March 3
maleea Acker

Maleea Acker is the author of three poetry collections, Hesitating Once to Feel Glory (Nightwood Editions, 2022) and Air-Proof Green and The Reflecting Pool (Pedlar Press, 2009 & 2013), and a non-fiction book, Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast (New Star, 2013 & 2020), which charts the Indigenous stewardship and current restoration of an endangered Vancouver Island ecosystem. Acker holds a PhD in Human Geography (Geopoetics) as well as an MFA in poetry and an MA in Literature, and lectures at the University of Victoria, Thompson Rivers University and Camosun College. She is also currently a UVic post-doctoral researcher, funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada, where she uses storytelling and art to communicate and urge action against climate change.

Maleea Acker’s third book of poems poems hangs on a precipice of emotion. The poems cartwheel from sadness to glory, then break into blossoms in a drought-struck landscape of longing. These are pieces filled with daring leaps and precise, deft metaphors. There is machinery, there are imaginaries; a dictator selects the musical soundtrack. The poems cajole and praise both the world and interior life with an erotic charge and enduring hope. As Jan Zwicky writes, “Acker summons a sad, mysterious music, the self talking to the self as though after the end of the world. A book of mesmerizing lamentations, at once precise and surreal.”

Poetic Appetizer
The west wind faded and bats flew over us.
We both had to work in the morning. When we talked
we faced outward and married one another’s arms
and fingers and heads to one another’s bodies, and it felt
like becoming a planet, out in the dark, with a fragrant light
tearing our lives into pieces where each met the others’ edge.

March 3 Poetic Opener
Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson turned to poetry and short story writing when he retired from academic life in the UK and shortly before he moved, with his wife, to Victoria. He has published three books of short stories in the UK and Canada and (in 2022) a 150 page history of Uplands Golf Club titled A Walk in the Park. He has three collections of poetry published in Canada; Chasing Crows, Apple Man and Crows in the Apple Tree. His recent (2021) collection Village Lines, which was a joint venture with UK artist Alan Taylor, was designed and published in Victoria but printed in the UK. He is currently pre-occupied with a new collaboration with local artist Tony Fathers, to be titled Oak Bay and Not Far Away.

march 10
Brendan McLeod

Brendan McLeod is a writer, theatre creator, and musician. He’s the author of a poetry collection, Friends Without Bodies, a novel, The Convictions of Leonard McKinley, and five theatre shows. His music group The Fugitives has been nominated for a JUNO, as well as multiple Canadian Folk Music and Western Canada Music Awards, including Best Roots Group, Best Songwriter, and Best Vocal Group. He was the Poet of Honour at the 2012 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and the 2015 Victoria Spoken Word Festival.

“An extraordinary little book… In Friends Without Bodies, McLeod gives us a detailed look into the inner life of a sensitive witness to the plague, with particular focus on the embodied loneliness of lockdown and the writer’s uneasy recognition that his suffering is minor compared to the millions who are dying and losing loved ones….Highly recommended.” —Vancouver Sun

In his debut poetry collection, award-winning writer and musician Brendan McLeod tracks the Covid-19 pandemic. Funny, harrowing, and compassionate, Friends Without Bodies mines the irony at the heart of the pandemic—that the greatest tool we have to protect ourselves, and others, is our own loneliness.

Poetic Appetizer
The people will come together.

Even if it means malls become
mausoleums for the clothing
we cared about
when we were seen.

march 10
Poetic opener steven ross smith

Steven Ross Smith, Banff Poet Laureate, 2019–21, loves music and is fascinated by moss. His work often juxtaposes disparate threads, as in fourteen published books, including his poetic series fluttertongue. His newest book is Glimmer: Short Fictions, (Radiant Press). He writes in Victoria, BC.

march 17
zoë Landale - Sponsored by the writers union of canada

Zoë Landale has published nine books, edited two books, and her work appears in around fifty anthologies. Her writing has won significant awards, including first in the CBC Literary Competition for poetry. She taught for fifteen years as a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

What happens when someone we love dies? In luminous poems that echo the Duino Elegies, Zoë Landale—like an edgy, modern-day Rilke—takes the reader to a place of amazement. Enquiring into loneliness and the transformative power of a particular bioregion, Landale’s poems use language infused with the consolations of music to enact transformation.

Orchid Heart Elegies captures the torn, jagged moments of grief and transforms them into poems of deep consolation and healing.

Poetic Appetizer
Here we stand between one
breath and death asking to be light. Off in the distance
the city reflects light onto pink sky; oh such loneliness
steals the heart and rides off with it hanging. . . "

march 17
poetic opener pamela porter

Pamela Porter is the author of fourteen published books, including ten volumes of poetry and four books for children/young adults, including two novels in free verse. Pamela’s awards include the Governor General’s Award, the Gwendolyn MacEwan Prize for Best Poem, the Freefall Magazine Prize, the Malahat Review 50th Anniversary Poetry Prize, and the Vallum Poem of the Year Award. PEP has been a refuge of poetry ever since Wendy Morton ran Mocambo Po in the early 2000s.

march 17
PEP in the afternoon with Zoë Landale

Join us at New Horizons in James Bay at 2pm. New Horizons Centre is at 234 Menzies St. in James Bay (street parking only). Please note that unlike our evening readings, the afternoon readings will not be livestreamed or recorded.

march 24
Jamie Dopp

Jamie Dopp is a novelist, poet and musician, as well as a professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Victoria. Getting Lost Going Home is his third collection of poems. His most recent novel is Driving Lessons. Amongst his academic works are three co-edited essay collections on sports literature.

Getting Lost Going Home invites us to see the world through the eyes of a father, a son, a husband, a teacher and writer. In a style that echoes the narrative lyricism of Philip Levine and Bronwen Wallace, the poems tell stories both comic and tragic, using language that is familiar and yet startling, to explore the complexities of our most intimate relationships and our place in the world.

Poetic appetizer
Somewhere up the fir tree there are still
branches circled with duct tape,
whose grey-white ends dangle like
unwinding bandages.

from “Boy on a Trampoline”

march 24
Poetic opener Derek Peach

Derek has been a teacher and traveler for more than 50 of his 70+ years and has recorded his life’s experiences in poetry and prose along the way. Now in transition from teacher to writer, he draws on all of those times for current work.

march 31
Jónína Kirton

Jónína Kirton, a Red River Métis and Icelandic poet received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She just released her third book, Standing in a River of Time.

Standing in a River of Time merges poetry and lyrical memoir on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on a Métis family. The Ancestors whisper to Kirton throughout, asking her to heal, to bring them home, so that within these stories of redemption and loss the dead walk with us, their presence felt as the story unfurls in unexpected ways. Kirton does not offer false hope, nor does she push us towards answers we are not yet ready for.

Poetic appetizer
born of water
meant to float
I sink until I rise
to the big sky songs
of my people travelling rivers

WRITING PRACTICE WITH Cynthia Woodman kirkham
SATURDAY, March 25 @11AM PACIFIC TIME

Join us for Writing Practice on Zoom. Writing Practice is free to attend — please feel free to invite a friend and share these Zoom credentials with them. We’ll have exercises, discussion, and silent time to write together.

Sign up for Zoom credentials HERE!
*Note this is a Zoom-only event.