St@nza 19.4 Winter 2022

Issue 19 Vol. 4 Winter 2022

Quarterly News from the League of Canadian Poets

News from the League

Cold Moon Contests from LCP

They’re back! The Very Small Verse and Broadsheet Contests from the League of Canadian Poets are now open to submissions. It’s now easier than ever to submit to both contests at once! New this year: Savings for everyone!

LCP Members receive access to an exclusive entry fee: only $2.50 per submission to Very Small Verse Contest and $5 per submission to the Broadsheet Contest.

SAVE 5$! If your submission fees total $25 or more, use the coupon code ONEMOREPOEM to get $5 off your total (LCP Member and General Public)!

BOTH CONTESTS ARE OPEN NOW UNTIL JANUARY 16, 2023. Learn more and submit your poetry!

Poem In Your Pocket Day Contest

There will be 10 selections made from contest submissions for the Poem In Your Pocket Postcards. The 10 selected poets will receive $300, the full Poem Postcard Pack, and will be invited to provide an audio recording of their selected poem. Free for LCP Members to submit, $10 entry fee for general public!

Deadline: December 16, 2022 Learn more and submit your poetry!

The Jessamy

Stursberg

Poetry Prize for Canadian Youth was established to foster a lifelong relationship between Canadian youth and the literary arts, specifically poetry. The prize is supported through a generous donation from the Stursberg family and other donors in honour of Jessamy Stursberg. The prize accepts submissions from young poets all across Canada, with three prizes awarded in both the Junior (grades 7 to 9) and Senior (grades 10 to 12) categories: Winner: $400, Second Place: $350, Third Place: $300

Selected winning poems and runners-up will be published in a special edition of the League of Canadian Poets chapbook series! Deadline is April 30, 2023. Find out more.

NEW! LCP Membership Drive

Invite your fellow poets to join the LCP and they will receive a year of complimentary membership (2022–2023). Between 2022 and 2023, the League of Canadian Poets invites poets to apply for a free year of membership in the organization. We invite LCP members and members of the poetry community to self-nominate, or to nominate others for this offer. If you know of a talented poet who should be

a member of the League, fill out one of the forms below so we can reach out with key information and application instructions to receive free LCP membership. This opportunity is open to candidates who are not current or former LCP members. Nominate a talented poet you know for free LCP Membership today!

LCP Community Committees

Join a Community Committee of the League!The League of Canadian Poets is excited to invite active members of the League to sign up for committees that align with their interests and passions. Learn more and join a community committee.

Guide to LCP Communications for Members

Are you a member of the League who may need a refresher on what the LCP can do to help promote your poetry and build a bigger and better poetry community? We love to support our members in every way we can! Check out this webpage for a low-down of 12 great ways to get involved.

The LCP Chapbook Series

Order a chapbook today and know that you are supporting the continued success of the Series that brings publication opportunities to underrepresented poets as well as some new, top-notch poetry for your bookshelf.

Order a chapbook!

Member News

The League has simplified the process to submit member news

for St@nza and social media promotion. If you are a member and have news you would like shared, fill out this quick form. The next issue of St@nza will be out in March.

Suggestion Box

Do you have a great poetry-related idea that you think the League might be interested in? Do you have any ideas that may broaden or enhance our current programming and projects? Let us know via the Suggestion Box! Let us know about your suggestion

In Memoriam

When we lose a member of the poetry community, that loss is felt deeply and with great love. The LCP has created a webpage where all are invited to remember, reflect and share memories of those from the poetry community who have recently passed. Visit our In Memoriam page.

Poetry Pause

Poetry Pause is the League’s daily digital poetry dispatch program and it’s growing every day! We deliver a daily poem an audience of over 1200 subscribers and we are always accepting submissions of published or unpublished poems!

Poetry Pause is a great way to introduce new readers to your work. Submit your poetry today! Tell your poets and poetry-loving friends to subscribe

What does it mean to support the League of Canadian Poets?

Your donation today will continue our work in providing to Canadian poetry and reinforcing the incredible talent of poets in Canada.

This past year, thanks to supporters like yourself, we distributed funding to over 300 poets and literary groups to help them bring poetry into their community spaces, local bookstores, festivals, virtual events, schools and more. Throughout the year, we offered 8 contests and awards, including the launch of a new summer contest for emerging poets and we awarded prizes to more than 25 poets!

We took time to reflect and dig deeper into our innermost selves for National Poetry Month 2022: Intimacy, featuring 11 bespoke essays from poets across Canada. We saw unprecedented demand for NPM materials, and distributed more than 12,000 bookmarks and 5,000 posters for NPM this year alone! It is so heartening to see how poetry is a priority for educators and communities as we have begun to gather in person again.

We celebrated the return of the Anne Szumigalski Lecture and were so fortunate to host two lectures this year: What have we left to us? Examining questions as a means of existential analysis in poetry by Tolu Oloruntoba and Cyclical: a ruminating lecture on aging and writing by Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer.

We published six chapbook collections featuring more than 80 poets in the LCP Chapbook Series, including our first chapbook dedicated to visual poetry; the stunning collection on survival “On the Storm;” the incredible voices of AHVAZ // AAVAZ // AVAAZ: A Chapbook Anthology of South Asian Poetry; and many more!

This is only a glimpse of what the LCP had to give this year. Next year, we want to give even more. And we need your help.

Donate today.

Donations are eligible for Canadian charitable tax receipts.

Bill Arnott’s Beat

Disguised as Prose

I thought I’d change things up, this time around. A departure. Like most of us who use the term poet to describe ourselves, I’m also a lover of prose. Well-crafted, poetic prose. Which does, often enough, appear in all types of writing, from impassioned YA to some forms of fiction and the most engaging nonfiction. And although I’ve enjoyed creating a range of genres, my most widely read work is what’s generally labelled travel literature, nonfiction memoir encapsulating personal adventure with history and humour. Armchair escape, some say. Anna Badkhen, Robert Macfarlane and Malachy Tallack are amongst my

nonfiction mentors and literary role models. And one thing in particular resonates through their work. An unfailing, consistent element. Poetic voice. Poetry disguised as prose. In keeping with this I’ve been asked to share an example, and at the risk of seeming self-serving, I was asked specifically to offer up a snippet of my own work. And when someone asks something of me, I like to say yes. So here we go, a brief passage from my new nonfiction travel lit memoir, which, to my delight, became a 2022 BC Bestseller the moment it was released. The book is A Season on Vancouver Island. “What’s it about?” you might ask. To which I’d roll my eyes. It’s actually multimedia, and includes my photos of the three month excursion which I’ve digitally painted as well, using a series of customized software apps. The result, I believe, is a dreamy, deeply sensory engagement between writer and reader. A connection I feel privileged to foster, and one I consider an obligation for those of us embracing the moniker of poet.

