, winter waited politely until I was settled, unpacked and the larder stocked with vegetables before drawing in with a little snow and cold weather, ideal for making soup and catching up on my reading. One of my astoundingly heavy bags held a copy of the River Cottage Veg Every Day! cookbook which holds some worthy temptations.
With my poetry ear I’ve been listening to the Saturday Play on BBC Radio 4, Tom and Viv, which explores the problematic relationship of TS and Valerie Eliot. Available until Saturday January 21, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch who seems to be everywhere just now. Listen for the reference to Robert W. Service…
Time, food and agriculture never sleep, at least not where interesting stories are concerned. Here are some that have been stacking up while I was away.
There’s a link here to a rather beautiful brochure shows that shows you who’s growing what and where in twenty-six urban farms in Vancouver.
And a nice story about the loneliness of the the farming life which I suppose applies to urban farmers as well; it offers a reminder that we are often in too much of a hurry, and too accustomed to shopping anonymously for food, to thank those who provide it.
There was wrist-slapping lesson in public consultation for Stephen Harper whose decision to bring to fruition his longtime plan to dismantle the Canadian Wheat Board was declared illegal by a federal court.
And finally, the soil is the thing: the EU Soil Report warns about the cost of doing nothing in a time when we are quickly losing the soil we’ll need to grow food by building on and contaminating it. Soil: Worth standing your ground for from The European Environmental Bureau explains why we should be paying attention, in urbanizing and industrialized countries everywhere:
Soil is the basis of all our food and fibre production and plays an essential role in water purification, waste decomposition and climate mitigation. It therefore must be regarded as a natural resource of strategic importance which should be protected adequately and used efficiently throughout Europe. The reality however is that Europe is losing this natural asset, thereby jeopardising Europe’s food security and its ability to deal with the consequences of climate change.
Participants spent some time introducing themselves and reflecting on their relationship with land (and water) before embarking on studying poetry models and being sent off at intervals to write.
