NOVEMBER 15th 2025
3:30Pm to 5:00pm
SAY IT read by Jan Zwicky
with GARTH MARTENS
followed by a conversation with
TIM LILBURN
Saturday November 15th from 3:30pm-5:00pm (doors at 3:00pm)
OPEN SPACE ARTS SOCIETY: 510 Fort St, 2nd floor (wheel-chair accessible lift)
Garth Martens and Jan Zwicky join forces to read Jan’s new long poem, Say It, which arises from the depths of environmental cataclysm.
Say It is the most recent release from Deer Mountain Pages. Tim Lilburn will introduce this unique publishing venture and lead a discussion with Garth and Jan following the reading.
Tea will be offered after the reading.
This event is supported by Open Space Arts Society, Victoria Arts Council, and by The City of Victoria through the Poet Laureateship.
POET, JAN ZWICKY
Jan Zwicky is a Canadian poet and philosopher whose work has engaged with environmental issues for the last five decades. With Garth Martens, Gareth Owen, and Denise Yeo, she has been part of Dark Sounds, a collaboration that fuses contemporary English-language poetry with the intensity of flamenco to offer urgent truth-telling for our times. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, Forge, and The Long Walk, as well as the philosophical works Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor. Her work has received many honours, including the Governor General’s Award. In 2022, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.
POET, TIM LILBURN
Tim Lilburn lives in the Bowker Creek watershed in W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Vancouver Island. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Harmonia Mundi, The House of Charlemagne, Assiniboia, Orphic Politics, Kill-site, and To the River. His work has received the Governor General’s Award, The Canadian Authors’ Association Award, the European Medal of Poetry and Art (the Homer Prize) and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. His poetry has been translated widely. Lilburn is also the author of three essay collections, Living in the World as if It Were Home, Going Home and The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, and editor of two other influential books on poetics. A new essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, will appear from the University of Alberta Press in November, 2023. He has taught at the University of Victoria, the University of Saskatchewan and Middlebury College and worked with the dance troupe New Dance Horizons as a writer and performer.
POET, GARTH MARTENS
Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence (House of Anansi) and the chapbook Remediation (JackPine Press). For his first book, he was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry, and for a selection of poems from that manuscript, he won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. In 2017, he co-founded Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble, as its producer and principal poet. His work appears in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead, Grain, PRISM, Geist, Best Canadian Poetry, and 29 Mennonite Poets. He’s a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and a former member of The Malahat Review’s editorial board. He lives in Victoria, BC. His next book of poetry Who Else in the Dark Headed There is forthcoming in spring of 2026.