So for this departure, aptly enough, let’s head out. To our country’s west coast, and a bit beyond, with this passage from A Season on Vancouver Island …

“Ten thousand horses rumble to

life. With a diesel vibration, water churns into chop and a blue and white ferry shoves us into the strait, in the direction of Vancouver Island. On the other side of the water, Nanaimo. Snuneymuxw. Coast Salish land. A sense of connection is what I feel, gazing through open steel portals. The horses pick up their pace, trot to canter, as a ripple ricochets through rivets and railings. The result, a feeling of departure, and possibility.

It’s what I felt as a child, venturing into hills behind our home on a north arm of Okanagan Lake, bubbles of land carved by glaciers, the big lake fed by a narrow, deep creek. It was that sense of departing on a grand adventure that’s never gone away, each time I’m off somewhere new. Even places familiar, for that matter, seen for the first time again. As a kid I’d pick a stick from the deadwood, pry my way through barbed wire like a wrestler entering the ring, and climb. Over the hill cattle grazed, and the land beyond that was orchard. It always smelled dry. Of course, I’d take care, watching for cow pies, rattlesnakes, and undetonated mortars. An army camp was across the lake, and a few decades ago the arid grass banks served as target practice, bombs lobbed across the water.

Now, aboard a westbound ferry, the day’s rolling out somewhat dreamily. The ferry is full, the first at capacity in months, and the crew’s a bit overwhelmed by an onslaught of passengers awaiting their Triple-O

burgers, like kids released into summer following a particularly miserable winter. A winter that’s lasted two years.

Our vehicle is on an upper deck berth aboard the MV Queen of Cowichan and we’ve chosen to stay put, hunkering in our well-worn car with the aroma of road trips, fast food, and bare feet. Meanwhile, Horseshoe Bay’s showing off its photogenic cliffs and arbutus, copper-pistachio peelings of bark as though they’ve been outdoors too long, overdue for a coating of sunscreen. Bowen Island rises from sun-dappled water like a child’s likeness of a surfacing whale, a round hump of a back, the only things missing being flukes and a blowhole waterspout. Sounds and smells mingle, wafting amidst cars: cell phone chatter, sneaky second-hand smoke, laughter, coffee, the vibrating basso of ferry engine, and the inevitable bleat of a car alarm, its owner nowhere to be found.

Tatters of cloud stream past as we venture west by southwest. Midway across the Salish Sea we pass our doppelganger going the opposite way, the visual striking. A weather front’s hanging in place at the halfway point of the crossing, a vertical line of rain and smudgy dark cloud, monochrome seascape in a rinse of blue-grey. I watch the ferry pass through the wall of weather, easing from dark to light, like Dorothy stepping from blustery Kansas to the technicolour of Oz. Unbeknownst to me we’re making our very own leap through a time-bending lens, as we’ve come for five weeks, but will go home in three months from now.”

Yes, dare I say, poetry in the guise of prose. A literal journey. One I hope every fellow traveller will enjoy. With thanks to my mentors and role models, and all of us known as poets.

Bill Arnott is the bestselling author of Gone Viking: A Travel Saga, Gone Viking II: Beyond Boundaries, and A Season on Vancouver Island. He’s been awarded by the ABF International Book Awards, Firebird Book Awards, Whistler Book Awards, received The Miramichi Reader’s Very Best Book Award for nonfiction, and for his expeditions Bill’s been granted a Fellowship at London’s Royal Geographical Society. When not trekking the planet with a small pack and book of poetry, Bill can be found on Canada’s west coast, making music and friends.

@billarnott_aps

Loose Ends a Tightly Woven Collection

Review of Loose Ends

Poet Ann Elizabeth Carson has released a book any poet would be proud of, at any age. That she has done it in her 90s only proves that creativity is the ever-living flame that can animate all of us, whatever the state of our bodies. Poetry is a lifelong craft, like any art one is truly serious about practicing, and Carson has proven the adage that the more you practice some-

thing the better you become at it. Loose Ends is actually an unfair title for this collection. It is anything but a random collection, the kind of afterthought the title implies. In fact, Carson has woven together a focused, highly accomplished collection with many wonderful lines that leap out at the reader. This is precisely the test of an accomplished poet, the “Oh!” one experiences at the unexpected, the original.

For example:

The breeze picks up, crosshatches the water as the day decides what to be.

(“First Poem of Summer”)

“Is this what a bee hears when the wind blows?”

(“Listen”)

leaves… waiting for a breeze to help them to the ground.

(“Noticing”)

Birds in flight swerve in obeisance to the huge hovering presence seeping into all life.

(“Volcano”)

by Ann Elizabeth Carson

Reviewed by Sean Arthur Joyce

And indeed, life is Carson’s subject, examined not merely in retrospective but with the poet’s capacity for defying time through imagining herself into multiple vantage points. Carson uses her empathy and imagination to dissolve the barriers civilization has erected between ourselves and Nature in poems such as “Talking with Willows,” “Gravity Insists,” and “Shadows,” where she realizes we are not and never have been separate from Nature: The air that lifts my scarf is not below, above or even around me, I am enfolded in air, in clouds, in sky not dislocated or distant, but connected, like my outstretched sidewalk shadow, submerged within earth’s thin protective skin of air.

(“Shadows”)

Childhood memories are another way Carson explores connection with the natural world, in the poem “Snow,” where an aunt’s paper cutout snowflakes mimic the uniqueness of the real thing, “each one a new winter flower, evanescent as it settles on / the pane.”

At Carson’s age it’s only natural to look back over a long life, not as a mere exercise in nostalgia, but to examine the nature of memory itself, as in the lead poem to this collection, “The Risks of Remembrance.” Memory is paradoxical; one of the great tragedies of dementia is that, by losing one’s memories, one’s personality often seems to

go with them. Even scientists cannot agree on exactly how memory works, or perhaps one should say, why it works at all given our constantly shifting biochemical nature. Yet memories are not only critical to the capacity to learn but also to our individual sense of identity. Why, Carson seems to be asking, do such random objects as “A bone, a paper scrap crumbling / in the light, / chipped arrowheads, dented coins…” bear remembrance at all? (“Looking Back”) As the poet asks: “Whose memories do these remnants hold? / How to understand / these unaccompanied remains, / a lost language beseeching?”

Thus it’s appropriate for Carson to include a section of poems that tell the stories of her life—a life that bore witness to the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II. Carson has chosen an appropriate poetic diction for this sequence, where her usual tightly controlled lines suddenly splay across the page, like a distracted newspaper reader picking up disparate bits of information from the war front. News blurbs from the war are interspersed with family memories, painting a broad canvas—from the universal to the personal.

