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Worth More Standing – Nanaimo Launch

Followers of environmental news will know of the ongoing protests over old growth logging at Fairy Creek, southwest Vancouver Island. In tune with this, Christine Lowther named the substantial anthology she’s edited for Caitlin Press Worth More Standing.

Clocking in at 239 pages, the anthology is a veritable forest of Canadian poets paying homage to trees of all kinds. I am one who contributed two poems to this work, including a poem from Larder.

On Saturday May 28 I will join five other poets at the Harbourfront Library in Nanaimo to help launch this with a live, in-person reading.

Poets who will be reading at the Nanaimo launch include: Leanne McIntosh, Ann Graham Walker. Rhona McAdam, Nicole Moen, Sheena Robinson and Kim Goldberg.

The reading runs from 1-3pm and is free and open to all.

Larder: Victoria reading

This Friday May 27 I’ll be reading in Victoria at Planet Earth Poetry. Events kick off with an open mic at 7:30pm, and then Catherine St Denis will take the stage as the Poetic Opener. Catherine has read a number of times at the open mic, always impressed with her poems, and I am very much looking forward to hearing more from her. After Catherine, I’ll be reading from Larder and selling books thereafter.

The reading is live and in person! at Russell Books. For those who can’t make it in person, there’s a livestream of Catherine’s and my readings which starts around 8/8:15. For info on how to access that, it’s best to contact Planet Earth Poetry; (details in their weekly newsletter) or you can message me on Facebook.

PEP’s readings (featured readers and poetic openers) are usually recorded and posted on its Youtube channel a few days later, so you can catch us there too!

Larder… the Book!

There is this now obligatory photo of authors opening a box of their books, the first glimpse of the real object. You can send off pages to a publisher, you can get typesetting proofs, you can see the cover image, but it’s not real until it’s in your hand. E-books have their place in our world nowadays, but nothing beats a well-designed, genuine book, printed on real paper.  Here’s mine.

I’ll be reading from it at the Fat Oyster reading series, in Fanny Bay Hall on Vancouver Island, a week from today, May 12. If you’re within reach, it would be great to have you in the audience! This marks the return to face-to-face readings for the series, post-pandemic.

There will be 3 of us reading: another Caitlin Press author, Arleen Paré, whose latest collection, Time Out of Time, riffs on the work of another poet, the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan. Comox Valley poet Kelly Madden will be there too, reading from her first collection, If I’d Known.

Here’s our poster:

Poetry Among the Seeds

Our BC Virtual Seedy Saturday poetry lineup is out. Eleven BC poets will be featured among the talks that make up the three days of the event.

Some months ago, when the idea for a virtual event was mooted, I was talking to Carla Hick, one of the organizers from Farm Folk City Folk. She said they were open to all kinds of ideas, and the word “poetry” crossed her lips. I jumped on that and offered to organize something.

I conferred with a couple of people – Yvonne Blomer, who’s well connected in the Island poetry community; and then Nancy Holmes, who teaches at UBC-Okanagan in Kelowna and knows many of the mainland and BC Interior poets.

It was Nancy who put her finger on the key issue: a regular poetry reading would not do, as our audience was not a literary one, but made up of farmers and gardeners whose focus is seeds, plants and the products of horti- and agriculture. She suggested something more multimedia. “Why not poetry videos?” she mused. Inwardly I cringed – learn another thing? Would there be enough BC poets writing around our subjects and comfortable with the technology?

Turns out there were! Farm Folk City Folk reckoned we’d have room for 10 videos, scattered through the weekend’s program rather than posted as one long piece. In the end we’ve got 11 poets represented, and here they are, with the names of their pieces and the date/timing in the program:

Sarah de Leeuw – October Chanterelling – Sat Feb 20, 8:45am
Matt Rader – Garlic – Sat Feb 20, 10am
Nancy Holmes – The Way We Are Made Of – Sat Feb 20, 12:15pm
Michelle Doege – Fields of Wheat – Sat Feb 20, 2:15pm
Fiona Tinwei Lam – August Raspberries – Sat Feb 20, 3:30pm
Yvonne Blomer – Rhubarb, Death in a Garden – Sun Feb 21, 8:45am
Renée Sarojini Saklikar – Grandmother’s Instruction, Sun Feb 21, 10:05am
Shelley Leedahl – Sometimes – Sun Feb 21, 11:15am
John Barton Malus Pumila – Sun Feb 21, 12:30pm
Rhona McAdam! – Wild Bees – Sun Feb 21, 1:45pm
Cornelia Hoogland – Seaweed, Sun Feb 21, 3:45pm

All the poets used their own poems and created new videos for this program, so check ’em out! Registration for the weekend is only $5 (or more if you want to donate towards a share that goes to the organizing nonprofits). See you there!