The Planet Earth Poetry reading series is a launching pad for the energies of writers and poets established and not. It is a place where words are most important. A venue in which all manner of poets and writers are welcome; a place for excellence, innovation, collaboration, diverse projects and experiments. The evening begins at 7:30 with an open mic, followed by a featured reader(s). Planet Earth Poetry is located at Hillside Coffee and Tea, 1633 Hillside Ave (across from Bolen Books). Sign-up for the open mic begins at 7pm.

Friday, febuary 6, 2014

judith castle & Carl leggo

Join us for a celebration of Dvora Levin’s third collection of poems, Ragged Light. Dvora and friends will read selections, accompanied by the musical stylings of keyboard artist Phil Newton.

Susan McCaslin is an award-winning Canadian poet and Faculty Emerita of Douglas College in Westminster, BC, where she taught English and Creative Writing for twenty-three years. She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including her most recent, The Disarmed Heart (May 2014). Her previous volume of poetry, Demeter Goes Skydiving (2012) was short-listed for the BC Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award) in 2012. Susan has published a volume of essays, Arousing the Spirit: Provocative Writings (2011) and edited two anthologies on poetry and spiritual practice. Freed to be a full-time writer since retiring from teaching, she lives in Fort Langley, British Columbia with her husband.

Susan is launching Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga, a spiritual memoir in poetic prose.

“You won't be the same after reading this book. Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga flows with a subtle, near-miraculous spiritual sweetness. This is a vibrant, light-filled portrait, a document of transformation, an eloquent guidebook. It's a treasure.”
—Russell Thornton, author of Birds, Metal, Stones & Rain (nominated for the Governor General’s Award, 2014)

Friday, febuary 13, 2014

chris levenson & cathy ford

We kick off the New Year with the next generations of poets and poetry. Youth from St. Michaels University School, Claremont Secondary School and the Claremont Review take over Planet Earth after the open mic.

Featured Readers from SMU
Acacia Welsford
Emily Jordan
Sophie Butterfield

Featured Readers from Claremont
Annie Macintosh is a grade 12 student at Claremont Secondary. She loves a good metaphor, homemade macaroni and pretending to be a mermaid.

Amy Dechka is a grade 12 student at Claremont. She enjoys singing, dancing, and acting. She prides herself on the ability to wiggle her ears both together and separately.

Gabriel Swift is a grade 12 student at Claremont. He enjoys surfing, writing, and has an undying love for guava juice.

Sage Broomfield is in her final year at Claremont. She loves cacti and prides herself in her curried yam soup.

Selena Wong is a grade 11 student at Claremont. She holds a passionate love for music, reading, and irritating people by humming constantly.

Friday, febuary 20, 2014

fiction night with margaret thompson

Isa Milman is the author of three volumes of poetry, each of which has won the Canadian Jewish Book Award. A retired occupational therapist, she has a small private practice of writing poetry with clients living with chronic health conditions. She is currently writing a family memoir, Searching for Basia.

Isa will read from a selection of her new and previously published works.

What Should I Do With This Purple Petal?

You asked, after we stooped, picked it up
on our way to the library door.
Such colour, it looks like a flower
feels like a raindrop, before it pours.

Holding it tight, I'd never seen you so engrossed,
from one hand to the other, you twirled it, rubbed
and squeezed. A tiny piece of purple
became fascination

as you wondered how small
you could make it, wondered how much
a life can contract
to the size of a petal, and all that matters
is reduced to a fragment
that fell from a flowering tree.

Mary Ann Moore’s poems have appeared in several chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane and have been published in Carousel, Room, Freefall, Vallum and Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press, 2013). You are Here (Leaf Press, 2012), is Mary Ann’s most recent chapbook of poetry. Mary Ann leads women’s writing circles in Nanaimo, B.C. as well as monthly poetry circles called Poetry as a Doorway In . . . and a Welcome Home. She is working on her next poetry collection, Putting Things By. maryannmoore.ca

Mary Ann is launching her first full-length collection of poetry, Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014).

Ancient Turkey, the Ottawa Valley, the West Coast.  Frida Kahlo, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda. Odes to the ordinary, words of praise, sorrows revealed. Colours, textures, and sounds of the everyday. Honouring ancestors. Making peace, embellishing history.

Moore’s writing celebrates the joyously human and the mythological too. —Dennis Bolen, The Vancouver Sun

Friday, febuary 27, 2014

wordsthaw 2015 event with poets from the malahat review

Patrick Friesen, living in Victoria, B.C., has published more than a dozen books of poetry and a book of essays.  He has also written plays for radio and stage.  His most recent book was a dark boat (Anvil Press, 2012).  His long poem, "a short history of crazy bone" (Mother Tongue Press), will be out in the spring of 2015.

Derk Wynand has translated some 200 poems, stories and essays and radio plays from French, Austrian and German from 1968 to the present. He has published 11 collections of poems, including his most recent, Past Imperfect, Present Tense,
Bayeux Arts, 2010, a collection of fiction, One Cook, Once Dreaming, Sono Nis, 1980, and several books translated
from the German, including Under the Cover of a Hat/Green­sealed Message, Quartet Books, London, 1985, Sweat and Industry, @las Press, 1992 (both from the German of H.C. Artmann), Black Sails, from the German of Erich Wolfgang Skwara, Ariadne Press, 1999, and Midsummer Cut and Glass Voices lasinäänet (both from the German of
Dorothea Grünzweig, Buschek Books, 2002 and 2009). For 35 years, he taught English and Creative Writing at the
University of Victoria, where he edited The Malahat Review.

Phil Hall won the 2011 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in English, for his book of essay-poems Killdeer.

He also won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Killdeer. This book will soon be published in a French translation from Éditions Pris de parole.

His most recent publications are: The Small Nouns Crying Faith (BookThug, 2013), Notes from Gethsemani (Nomados, 2014), and Essay on Legend (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2014).

He is Poetry Editor for BookThug Press, and has recently been Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ottawa, Queen’s University and the University of Windsor, as well as teaching
in the Wired Writing Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

In 2012, he initiated & established a lecture series at Queen’s University, The Page Lectures, in honour of Joanne Page.

He is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He lives near Perth, Ontario.

This event is a prequel to WordsThaw 2015, The Malahat Review’s third annual symposium at the University of Victoria.