in person at Russell Books

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IN PERSON

Livestream HERE (Meeting ID: 494 660 4447 /Passcode: 2129)

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friDAY, february 11, 2022

Poetic Opener: Barbara Pelman

Cornelia Hoogland

Dressed in Only a Cardigan, She Picks Up Her Tracks in the Snow, (Baseline) and Cosmic Bowling (with Ted Goodden, Guernica), are Cornelia Hoogland’s recent publications. Trailer Park Elegy and Woods Wolf Girl were finalists for Canadian national awards. Hoogland was the 2019 writer-in-residence for the Al Purdy A-Frame and the Whistler Festival. Visit her website here.
FB Cornelia Hoogland
Twitter @CHoogland

“Most of Cosmic Bowling’s poems and images playfully (hence, Bowling) ruminate on the complex forces of push and pull that operate internally and externally, from beneath the earth to the far reaches of space (hence, Cosmic). The beauty of this complexity lies in the brevity of the poems and sculptures and also in the dialogue between the two, which is at once playfully illustrative and also dialectically enriching.” Julie McIsaac, reviewer.

Poetic Appetizer

36. Ming I, Darkening of the Light

Let’s say there are ten pictures. In nine of them
I’m what everybody thinks I am, dutiful. But in the tenth,
I’m as I know myself to be. Even when I was a kid

there was a room at my centre––it had windows
that opened to the stars. Time and space
whirled outward, except it was me expanding.

february 11 Poetic Opener

Barbara Pelman is a retired high school English teacher, and poet. She has three published books (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 poems have appeared in literary journals, and in 2018 her glosa “Nevertheless” won the Malahat Poetry Prize.

friDAY, February 18, 2022

Poetic Opener: Shawnda

Kelsey Andrews

Kelsey Andrews lives in Saanichton BC. She has written about birdwatching when you can’t see the birds, snails, and two separate poems about turning into rock. The natural world anchors much of her writing while she explores her past and various possible presents. Big Sky Falling is her first book.

When Kelsey moves from rural Alberta where nothing breaks the sky but the curve of the earth, to Vancouver with its metal-scarred skyline, depression nests within her, along with loneliness and past secrets. In Big Sky Falling she lessens her burdens by writing poems that are not without gristle and little violences, but draw on the earthy whimsy of the natural world and ultimately speak to the light that persists. 

Facebook and Instagram: @KelseyAndrewsWriter

Poetic Appetizer
“we uncover joy somehow

like light hidden green

under a cabbage we pick

for coleslaw.”

            from “Green”

February 18 Poetic Opener

Shawnda is a poet, visual artist and writer of short fiction. Originally from Montreal, Shawnda has lived in seven countries. She currently resides in Victoria, BC. She loves big noses and laughter!

TuesDAY, February 22, 2022

Chapbook Launch

Please join us for the launch of Wild Swings. This chapbook is a collaboration among thirteen poets who were connected through an online retreat led by Richard Osler in the summer of 2020. This workshop was the Covid alternative to meeting in person at La Romita School of Art in the Umbrian hills of Italy. We made the best of it!

The first half of this collection contains response poems where each poem but the first is inspired by the one that comes before it. The second half is made up of centos, a poetic form that uses lines borrowed from other poems. We lifted lines from all the response poems. One phrase that appeared several times was “wild swings,” hence the title.

In the introduction, Richard is “captured by the echoes upon echoes upon echoes that reverberate through this huge small collection” and “these echoes cast a spell and I am cast adrift from logic and reason and swept into a current of revelation and surprise.”

Wild Swings is published by Nose in Book Publishing. Editor, Linda Crosfield

friDAY, February 25, 2022

Poetic Opener: Terry Ann Carter

Doris Fiszer

Doris Fiszer is an Ottawa poet. Her debut collection Locked in Different Alphabets (Silver Bow Publishing) was nominated for the 2021 Archibald Lampman Award. She has two published chapbooks, The Binders and Sasanka (Wild Flower). Awards include the 2017 John Newlove Award and Tree Press’s 2016 Chapbook Award for The Binders, also a nominee for the bpNichol Award.

Locked in Different Alphabets portrays the legacy of the author’s parents displaced by the Second World War following their origins and imprisonment in war camps in Germany. Through a series of vivid portraits, the author reveals the impact of their war experiences on the next generation’s lives in Canada. In the face of the traumas and struggles of the past, the strength to love and receive solace from family bonds and the beauty of nature prevail.

Poetic Appetizer
Four lines from my poem, “Lately Everything is Language”

Branches wave
in a different alphabet.
Your voice murmurs
through the pines.

February 25 Poetic Opener

Poet and paper artist, Terry Ann Carter is the author of seven collections of poetry, two haiku guidebooks, and five haiku chapbooks; she has edited four haiku anthologies. As past president of Haiku Canada, founder of and facilitator for KaDo Ottawa and Haiku Arbutus Victoria Study Group, she has given haiku and book arts workshops around the world. Her eighth collection First I Fold the Mountain Black Moss Press, launches this spring. More at her website.