In “Fractured Dreams: The Crash of ’29 and The Depression,” she recounts the irony of her birth that year being overshadowed by the economic collapse that destroyed millions of families’ hopes and futures, including her own father’s, who “was never the same. / “You never knew the man I married,” my mother said, years later…” In our

world of 200 varieties of everything lining supermarket shelves, it’s hard to accept that during the 1930s, families were lucky to be able to give their children a single orange at Christmas.

Carson covers the polio epidemic and of course the outbreak of World War II. Her generation has had to endure an incredible amount of hardship on the way to affluence, and after two or three generations of comfort, it appears new generations may have to face similar hardships. However, her comparison of the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and being refused entry at ports around the world with “the thousands of women and children—and orphaned children (no men?) / fleeing Russian genocide in Ukraine in ’22” may not stand up to close scrutiny. The comparison between Churchill and Ukrainian President Zelensky is similarly premature at this stage of history given what we already know about war propaganda. It remains a perennial truth that “the first casualty of war is truth.”

As I’ve written many times, political poetry is by far the most difficult to successfully pull off; even the great Pablo Neruda—no stranger to politics in poetry—sometimes stumbled, as in the shrill-voiced Songs of Protest. Poetic polemics either become dated too quickly as new historical evidence comes to light or simply come off sounding like a rant. I’ve slammed into this rhetorical wall a few times myself. Or, as all too often happens these days, it has the scent of the poet ‘virtue signal-

ing’ to position themselves on the correct side of the PC line. One of the best examples by far of a political poem that succeeds on every level is Gary Geddes’ poem on the Kent State shootings, “Sandra Lee Scheuer.” Geddes simply describes the character of one of the shooting victims, the quietly eloquent tragedy that her aspirations to become a speech therapist will never be realized. That’s not to say that more direct, forceful language can’t also succeed in a polemical poem provided it’s done skillfully enough. (See footnote).1 Fortunately Carson manages to walk the fine polemical line with grace and skill in her lyrical poems, while occasionally stumbling in the looser verses of the “It’s All There” section. This reinforces how important controlled structure in poetry can be, forcing the poet to rein in their sometimes over- zealous impulses.

1 Who burned the houses but left the clothes hanging on the line?

Who dropped the bombs? Who unleashed the missiles? Who murdered the villagers as they crossed the bridge to market?

Who looted? Who beheaded his neighbour and left him there to gawk bodiless beside the city gate?

I did.

I and my comrades did this.

I, your good neighbour who went to mass

who prostrated in the mosque who donned his skull cap who genuflected, who prayed.

It was I, I who used the correct word for bread.

—excerpt from “I Did This” by Ernest Hekkanen, Straying from Luminosity, New Orphic Publishers, 1999.

Notice that the poet doesn’t project guilt outward but accepts his own responsibility as being as innately capable of genocide as the next person, given the wrong circumstances.

Carson, who had a career as a psychotherapist, threads her observations of how trauma affects people throughout this section, as when a family friend and veteran of Dunkirk comes to dinner: “Like most survivors, he fends off war talk.” Studies in epigenetics reveal that often it takes until the third generation (the grandchildren) after trauma for family members to feel safe talking about it. And quite contrary to the media-propagated ideal of WWII veterans or their families swooning in nostalgic fits to the sounds of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” for Carson the song is “sickening saccharine propaganda / sung to hide raw terror and fear / as casualties mount. Nausea rises / even now when I hear that music.”

In the “Closer to the Bone: Covid and Climate Change” section, Carson feels the incarceration of those in extended care homes more than most of us would. Even be-

fore Covid, reports revealed that these institutions were failing our seniors catastrophically, with, as Carson writes, “crowded rooms, neglect and abuse,” but instead of meaningful action, “they will write a report,” while during pandemic lockdowns families are cruelly forced apart, “mothers fathers grandmothers/ grandfathers brothers sisters husbands wives friends they / can touch only through windows, hands and mouths leaving / smudged traces on the glass.” Later, in “Elder Care,” her skepticism of these supposed ‘protective’ measures bleeds through: “Loved ones, paralyzed spectators behind supposed / doors of safety, screenwatch, desperate / to touch/comfort you…” The poet intuits that indeed, the social engineering is designed to reduce us to fearful spectators, “screen-watchers” rather than active participants in life willing to take risks in order to thrive. (No risks, no rewards.) Or worse, lab rats in “a lab experiment / whose outcomes will be read / by an incredulous future, or hidden away / until the next crisis.”

Just as I did in Diary of a Pandemic Year, Carson uses poetry as witness to record her impressions of “a full year of Covid-19, masks and double-masks, social distancing in-home and outdoors, of hand-washing and hand-wringing, and a vaccine I may or may not be able to take…” It’s ample and eloquent witness to the dominion of fear created by lockdowns and the deliberately exaggerated threat of coronavirus. Carson as poet looks to the forthcoming emergence of

spring, with its attendant rise of new saplings as well as hope in the human heart, “the invisible chrysalis of possibilities, imagining a / wordless longing to connect with the calls to mind and heart at / the start of spring.”

Carson deftly captures the eerie sense of emptiness during lockdowns, when city spaces like New York’s Times Square or similar beehives of human and commercial activity were devoid of people, like a dead civilization. In “Celebrating Victoria,” Carson sketches the scene with visceral details: “No fireworks split the sky. / An empty streetcar grumbles by… the city squares / of London, Canberra, Nassau and beyond, empty / of any vestige of delight…”2

A collection of poems by a nonagenarian writer wouldn’t be complete with some reflections on aging, that process we are all confronted with sooner or later. As I see my mid60s on the near horizon I cannot for the life of me see aging as anything other than a tragedy— Nature’s slow, inevitable desecration of the beauty and energy of youth. In “SIX feEt APART BuT NOT UNDER,” Carson relates a typical daily conversation that seniors must endure simply by virtue of their age; even between peers of an age group it can sometimes be condescending or infantilizing. In “Late Day Reflections,” part 2, Carson captures this in just a few deft words:

Amazing, given what she has lived.”

One more thing, just one more and I fray, shatter, falling around myself.

“See how she smiles, glad of the company.”

(“One thing after…”)

2 Or as I wrote in Diary of a Pandemic Year in “The Next World”:

…The streets, airports, concert halls, cafés are now empty, but the residue of our touch makes them ache for our presence.

And in “Life During Pandemic”:

“Streets heavy as decades-old / silence, a soundless string about / to snap.”

Once again, the role of memory becomes more—not less—critical as we age. Stumbling across an old blue dress in her wardrobe, Carson is catapulted back in time, an epiphany resulting in the insight that, “In the end we all become stories / begun in dreams / unscrolling on a player piano, / no foot on the moving pedal.” The creeping, mostly suppressed terror of mortality is suddenly foregrounded by a heart attack. In the “Heart Matters” suite, the poet pleads, as we all do, for just another day, a week, a month, a year—ten years, even:

“She is strong, yes! Strong and engaged as ever.

