Friday, May 5

Evelyn Lau

Evelyn Lau has authored nine volumes of poetry, and received the Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and a National Magazine Award, as well as nominations for a BC Book Prize and the Governor-General’s Award. Her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including the Best Canadian Poetry series.

Set against a backdrop of shifting weather and a blasted, mysterious landscape, Cactus Gardens explores the complexity and intensity of personal relationships. The narrator drifts through a variety of locales, from a hospital ward to a lakefront hotel, a downtown condo, and restaurant patios, depicting friendships that are as meaningful and volatile as romantic entanglements.

MAY 5 poetic opener
Rhonda Ganz

Rhonda Ganz’s Frequent, small loads of laundry (Mother Tongue) won the Relit Award for Poetry. It was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Victoria Butler Book Prize. Her poems are in The Malahat Review, Rattle, Room, Harvard Design Magazine, on city buses (Poetry in Transit) and anthologies, including Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, Poems from Planet Earth, Force Field:  77 Women Poets of BC, and Voicing Suicide. She reads crime fiction, watches Judge Judy, and needlefelts fancy hearts in the Victoria home she shares with a quiet man, and two young cats who amuse themselves by knocking things over.

MAY 12
SUSAN MUSGRAVE (Sponsored by anonymous)

Susan Musgrave has published more than 30 books and was longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize. Also in 2023 she became the 30th recipient of the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. The high point of her literary career was finding her name in the index of Montreal‘s Irish Mafia.

If grief is the willingness to be claimed by a story bigger than ourselves, Musgrave writes, “in that /tender wavering, I let grief in.” But to say Exculpatory Lilies is a collection solely about grief would be to miss the whole nature of Musgrave’s voice and sensibility. Her alertness to even the most desolate places makes her personal sorrows unbearably potent; the way that she scrutinizes language, and her emotions too, makes shot silk out of sackcloth and ashes.

Poetic Appetizer

...He taught me to take
pleasure, not in ideas, but in small miracles,
like breath. Peeling wild onions to savour the sweet
layers within. A thin soup tasting of rain.

May 12 Poetic Opener
David Day

David Day has published over 50 books that have sold in excess of 3 million copies and been translated into twenty languages. Best known internationally for his dozen best-selling books on the works of JRR Tolkien, Day is also noted for six major books of natural history and environmental activism. His Doomsday Book of Animals was selected as a “Book of the Year” by Time magazine and was the basis for 100 part TV series Lost Animals of the Twentieth Century. David Day has also written six illustrated books of animal stories and three illustrated books of poems for children. His children’s novel, The Emperor’s Panda was nominated for both the Governor General’s Award and the National Library Award. His six books of poetry for adults include poems that have won CBC and National Magazine awards.

AT NEW HORIZONS IN james bay, May 19 at 2pm
PEP IN THE AFTERNOON WITH alice major

Alice Major has published 12 books of poetry and the essay collection, Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science. Her many awards include, most recently, an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta. (Clearly they didn’t check the transcript of her long-ago marks.) She served as Edmonton’s first poet laureate. (More information below.)

May 19
Alice Major

Alice Major has published 12 books of poetry and the essay collection, Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science. Her many awards include, most recently, an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta. (Clearly they didn’t check the transcript of her long-ago marks.) She served as Edmonton’s first poet laureate.

Knife on Snow is a book about being here, at this point in human history, and knowing how deeply connected we are to the past. It’s about the utter continuity of time: the long narratives of people and fire, the surge of empires, the deep history of life on earth, even of the solar system itself. It’s about what falls from the sky—apparently random, but never without cause.

Poetic Appetizer
from “Knife on Snow”

This bitter winter night.
The city light that blanks the stars
and stares at the metal wedge
stamped on snow. 

may 19 poetic opener
Nancy Yakimoski

Nancy Yakimoski is a visual artist and writer living and working on the traditional territories of the Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. In 2016, her poetry group enjoyed a week-long writing residency at Centrum (Port Townsend, WA). Nancy co-organized the ambitious Art-Poem-Art Experiment at Camosun College in 2016; in 2017, she won The Malahat Review’s WordsThaw poetry prize. She has a trail of unfinished manuscripts that she swears she will complete—including a collection of linked poems about raising her child with Down syndrome. Nancy teaches art history, visual culture, and lens-based courses in the visual arts department at Camosun College in Victoria, BC.

may 26
susan braley (Sponsored by Angie Killoran, Leah Fowler, Peter Pinfold, and Wendy Donawa)

Susan Braley lives in Victoria, BC, on the unceded territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Her first poetry collection, Tilling the Darkness, was published by Caitlin Press this year. Her poetry was included in Best Canadian Poetry 2023, and appears in literary journals across Canada.

