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friDAY, march 11, 2022

Poetic Opener: Wendy Donawa

Alan Hill

Alan Hill was born in the UK and immigrated to Canada in 2005 after meeting his wife while working in Botswana. He is the former Poet Laureate of the City of New Westminster (2017–2020), former president of the Royal City Literary Arts Society (RCLAS), and was the editor and curator of A Poetry of Place: Journeys Across New Westminster, published in partnership with New Westminster Arts Services. His writing has been published internationally and his poetry has appeared in Event, CV2, Canadian Literature, The Antigonish Review, subTerrain, and Poetry is Dead, among others. He works in the field of community development and immigrant settlement and lives in New Westminster, BC.

In the Blood traces the relationship of two brothers through childhood to adulthood and in and out of institutions to reveal the intricate, often hidden bonds that are broken and forged by the effects of mental illness.

Poetic Appetizer
That night a girl with smudgy glasses danced with the banisters, a teen with a wispy beard clapped in a corner, nobody touched:

In fact, nobody ever did touch, not here, where surviving in your own body was enough

knowing it was still there, still moving, however out of step, to your commands. 

 From the “Hospital Dance”   

Instgram: caitlinpress.daggereditions
FB: caitlinbooks
Twitter: @caitlinpress

March 11 Poetic Opener

Wendy Donawa spent much of her adult life in Barbados, where she was educated, and worked as a college instructor and museum curator. She has returned to her Victoria birthplace on the unceded traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt people. Her poems have appeared in magazines, chapbooks, anthologies, and public transport buses; she has read in libraries, bookstores, literary festivals, reading series, parks, and pubs! Her first book, Thin Air of the Knowable, was a Gerald Lampert Award finalist. Her second collection, Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions, was recently published by Frontenac House.

friDAY, March 18, 2022

Poetic Opener: Carol Halligan

Sarah de Leeuw

Award-winning writer and Canada Research Chair, Dr. Sarah de Leeuw is a Professor with the NMP, a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine. In 2017 she was appointed to Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She grew up on Haida Gwaii and now lives in Lheidli T’enneh/Dakelh and Syilx Territory.

Written in a time of ostensible Truth and Reconciliation in so-called Canada, when the Government of British Columbia declared support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples but continues to arrest Indigenous peoples in their homes and on unceded lands, Lot draws a firm, and yet poetic, line between historic and present-day white-Euro-colonial violence. Through structure, form, and sound, in Lot insist on the possibilities of poetry to create better worlds, to utter something anew.  

Facebook and Instagram: @KelseyAndrewsWriter

Poetic Appetizer
as in                 royalty paid to mine owner, ore

as in                 forming part of a larger whole

as in                 person regarded as having a special quality (bad lot)

as in                 plot of land

FB: Sarah De Leeuw
Twitter @SarahNdeLeeuw

March 18 Poetic Opener

Carol Halligan, former resident of Winterpeg, now spends her time in beautiful Victoria writing poetry and doing stand up comedy instead of shovelling snow. Usually.
So far, Carol has not published her poetry in a book or entered any contests. Her daughter calls her a “master procrastinator.”
However, if anyone knows an artist who could draw a Roy Lichtenstein romance comic book cover, please get in touch.

friDAY, March 25, 2022

SPRING FLING ALL-OPEN-MIC NIGHT

“April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay

We made it through the dark months! Let’s celebrate with an entire night of spring-related poetry. For this special all-open-mic night of PEP, we are allowing poets to read up to 2 poems each, for a total of 6 minutes – BUT to get the longer time-slot at least one of the poems you read must connect to our springtime theme! Please do time your readings and make sure they will fit into the 6 minutes. There will be a prize for the “springiest” poem!

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Jude Neale & Kamal Parmar

Jude Neale is a Canadian poet, mentor, educator, opera singer and spoken word performer. She publishes frequently in print and online journals, including The Antigonish Review,  Ascent Aspirations, Quill, and Leaf Press.

“I just read Inside the Pearl and what a delicate beautiful tone comes by. A light bell sound. Wonder. Grace...”
Joy Kogawa, Order of Canada (CM),Order of British Columbia (OBC), novelist, poet, activist. 

This book challenges readers to look at Canadian history in a new way so we can face the wrongs committed by the government with the complicity of this nation.

Nanaimo poet Kamal Parmar is currently an Associate member of the League of Canadian Poets, a board member of Federation of BC Writers and a member of The Writers Union of Canada, the Canadian Authors Association as well as of Haiku Canada. She is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Nanaimo.

Poetic Appetizer
Lost in a dream,

I see folds of green on the distant hills

rise and fall.

Waves crash in, on the shores of my mind

sucking me into the whirlpool of my  past.

What does the wind say? is available at Chapters; Windowseat Books and Well Read Books in Nanaimo; and online.