Please pause, please stay

here throbs in muscles, bones and cells.

(“Re-discovery”)

There’s one thing to be said for such shocks to our awareness of mortality—often they wake us up to the preciousness of life. Clichéd as that may sound, it remains a truism: I am the smell of coffee, the savour of buttered toast with maybe jam, the scratch of a pen on rustling paper. I am alive for today.

(“Today”)

And ultimately, given the unpredictability of life, isn’t today all any of us can count on?

of great range, brilliant technique and musical qualities,” writes Roger Lewis, Professor Emeritus of English Literature (Acadia University).

Poetry Parlour

Sean Arthur Joyce is the author of 11 books and numerous limited editions, featuring Western Canadian history, poetry, a novel and his latest, Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, a collection of essays. Joyce’s poems and essays have appeared in Canadian, American and British literary journals and anthologies. He has been a freelance journalist since 1990 and blogs regularly at Substack. Joyce has also produced poetry videos, including “The Day After Covid,” based on the author’s latest poetry collection, Diary of a Pandemic Year. They can be viewed on the author’s website. His newest collection of poems, Blue Communion (Ekstasis Editions), is due out by Christmas 2022. “Joyce has distinguished himself as a poet

Ann Elizabeth Carson poet, author, artist, feminist, honoured at the 2008 Luminato Festival for her contribution to the arts, reads and sculpts in Toronto and on Manitoulin island in solo and collaborative events. Previously at York University and a psychotherapist in private practice, Ann’s career has focused on understanding the silenced voices in our society and attempting to give them space in her writing. Her work has appeared in many journals magazines and anthologies and in seven published books: Shadows Light, poetry and sculpture, The Risks of Remembrance, collected poems, My Grandmother’s Hair, how family stories shape our lives, We All Become Stories, challenging stereotypes of memory and aging, Laundry Lines, a poetic memoir, Filling the Ark, stories and poems and Loose Ends, reflections. Ann is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, The Ontario Poetry Society, The Manitoulin Writers Circle and The Heliconian Club for women in the arts.

Thank you to everyone who responded to the most recent Poetry Pause questions! Check out our new batch of questions.

How do you fight distraction when writing?

Amanda Earl: This is tough. I haven’t really figured out a successful method, except to allow the distraction to happen and then go back to my work.

Anne Burke: Writing is more attractive to me than most other daily activities. If I have an especially difficult project I will take to a hot bath. Classical music without words is another go to solution. Trains and planes are also useful for long haul journeys. I have tried exercise which makes me limber. So many, many ways!

Barbara Black: Once I am on task, I write quite freely. But when I go to a coffee shop to write, I take noise-cancelling headphones and play ambient music to both block out annoying sounds and to keep me in a sort of hypnotic writing bubble. Works like a charm.

Bill Garvey: I think I lose the battle quite often

Cristy Watson: As I can be easily distracted, I choose to enter poetry contests which have a tight time deadline (CV2 2-Day Poem Contest and the Poetry Marathon) and then I have no choice but to remain focused if I wish to participate. I receive a prompt and/or ten words and then have to create a poem within an hour for the Poetry Marathon or within 48 hours for the Contemporary Verse2 Contest. Looking up information on the prompts or gathering multiple meanings for each word shared helps me to engage with the words and/or prompt and ultimately, the poem.

Ellie Csepregi: When I don’t lean into the distraction and follow that, I set a timer and take some deep breaths and write until I’m ready to finish what ever it is I’m working on. Sometimes I go beyond the timer.

Gwen Higgins: By turning off my phone and writing by hand in a notebook.

Loose Ends by Ann Carson (Aeolus House, 2022)

See what Leaguers have to say about fighting distraction and self-portait poems!

Jessica Anne Robinson: I ensure that my phone is in a bag or behind me, nowhere within screen tapping distance, that the TV is not on or better yet I’m not home, better situated in a coffee shop or a park where supposed distractions might instead make their way into my poems as inspiration.

Jude Neale: I am oblivious to everything when I’m writing, I have no times for detours. The music can be heavy metal and vibrating through the house, but I just see/hear my own piece of writing.

Kala Godin: Usually the Pomodoro technique works for me. I find if I know that I get to have a break, then I can write uninterrupted for 20-30 minutes with ease.

Kamal Parmar: Frankly speaking, when I am with the Poetic muse, I can sense a subtle relationship between myself and the Muse. it is like a wave that washes over me and shuts off any distraction that may try to wean me away from my writing.

Neall Calvert: With a hot cup of green tea; gentle music in the background (but sometimes even music is too much distraction). I forbid myself to check emails until I feel I’ve accomplished something. In daylight, I adjust my blinds so I can see the sky. I go for a 45-minute walk, so my body doesn’t feel restless while writing. I post my latest published poem beside my desk for upliftment. I complete all outstanding chores and necessary personal communications first so nothing is

nagging at me. I stop caring about what time it is.

Pam Galloway: Daily life is often the distraction I struggle with, committing myself to too much “other”. I have to schedule my writing time as work time now I’m retired which is sometimes more successful then at others. Writing this, right now is truly a distraction and procrastination from writing! Putting the phone aside and setting myself specific tasks are helpful. I’m unsure why I seem to avoid getting down to my writing when, in truth, I love to write and know it’s very important to me. One of life’s great mysteries.

Stephen Kent Roney: By resisting the temptation to check Poetry Parlour to see if there are new questions up.

Okay, I’m not very good at this. Wait. There’s a squirrel outside my window. Later, okay?”

Vironika Wilde: When I’m feeling serious, I turn on my screen recorder and put my phone on “do not disturb.” I use videos of me writing and editing for my workshops and writing courses, but that’s not the only reason I do this. The practice of recording myself forces me to focus. If I still can’t seem to make it work on my phone, I switch to my laptop. I only use my computer to do work, so I don’t need to make much of an effort to stay focused.

Yannis Lobaina: My way is to first spend the first 10 minutes of waking up meditating and visualizing what I would like to write. Then,

using the Pomodoro Technique, I divide the day’s writing work into intervals: 25 minutes separated by five-minute breaks.

distance between what I used to be and what I will become. Until there is no more, only herstory remains or persists. I like to think of portrait on my computer and the alternate landscape. So a delicate choice or balancing act.

