I write about Pakistani folklore, thinking about the richness of my own history and the ways it has been erased through colonization. I write about love. I love writing about love, and I love leaning into softness and vulnerability.

For me, the thrill of writing poetry is this possibility of being inspired, of looking at something or someone as if for the first time, seeing it or them without imposing myself. Jan Zwicky in her book, Wisdom and Metaphor, calls this seeing-as.

I dream new selves and alternative futures into becoming through poetry. I sing to the co-flourishing of the living. This song, in order to find its music, asks me to courageously accept past trauma before transforming the compost of the dead into a healing hymn.

Poetry to me is a genre of community. With the work we do at Rahila’s Ghost Press I have been privileged to meet so many incredible writers with their own unique voices and sense of story-telling.

Someone who does not simply tell us about something, but sits beside us in the silence that follows— breathing, alive. This is what... early, beloved poems did for me.

I write a haptic poetry in which the touch of other writing is continually felt, such that the encounter with my book is also an encounter with the books I have been reading.

When I’m not seeing the world poetically (lines arriving, images that stick, connections that surprise, a kind of spatial awareness that is outside of ourselves) then I feel flat—imbalanced. Not whole. Half alive. I don’t want the literal. I crave the figurative, always.

Aspects of my poetic work include deepening knowledge of self and home, decolonization, prairie history, environmental collapse, and the long poem.

When reading …, I enter a state of not-knowing which frees the imagination: poems come on through, then, through a kind of portal, door to a gate, unlocked—so the poems: themselves, the thing.

The act of writing poetry is an emancipatory act that allows me to write my truths and observations about the world we live in. I also am a researcher at heart, which allows me to explore the art of poetry from a place of documentation, and engaging both the archives and engaging popular media references.

Whenever I’m pressed for a definition of the word lyric, I think first of this—the ‘song’ contained in the Greek word ode, the Latin carmen, the Hebrew psalm, the Sanskrit gita, and the French cantique. Or the ‘little sound’ of the Italian sonetto; the rhythmic ‘jumping’ or ‘dancing’ behind the French ballade.

Julie Joosten’s first book, Light Light, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Goldie Award. Her second book, Nought, was published in 2020.

My paternal grandmother was a writer, poet, and elementary school teacher in my family’s ancestral hometown, Anju, Jining. She taught her students how to read words by the jujube trees she helped to plant at the entrance of their elementary school yard.

Poetry has allowed me to explore loss, the world of the unseen and the Ancestors. It offers me the ability to gesture towards memories that are incomplete, opening doorways to the thoughts and feelings that live on as dreamscapes in our psyche, inhabiting our bodies and souls.

My poetry since the 1990s has primarily addressed black and mixed-race identity and, in particular, black history in British Columbia, variously at the formal meeting points …

I was born “into the world” speaking the Cree-Michif of my home community of Île-à-la-Crosse. I heard sounds and mimicking them I learned words had power to connect me with a world outside of myself, human and otherwise

It’s inevitable that landscape seeps into writing, whether we are writing from an urban, a rural, or a wild place. And there are many kinds of landscape—the physical, the aural, the psychological and the social, just to name a few.

Through the honesty of her words, she embraces the spirit world, the resilience of her foremothers, the integral healing powers of disassociation as a survival mechanism, and the richness of her PoWaMeWin - dreams, which reconnects her to herself.

If the heart could speak, it would speak poetry. If the soul could speak, it would speak poetry.

Poets have the chance to build a conversation in writing, a means of exploring what writing can be through ongoing discourse and the creation of opportunity.