In Tilling the Darkness, a young woman in a large family navigates the inequities of gender roles on the farm and in the church. This woman, after leaving the farm, comes to appreciate the complex, bountiful legacy of her early life. Tilling the Darkness explores how we all undertake this tilling ritual in the finite field of our lives. In these powerful poems, it is often women who, even in the face of injury and erasure, turn dark to light.

Poetic Appetizer
from “Not a Pretty Stone”

Mantle bursts into air for the first time . . . .
I hold the scrap in front of me—
fire, earth, water, jewel.
Blood-blush rising in my hands.

may 26 poetic opener
sarah weaver

Sarah Weaver is a nature lover and earth activist, and has written about the environment for many years. She is now branching into poetry and memoir and has been published in both genres in Island Writer. Both her poems and prose have been winners in writing contests, including Victoria Writers’ Society and Shuswap Association of Writers.

Sarah has been writing since high school, where she was Literary editor of the school newspaper. She is a close observer of nature, and in her words and photographs shares her wonder of the world and helps us "see with new eyes".

In 2002 Sarah’s non-fiction guidebook On the Living Edge, Your Handbook for Waterfront Living became the flagship product of an award-winning environmental project. Over five years 22,000 copies of the book were sold, making it a three-times Canadian best seller.

Sarah blogs at “Coast Lines” (linesfromthecoast.blogspot.com/); her website is sarahweaver.ca.

WRITING PRACTICE WITH Andrea McKenzie Raine
may 27 @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.

Andrea McKenzie Raine was born in Smithers, BC and grew up in Victoria, BC where she still resides. She was enrolled in the Creative Writing program and earned a B.A. in English Literature at the University of Victoria in 2000. She has attended the successful Planet Earth Poetry reading series (formerly known as Mocambopo) in Victoria, BC since 1997, and participated in the Glenairley writing retreats led by Canadian poet and novelist Patrick Lane in Sooke, BC. She published two books of poetry titled A Mother’s String (2005) and A Year of Mornings (2017) through Ekstasis Editions, as well as several self-published poetry books. Her poetry has appeared in Mocambo Nights, Canadian Literature journal, Quills, Borderlines anthology (Ascent Aspirations magazine), Tempus anthology (Rubicon Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Tongues of Fire anthology, and Glenairley chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane (Leaf Press). She lives with her husband and two young sons and, by day, is employed as a correspondence writer for the provincial government. She has also published three novels as a series titled Turnstiles (2014), A Crowded Heart (2015) and Beyond the Summer Grass (2020). 

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

june 2
karen enns

Karen Enns is the author of four collections of poetry: Dislocations, published in 2023, Cloud Physics, winner of the Raymond Souster Award, Ordinary Hours, and That Other Beauty. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Grain Magazine. She lives in Central Saanich.

Poet Karen Enns takes the reader on a lyrical journey, wrapped in the vicissitudes of seasons and weather—while observing human and other-than-human lives. Enns invites us to peer and listen, always concerned with the locations and dislocations perspective implies and creates.

Poetic Appetizer
Some days nothing becomes something
and then nothing again.
You read the lips of air.

from “Almost”

june 2 poetic opener
barbara pelman

Barbara Pelman is a retired high school English teacher. She conducts poetry workshops and is an assistant at Planet Earth Poetry’s Friday night venue. She has three published books of poetry: One Stone (Ekstasis Editions 2005), Borrowed Rooms (Ronsdale Press, 2008), and Narrow Bridge (Ronsdale Press 2017), and a chapbook, Aubade Amalfi (Rubicon Press 2016). Her fourth book, A Brief and Endless Sea will be published by Caitlin Press in the fall, 2023. In 2018 her glosa, “Nevertheless” won the Malahat Review’s Open Season Poetry Contest. Previously another glosa “After Winter” won the Literary Writes contest in 2005.

June 9 Chapbook Launch
“How can I keep from singing”

Please join us for a group reading of poems created during the fall retreat with Laura Apol at Honeymoon Bay, BC, in October 2022: “The Poetry of Delight.” In her introduction, Laura ponders: “Poetry of delight in the midst of all that the world and our lives contain seems a bit… Audacious? Naïve? Unsophisticated? Or does it seem like something more positive—a means of healing? A celebration of life and life force? A way to hold ourselves and each other in a sacred space of joy and empowerment and appreciation?” Though the retreat proved to be challenging in some unforeseen ways, it nevertheless generated poems full of surprise and wonder and gratitude. This chapbook, “How can I keep from singing” highlights these poems.

And there will be cake! 

Readers:

Michelle Poirier Brown, Barbara Pelman, Anne Hopkinson, Kate Braid, MJ Burrows, Susan Olding, Daniel Scott, Jodi Lundgren, Nancy Issenman, Michael Boissevain, Wendy Donawa, Susan Braley, and John Swanson