Amanda Earl: i haven’t. my imagination

Anne Burke: My poems are fiction while my stories are true. The persona is derived from different elements by emphasizing some over others. Myth tells a true story by using parables. There are stages in personal growth which appear and reappear. So a self metamorphosis is possible and even probable. However, time creates the necessary

Barbara Black: In some ways, all my poems are self-portraits, at least inadvertent ones. I often struggle with writing poetry because I am a private person. But when I look at my most successful poems, they are the ones with content that came from deep freewriting and that bring forth aspects of myself and emotions that are powerful and authentic--but that I don’t initially recognize. Most times, it is my poetry group who draw this to my attention! My challenge in crafting the poem is to leave the vibrancy and rawness of these words intact and impart something to the reader that resonates emotionally.

Bill Garvey: I have not written a self-portrait poem. I think the way I view the world and the people in my life best explains my poetry

Ellie Csepregi: My shadow or a fleeting reflation in a window.

Gwen Higgins: Not yet, but now I would like to try!

Have you written a “self-portrait” poem? What parts of yourself are best explained through poetry?

Jessica Anne Robinson: I have always found my physical features and my relationships to be the easiest parts of myself to portray in poetry. My poem “like mother” intertwines the two, chronicling all the ways my mother and I look alike - it outlines us at first like mirrors of each other, but then in the last lines changes perspective, as if instead I am the continuation of her story, as opposed to her reflection. (It was published with Atlas and Alice, and then in my chapbook, Other Mothers’ Funerals.)

Jude Neale: “Yes, I have written an abundance of autobiographical poems. Ah, so quiet here tonight. The cuckoo clock ticks and I measure the minutes with silence. Someone has stolen my voice, I whisper for water and you bring cups of weak tea, more than I ever asked for. You. The tea. My need.”

Kala Godin: Honestly, I think that at least 80% of my poems are self-portraits. Writing poetry, for me, is both an act of self-discovery and a bit like splitting myself open for the world to see.

Kamal Parmar: Thanks for sharing that idea! I I think that my eyes do most of the talking and I could write about the depth and the mystery that lies in them while I decipher the world around me.

Neall Calvert: Many. They encompass struggles in progress (“things I am trying to

learn about through writing about them”) or struggles overcome (“life lessons learned”). They also describe an expanding relationship with wildness and the natural world. They are beginning to encompass humour, as I learn to integrate that into a previously solemn life.

Pam Galloway: I’ve written poems about myself at various times of my life. In my first book, Parallel Lines, I wrote about my family history and my early life so that goes some way to explaining where I came from. My poetry always turns to and reflects human emotion in a particular place or time and this, I’m sure, reveals a lot about me personally.

Stephen Kent Roney: The poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence. I do not wish to bore my audience.

Vironika Wilde: All my poems are self-portraits. Poetry helps me tell the truth. With each poem, I share a little more. I believe poetry is medicine. I heal myself with honest words. Then, I share what I’ve brewed with others.

Yannis Lobaina: Yes. My language background.

New Poetry Parlour questions are now available! Click here to share your thoughts

New Members

Vannessa Barnier

Padmaja Battani

Nancy M Bell lives near Balzac, Alberta with her husband and various critters. She is a member of the Writers Guild of Alberta, the Canadian Authors Association and the League of Canadian Poets. Nancy has presented at the Surrey International Writers Conference, at the Writers Guild of Alberta Conference, When Words Collide, and Word on the Lake. She has publishing credits in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Recently her work has been included in Tamaracks Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century, Vistas of the West Anthology of Poetry and The Beauty of Being Elsewhere. Her poetry is also being included by the University of Holguin Cuba in their Canada Cuba Literary Alliance (CCLA) program. The self published Touchstone was reviewed in A Shower of Warm Light by Prof. Miguel Angel Olive Iglesius. Her poem “Birds” has been nominated for the PushCart Awards.

Joan Boxall

Alice Burdick lives and writes poetry in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia and coowned the former Lexicon Books in Lunenburg. Alice moved to Halifax in 2002 from Toronto, Ontario, where

she was born and raised. She has also lived in Espanola, Vancouver, and on the Sechelt Peninsula in BC.

Elaine Cagulada

Isabelle Call is a Vancouver-based Romani poet, author, and filmmaker. She creates her work from deep emotional wounds, both her own and those of others. Though this work often centers around trauma, Isabelle draws on the imagery of connection created through the use of nature to find a sense of calm amongst the storm. Her work has featured in 14 publications around the globe to date and will soon be accompanied by her debut poetry collection, The Unfamiliar Narcotics of Moss.

Donald B. Campbell is an English as a Second/Additional Language teacher and writer in Saskatoon. His plays have been performed in Saskatchewan and Alberta. His writing--including poetry, plays, short stories and journalism-has been chosen in competitions and has appeared in newspapers, magazines, print and online anthologies, and a Saskatoon Public Library website video, as well as on provincial and national CBC Radio. Nature, being gay, and dealing with anxiety and depression have helped

inspire much of his recent writing. In 2022 he learned a great deal from participating in a series of online poetry workshops led by noted Canadian poet Di Brandt. Audiences have reacted very positively to his readings partly because of his training and experience in acting.

New League Members

Leanne Charette

Boyd Chubbs Born, raised L’Anse Au Clair, Labrador currently in St. John’s, Newfoundland. My work is literal, visual and musical and the three inform each other but it is language that is the propulsion for all narratives. Public and private commissions for all nature of works. Publications (poetry); exhibitions (visual); recordings(guitar and compositions).

Zoe Dickinson is a poet and bookseller from Victoria, British Columbia. Her poetry is rooted in the Pacific coastline, with a focus on local ecology and human relationships with nature. She has been published in literary journals such as Existere, Prairie Fire, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her first chapbook, Public Transit, was published in 2015 by Leaf Press, and her second chapbook, intertidal: poems from the littoral zone, is the 2022 winner of the Raven Chapbook competition (available at ravenchapbooks.ca). She is a manager at Russell Books and the Artistic Director of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series.

Benjamin C. Dugdale is a poet & experimental filmmaker currently living in Rural Alberta (Treaty 7 territory). B’s writing can be found

in places like GEIST, Plentiude, Riddle Fence, giallo, filling Station, &c., and their films have screened across the globe at festivals such as Sick’N’Wrong, VideoDrunk, GottaMinute, Bideodromo, and London Experimental. B also reads for PANK and ARC Poetry, and sometimes publishes as bonny CD. Their updates can be found at benjamindugdale.ca. Their debut chapbook, “Saint Rat O’Sphere’s Formica Canticle Poems,” was published in 2020 by Anstruther Press, and their most-recently completed experimental film project, “Contents Under Pressure,” is distributed by the CFMDC. “The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux” is their debut full length poetry collection.

Bill Garvey I was born in Massachusetts and have also lived in New Hampshire and Illinois. I received a Master’s in Fine Arts Poetry, New England College, Henniker, NH in 2005, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts in 1979. I am a dual citizen of Canada and the US, and have lived in Canada with my wife, a Haligonian, since 2010. We live in Toronto from November through April, and Nova Scotia the rest of the year.

