Poet Maureen Hynes

Friday, october 6
maureen hynes

Maureen Hynes lives in Dish with One Spoon territory/Toronto, and is the author of six collections of poetry. She has won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award, and was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, the Golden Crown Literary Award for lesbian writers (U.S), and twice for the Pat Lowther Award.

A strong theme of journeys is threaded through Maureen Hynes’s Take the Compass. Poems can be journeys of repair and recovery, adventure and discovery. However, even when our “journeying” is confined or curtailed, we are still travelling—and one of those journeys is discovering where language can take us. Hynes’s collection is a search for tools and instruments that will “ward off adversity,” and sustain social justice. They point to sources of remedy, repair and renewal, and to the sustaining power of love.

Poetic Appetizer
from “For Your Head”

Pick four small leaves—
one for Hope, one for Trust, one for Rage,
the last for Desire. Lay each briefly on your tongue,
just taste, don’t swallow. Open your mouth,
let their power beam into the world’s countless
troubled and troubling zones.

OCTOBER 6 poetic opener
GISELA RUEBSAAT

Gisela Ruebsaat has performed her poems at academic and literary events including the International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry in Vancouver and Montreal, the Inquiry and Innovation Institute in New York, and the Soulfood-Lesebuhne in Marburg Germany. Gisela’s Ekphrastic poems and poetry walks based on public art were featured in the Oak Bay Arts Alive Festival in 2018 and 2019. In 2020, her poem “Communion” won first prize at the Planet Earth Poetry’s All We Need is Love contest and her poem “A Tale Told to my Daughter on her Wedding Day” won second prize in the Island Writer poetry competition. Heart Mechanic, Gisela’s debut collection, was published in 2016.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13

Victoria Festival of Authors Panel: These Verses Weren’t Made in a Vacuum: Community & the Muse

NOTE: This event will NOT be at our usual venue! Please join us at Langham Court Theatre (805 Langham Court). This is a ticketed event; get your tickets HERE.

Writing poetry is often seen as a solitary act, but the truth is, poetry breeds poetry. Connection with other poets can be deeply impactful in sparking an initial interest, developing craft, and sustaining a poetic career in the long term. For this year’s poetry panel, we have three women who have each been integral, throughout their careers, in building B.C.’s flourishing poetic community. We will hear Lorna Crozier, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, and Marie Metaphor Specht read from their new collections, as well as discuss their experiences as poetic mentors, teachers, and organizers. In a conversation moderated by Zoe Dickinson, current Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry, we will discuss the ingredients of an inspiring, inclusive poetry community; balancing one’s own practice against nurturing others’ development; and what poets as a group can offer both each other and the world.

Moderated by Zoe Dickinson. Curated by Planet Earth Poetry.

Poet Meghan Fandrich

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20
MEGHAN FANDRICH - SPONSORED BY BRENTWOOD BOUND BOOKSTORE
Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, in Nlaka’pamux Territory, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For the past decade, she ran Klowa Art Café, a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage is Meghan’s debut poetry collection.

On the day that Lytton, BC, burned to the ground, Meghan Fandrich ran from the flames. She saw the village turn into a black pillar of smoke, and went home after a month-long evacuation to its ashes. Her house, on the edge of the fire, was saved; her community and her small business were not. Life as she knew it was gone, and somehow, in spite of the trauma and the ongoing onslaught of natural disasters, she had to keep going. Living. Surviving.

Burning Sage shares Meghan’s deeply personal story of the fire, the ensuing trauma, and the path out of it. But it is also a human story, a universal story, of loneliness, fragility and beauty. The poems follow the arc of shock, fear, and anger, and the impossibility of single parenting in a burned-up town. They tell of a connection, a love, and the way that feeling understood can help us understand ourselves. The poems in Burning Sage share a vivid portrait of grief and heartbreak and, ultimately, of healing.

october 20 poetic opener
Kurt trzcinski

Kurt Trzcinski is an ecologist who has studied many ecosystems around the world. He thrives at the edge of poetry and science, and hopes that together they can create new visions of how we relate to the world. His second chapbook, Tonewood (Red Tower bookworks), comes out this fall. Tonewood (Red Tower bookworks, 2023) is a short collection of poems gathered from the author’s journeys and work as a field biologist. Each poem is an invitation to pause, connect and rewild.

Planet Earth Poetry New Horizons October 20

New Horizons, 2pm

Join our featured readers on the third Friday of every month in the afternoon at New Horizons in James Bay (234 Menzies Street), in addition to our usual evening reading at Russell Books.

Poet Jen Currin

friday, october 27
jen currin

Jen Currin's most recent book is the poetry collection Trinity Street (House of Anansi, 2023). They have published five other books, including Hider/Seeker: Stories, which won a Canadian Independent Book Award, was a finalist for a ReLit Award, and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book; School (Coach House, 2014), which was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and a ReLit Award; and The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for a LAMBDA, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and a ReLit Award. A white settler of mixed, mostly western European ancestry, Currin was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Multnomah, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin, and other tribes. They currently live on unceded Qayqayt, Musqueam, Kwikwetlem, and Kwantlen Nation territories in New Westminster, BC and teach creative writing and English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. www.jencurrin.com

Heartsick, reverent, irreverent, and quietly political, Trinity Street is the much-anticipated fifth collection from poet Jen Currin, winner of the Audre Lorde Award and a Lambda finalist. 

While Trinity Street is in fact an actual street in Vancouver, it is also the site of an imaginary garden and imperfect utopia in the title poem of this new collection. Currin’s poems weave together the meditative and the disruptive, the queer and quotidian, and the worlds of the dead and the living. Connections are made through prayer and protest; friendships are forged on a planet challenged by climate crisis, collective grief, and the perils of late capitalism. 

These poems vibrate with unexpected shifts and precise, startling imagery, the touchstones of a poet whose work critics have described as “thrilling,” “emotionally evocative,” and “revelatory.”

Poet Meharooni Ghani

October 27 poetic opener
meharoona ghani

Meharoona Ghani, writer and poet published in many collections including Body & Soul (Caitlin Press), The Muslimah Who Fell to Earth (Mawenzi House Publishers), and a forthcoming anthology by the Federation of BC Writers as result of making their 2021 Literary Contest shortlist. Meharoona continues to write “Letters to Rumi “– her journey of identity and belonging; and contributes to the Spiritually Speaking column with the Victoria Times Colonist. Learn more at: mghaniconsulting.ca.