Read, love, listen, write, dance and sing – cry out – make waves – stand your ground firmly – experience big – be brave – be vulnerable – know who you are – give back before you take – and remember

As a Kwantlen man, father, fisherman, poet and playwright I believe the gift of words was given to me so I can retell all of our stories either upon stage or in in a book of poetry or in our longhouses on a cold winter’s night.

I feel like the poems—even when they remember, forget, and imagine elsewhere or elsetime—encounter place as layers of memory: arrivals, departures, resistances, transformations.

The measure of these geolinguistic spaces is found in the particularity that writing reveals: correspondences of a world. And then, of course, the surprising and unexpected holes in that world.

As a daddy writer to be, I urge every parent to be able to write about their experiences and share it with the world.

“Poetry, because it enacts the mutability of both language and perception, can reflect the constant mutability of our world. In the underground verbal webwork made by the roots of words…

I think of my poetry as a form of rescue work. I’ve spent much of my creative life giving voice to figures from the recent or distant past, silenced by turmoil and time, who clamour to have their stories told. It’s a process that been called the ventriloquism of history…

Molly blends epistolary, confessional, lyric, and prose forms, especially favouring the poetic statement and contemporary plainspeak. Her use of humour and sharp thematic and formal turns act as vehicles to empathy and comprehension.

Jan Zwicky is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Forge, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, and Wisdom & Metaphor. As both poet and philosopher, she frequently focuses on music, the natural world, and questions of ecology.

Entering Sappho is an engage-ment with desperate, indulgent, and condescending nostalgia. It documents a wish for this special kind of small-town life.

Sometimes when I wash the dishes, I am seized by the notion that I can attain some kind of transcendent absolute, will have brushed my scrubby against a joyful, radiant beauty if I can just clean every speck, every burnt skirmish from the surface of the pots and pans.

My poetry cannot exist without the confines of colonialism still bearing down on me that has kicked my ancestors so hard in the past that future children fell. My poetry punches people in the guts.

It’s rare that the initial draft of a poem matches my vision of what its potential. It takes time to either carve away at it to get to its essence, or to slowly unpack and add layers of sensory imagery and meaning—or both simultaneously.

This curious empathy leads to an emotion of form, but not without awkward pauses and stumbles, a slapstick which all the while suggests a particularity of duration, occasionally melody.

Poetry for me is the literary form closest to living, to breathing. Poems may arise directly from dreams, revery, witnessing: all we need do is articulate the moment, and others may enter in, share the experience.

I came to poetry as an Africadian (African-Nova Scotian) kid trying to write songs. In fact, it was July 1, 1975, when I decided to write four songs per day…

I’m thinking about sentences, I’m thinking about the prose poem, I’m thinking about friends and social concerns and civil rights and the ecological precipice; our small children go rushing past.

Both my written and visual work investigate the representation of Black people across the Canadian cultural landscape. My goal is to unpack mechanisms of power and systemic oppression…