Drucilla Gary

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her work has been published in various literary journals and magazines, including The Malahat Review, Room,

CAROUSEL, THIS, The Antigonish Review, Grain, and The Fiddlehead. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was released by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in 2021. Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, is due out with Radiant Press in spring 2023. Her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, is set to be published by Gordon Hill in spring 2024.

Kala Godin is a 25-year-old author living with a physical disability (Spinal Muscular Atrophy type 2) and is confined to a wheelchair. She is interested in talking and discussing her writing and how it relates to her life. She’s had 2 poetry collections published, as well as several short horror stories. Halloween is her favorite holiday. She likes tattoos, chocolate, and anything to do with the paranormal.

Blayne Clarke

Elisa Ana Maria Covello

Joyce Goodwin

Raymond Helkio

Gwen Higgins Accountant by day, writer & poet after hours. Soon-to-be student in SFU’s The Writer’s Studio program (2023).

Bára Hladík

Shahanaz Hoque

Sean Howard

Salma Hussain

Hunyah Irfan

Barbara Janusz The author of the

novel, Mirrored in the Caves, Barbara D. Janusz has also published short stories, poetry, book reviews, editorials and creative non-fiction. She is a mother, lawyer, environmentalist, feminist and educator. A graduate of the University of Alberta in Edmonton where she was born and raised, Barbara has also resided on Canada’s West coast, in Crowsnest Pass, La Paz, Mexico and Paris, France and currently makes her home in Calgary. A longstanding member of the Writers Guild of Alberta, Barbara has been a contributing writer for EnviroLine, Alternatives Journal, Herizons and ARTiculate Magazines.

Zak Jones is a student, teacher, labour organizer and US Army veteran living and writing in Canada. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vallum Contemporary Poetry, PRISM International, The Puritan Literary Magazine, Bad Nudes, Palimpsest (Yale University), Hart House Review (UofT), Acta Victoriana and elsewhere. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Jones is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto studying veteran narratives and their role in “epochal” psychic shifts post-WWII. His MA thesis, a novel tentatively titled Fancy Gap, and a full-length poetry debut are in the works and nearing completion.

shalan joudry

Kris Kaila

Karen Klassen

Matea Kulić has worked in and amongst the Westcoast literary

community since 2016. She was the Editorial Director of The Capilano Review from 2019-2022 and is currently the Executive Director of the Association of Book Publishers of BC. She continues to write in the after work hours alongside themes of interest: memory, belonging, work, motherhood, identity. She lives in Vancouver, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples, with her partner and daughter.

Tonya Lailey

Richard LaRose

Rion Levy is an emerging poet based in Toronto. His first collection of poems, Poems of the End Times, is set to be published in the spring of 2024. He is interested in research on the Beat Generation and completed his undergraduate thesis on poet, Peter Orlovsky.

Yannis Lobaina is an award-winning Cuban artist, writer, producer, community arts facilitator, emerging filmmaker, and photographer based in Toronto. Yannis loves to explore themes of immigration, diaspora, language and motherhood through various storytelling tools. Lobaina has published more than 30 short fiction stories worldwide. Also produced over 40 short fiction and documentaries in Cuba. As a photographer, she currently focuses on minimalist photographic storytelling, landscapes, patterns and pareidolias in nature. Lobaina believes the arts as a powering

tool for social change and peacemaking. She developed bilingual (Spanish-English) creative writing art programs for children

Kayla Elaine MacInnis Glenn Marais

Anda Marcu (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator living and working in London, Canada. Her work emerges from memories, dreams and persistent mental imagery. She is the founding editor of the literary & art journal The Purposeful Mayonnaise. Anda can be found online at www.andamarcu. com, on Instagram @andamarcuart and Twitter @beradiant.

Selection). John hails from Tkaronto/ Toronto, where he currently works as a postsecondary communication instructor and helps administer the plumb art gallery and project space on St. Clair West. Find him online at johnnyman.ca

John Nyman is a poet, critic, and book artist of mixed European and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. His poetic works include a Gerald Lampert Award-shortlisted poetry collection (Players), an erasure of words and images from the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books (Your Very Own), and a classic text of Lacanian psychoanalysis reprinted in a nearly illegible typeface (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis: A

Saba Pakdel is a poet, modernist scholar, and PhD student in the English department at University of Victoria. She completed her BA and MA in English language and literature in Iran. She earned her second MA in English at Simon Fraser University in 2021.

In May 2022, Saba published her chapbook In-Between by above / ground press. She has attended and coordinated literary workshops and poetry readings; published poems, translations, and essays; and collaborated in stage plays as a playwright and backstage filmmaker.

For a while, she worked as an editorial assistant at Talonbooks Publishing in Vancouver. Photography is her occasional and non-verbal means of communication with the world.

Saba specializes in migration studies and contemporary literature with a focus on exile, refugee, and immigration problems, particularly in works of migrant authors from the Middle East and Maghreb. Her research addresses the identity formation of migrants away from Euro-centric formulations based in twentieth century ideas about migration, largely derived from post-WWII circumstances, toward a contemporary reckoning with experiences of migration.

Cole Mash

Claire Matthews

Ward Maxwell

Lindsay Miles Monty Moniz

Dana Neily

Emily Osborne Gabriel Osson

Marc Perez

(ky) Peterson (perraun)

Malabika Ray

Leslie Roach

Nedjo Rogers

Michele Rule is a disabled poet from Kelowna BC. She is especially interested in the topics of chronic illness, relationships and nature. Michele is published in OYEDrum, Five Minute Lit, Pocket Lint, WordCityLit, the Lothlorien, and the anthologies Spring Peepers, Chicken Soup for the Soul and Poets for Ukraine, among others. She won honorable mention in the Vancouver Cherry Festival Haiku Competition 2022. Michele’s first chapbook is Around the World in Fifteen Haiku. She lives with a sleepy dog, two cats and a fantastic partner.

Russell Rebecca Salazar

Eric Schmaltz is a poet, academic, and editor based in Tkaronto (Toronto). He is the author of the poetry book Surfaces (Invisible Publishing) and co-editor (with Christopher Doody) of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (University of Calgary Press). His critical and creative work has been published in periodicals and anthologies, including Jacket2, Bomb, Canadian Literature, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Capilano Review, and BAX 2020: Best American Experimental

Writing (Wesleyan University Press), and other places. He maintains an aesthetically diverse literary practice –– working across genre and mode, including poetry, prose, print, 3D printed multiples, animated video, and more –– and has been recently supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. His work has been lifted off the page and exhibited in galleries and festivals, including The Institute for Experimental Art (Athens, Greece), the Symposium for the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium (Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania), Critical Media Lab (University of Waterloo), and Niagara Artists Centre (St. Catharines, Ontario). Eric is the Writer-on-the Grounds in the Department of English at York University’s Glendon College, where he teaches and coordinates the Certificate in Creative Writing Across Contexts.

Erin Scott Alison Smith

Deanna Smith

charles c. smith is a poet, playwright and essayist who has written and edited fourteen books. He studied poetry and drama with William Packard at New York University and Herbert Berghof Studios, drama at the Frank Silvera’s Writers’ Workshop in Harlem. He won second prize for his play Last Days for the Desperate from Black Theatre Canada, edited three collections of poetry and his poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including

Poetry Canada Review, the Quill and Quire, Descant, Dandelion Fiddlehead and others. He has received grants for writing from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. charles is the Executive Director of Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario and Artistic Director of the wind in the leaves collective. His recent books include: travelogue of the bereaved, The Dirty War: The Making of the Myth of Black Dangerousness, and, whispers (2014) and destination out (2018) and Searching for Eastman released in September 2021 by Mawenzi House

Jason Stefanik

Joanna Streetly’s work is published in Best Canadian Essays 2017 and in anthologies, magazines and literary journals. Her most recent book, Wild Fierce Life: Dangerous Moments on the Outer Coast, is a BC Bestseller published by Caitlin Press. Her work appears in the Malahat Review and Prairie Fire. She has been short-listed for the FBCW Literary Writes Poetry Contest, and the Canada Writes Creative Non-fiction Prize and The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul award for outstanding travel writing. She has lived in the traditional territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht people since 1990 and was the 2018-2020 Tofino Poet Laureate. Her volume of poetry This Dark was published in 2015 by Postelsia Press.

Tyneisha Thomas Tara K. Torme

Isabella Wang

Cristy Watson began writing poetry at the age of eight at a roll-top desk beside her dad. She continued writing and now has eight published MG and YA novels, as well as having poetry published in ‘Worth More Standing’ (Caitlin Press) and CV2’s 2013 Magazine, where she won Editor’s Choice for the 2-Day Poem Contest. She also has had her poetry published in The Poetry Marathon Anthologies from 2017 to the present, Ascent Aspirations, and online in RCLAS ‘Wordplay at Work’.

Her poetry has won prizes in contests from the Burnaby Writer’s Society and Vancouver’s Poetic Justice. Her novels have won awards, as well. She loves participating in the CV2 2-Day Poem Contest and the Poetry Marathon. She also offers ‘Playing with Poetry’ workshops.

Patricia Wilson

The LCP would like to extend a big welcome back to our members who have returned to the League this quarter: Madhur Anand, Lara Bozabalian, Maureen Evans, Hamish Guthrie, T Liem, Jeff Parent, Hilary Peach, Ellie Sawatzky, Shannon Webb-Campbell and Frank Westcott.

Karen

Michael

Samuel Ugbechie

Member News

Member News

Want to see your poetry news in St@nza? Fill out this quick form. The next issue of St@nza will be out in March.

Nancy M Bell

I’m thrilled to announce that my poem “Birds was nominated for the Pushcar”t Award by The Prairie Journal. Birds was published in The Prairie Journal this past fall. Thank you to Ann Burke, editor The Prairie Journal for nominating my poem.

david brydges

Eight League poets were in the 2022 Dr. William Henry Drummond Poetry Contest (Canada’s oldest non-governmental poetry contest) winners circle. Tanya Standish McIntyre placed first, and Dennis Reid was third. Honourable Mentions went to Elana Wolff, Keith Inman, Richard Brait, Carol Malyon, Daniela Elza, and Nancy Daoust, Associate member. David C. Brydges Administrator

Fern G. Z. Carr

FERN G. Z. CARR was delighted to participate in an author book signing event for both an anthology in which her work appeared as well

as for her poetry collection, Shards of Crystal. Wine, Dine & Book Sign took place at the beautiful Gallery Winery in West Kelowna on the lake. Fern was also pleased to have her poem, “Morning Rapture” included in the League’s Poetry Pause in November. Her YouTube channel now has a new handle and can be found at youtube.com/@ ferngzcarr. In addition to other free resources on her channel, Fern continues to create and curate short videos and animations to serve as writing prompts. These prompts are designed for poets, writers, teachers, students, or anyone just wanting to be entertained.

Louise Carson

Louise Carson has haiku in the fall issues of bottle rockets and Haiku Canada Review.

Ron Charach

Ron Charach’s most recent books are Lemily by the Sea and Christopher Sproyngeez and Deedlekin Doll both published by Friesen Press, and illustrated by the amazing Laura Catrinella. Each received a glowing Kirkus review, but positive reviews don’t get you an agent. Ron also published on Twitter a

tribute in light verse to the everyday objects all around us, “Poor Dixie Cup!

Silvia Falsaperla

Silvia Falsaperla placed second in the Venera Fazio Poetry Contest 2022 for her poem “Letter: A Last Summer”. She was also one of the winners for the same contest in 2021 for the poem “The Colossal”.

Leah Horlick

Leah Horlick has been named the 2022-2023 Canadian Writer-in-Residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program. More information, including ways to book a free, public event or free manuscript consultation, can be found here: arts.ucalgary.ca

Adeena Karasick

Adeena Karasick’s new book, MASSAGING THE MEDIUM: SEVEN PECHAKUCHAS has just been released from The Institute of General Semantics Press, NY. Described by Johanna Drucker, as “In the alternate universe where Roland Barthes was a TikTok star and Marshall McLuhan an Instagram Influencer cloned with a generation of super-whiz critical-wise-cracking kids to produce super-hip trendsmart media brand collage-critique they might have approached the extra-orbital velocity of Adeena Karasick’s high-powered cultural insights. The sheer scale of her inventory of references is enough to overwhelm the synapses and ex-

plode the constellationary possibilities of trying to process the world we live in. We, not the medium, are what is being massaged, manipulated, and mangled—and Karasick artfully exposes these many machinations while keeping her cool voice and ludic edge. Mordantly clever these compressed works are full of edge and insight. Up-to-date and totally timely, the dense fields of text-image resonate with current associations and indexical trails of the familiar frames according to which we mediate the culturally produced encounters with our daily lives. Accurate and terrifying, lively and vivid, Adeena Karasick’s format manages its hybrid pata-para-pechakucha parametrics with dizzying and dazzling energy and skill. In other words—WOW.” Two recent reviews can be accessed here: newexplorations.net and mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com

On Sunday, Oct. 9, she will also be presenting a talk, “In the sh[e]llow, the sh[e]llow sh[e]llow”: A Media Ecological and General Semanticist Investigation of Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: for the 70th Alfred Korzybski Memoria Lecture and General Semantics Symposium at The Player’s Club 16 Gramercy Park S. New York, NY, 11:30 am. Karasick was also featured on a 90 min. Podcast with eminent scholar, philosopher and analyst, Gerry Fialka: ”I’m Probably Wrong (About Everything)” Watch Here

Amy LeBlanc

My short story collection, Homebodies is forthcoming with Great Plains Publications in spring 2023!

Yannis Lobaina

This year so far, I have published Creative Non-Fiction stories and poetry: SIGNS IN MY PATH, In Anthology Finding The Way by Immigrant Writers. «Flashback» and «Cazando Cronopios». Portals. Issue 9 – Multilingual Art Lab Issue. You can read other publications on my website.

Diana Manole

“Iran needs us, we need Iranian women,” my poetic tribute to Masha Amini and to all the martyrs of the fight for freedom In Iran, was published in WordCity Literary Journal. The same poem was broadcast

on October 17 by the Ottawa Persian Radio, in my reading in English and in Farsi by Iranian-Canadian poet Mansour Noorbakhsh, its amazing translator. I hope Iran will regain its freedom!

Susan McCaslin

Susan was interviewed by Sharon Berg on her volume of poetry Heart Work (Ekstasis Editions, 2020) for The Artisanal Writerwebsite. Posted Sept. 2022. Note: Readers must sign in to access the interview, but it is free to do so. A review of Heart

Work by gillian harding-russell appeared in The British Columbia Review, publisher Richard Mackie, online, Nov. 17, 2022: archival link

Her poem “Consider the Western Red Cedar” was short-listed for the Federation of BC Writers Literary

Contest in the Poetry category, Nov. 28, 2022.

Honey Novick

Honey Novick, editor and contributor to “POEMDEMIC” reports she has been nominated for a 2022 Outstanding Neighbour Award for this important anthology. She will read from her book “Bob Dylan, My Rabbi” Dec 1, Free Times Cafe (Toronto) as well as sing and read with Clifton Joseph (Gladstone Hotel), bill bissett (Waterloo University) and George Elliott Clarke (Richmond Hill Public Library) and record her word/ks for download and airplay. She continues to facilitate “Voice Yoga”.

Richard-Yves Sitoski

Richard-Yves Sitoski has a lot going on. He is the 2nd place winner of the 2022 Don Gutteridge Award for his manuscript, Wait, What?, which skewers the worlds of precarious work and precarious psychiatry (publication to come soon). His chapbook, How to Be Human, published by Bywords.ca, was launched at the Ottawa International Writers Festival on October 20 (available at www.bywords.ca > Store). Finally, the poetry anthology in support of Ukraine he co-edited with Penn Kemp, Poems in Response to Peril, has sold out after a series of well-attended events over the course of the summer and fall (including a mass online reading featuring poets from the book, a London launch at Blackfriars Bistro, a Toronto launch at the Art Bar, and most

recently, a reading and discussion at Wordsfest London). A reprint has been ordered. The book is available at www.rsitoski.com. So far over $3000 has been raised.

Tanya Standish McIntyre

“Debut collection, The House You Were Born In, by MQUP, is due out in mid December. A poem from this book, DARK TIDE, won first place in the Dr. William Henry Drummond poetry contest, a second first place prize this year, after winning The Laurence House’s Carmen Ziolkowski poetry prize for Conceive of a Circle.

Eva Tihanyi

Eva Tihanyi’s ninth poetry collection, Circle Tour, will be published by Inanna Publications in spring 2023.

Anna Yin

After completing Here and Now, Discover Mississauga and More haiku project and free eBook downloading, I now am working on a CC grant project and will attend two online poetry/translation readings, one with a writer from China and the other with Armand Garnet Ruffo in Dec. I will read at 10th Anniversary Edition Poetry at the Manor in Windsor and had translations published in Modern Poetry In Translation (UK) and New York First Line recently.

Writing Opportunities

Please note: This is a curated list of opportunities. For a full list of all writing opportunities updated on a monthly basis, please subscribe to Between the Lines newsletter from the LCP.

Calls for Submissions

Submit YOUR Call to be included in Between The Lines and Stanza Newsletter. Let us know about a call for submission via this form

Arc Poetry Magazine Submissions received from September 1 to December 31 will be read for the Summer issue. Find out more.

Qwerty Magazine is open again for submissions. We invite writers aspiring and practiced to submit their writing for our next special issue, “Home/Town.” Many years ago, Northrop Frye mused on the question “Where is here?” And so we are interested in your answers. We want your stories of place and space, your poems shaped by positions, and your art resisting and defining geography. Write about your home. Write about your town. Write about how one is not the other. Then send it to us. Deadline is February 11, 2023. Find out more.

Grain Individual poems, sequences, or suites up to a maximum of 6 pages. If submitting multiple poems, please upload them all in one file. Do not submit them as separate submissions. Submissions period is now open until June 15, 2023. Find out more.

Awards and Contests

Exile Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition

All forms and styles of poetry considered. Open only to Canadian writers. $1,500 for Best Suite by an Emerging Writer. $1,500 for Best Suite by a Writer at Any Career Point. Deadline is January 31, 2023. Find out more.

shortlisted poets will each receive €1,000. A further eight poets will receive monetary awards of €250. Deadline is December 31, 2022. Find out more

Ottawa Book

Awards

Since 1985, the Ottawa Book Awards have recognized the top English and French books published in the previous year. Both languages have categories for fiction and non-fiction. All shortlisted finalists receive $1,000 and each winner receives a prize of $7,500. Celebrate the talent and creativity of our authors past and present, and applaud their remarkable achievements on the world’s literary stage. Deadline is January 11, 2023. Find out more.

for poems written in response to an existing occasion, personal or public, or poems that make an occasion of something ordinary or by virtue of the poet’s attention. We are interested in light verse and in verse more sober, in the whole spectrum of tones and occasions. Deadline is February 28, 2023. Find out more.

Job & Volunteer Opportunities

Carleton University Call for Submissions: 2023 FIST Grad Conference

The Moth

Poetry

Prize (International) is one of the biggest prizes in the world for a single unpublished poem. The prize is open to anyone, as long as the poem is previously unpublished, and each year it attracts thousands of entries from new and established poets from over 50 countries worldwide. The four shortlisted poems appear in the spring issue of The Moth, and the overall winner will be announced at a special award ceremony at Poetry Ireland in Dublin in the spring of 2022. The overall winner will receive €6,000, while the three remaining

LCP Contests The Very Small Verse and Broadsheet Contests from the League of Canadian Poets are now open to submissions. It’s now easier than ever to submit to both contests at once! New this year: Savings for everyone! LCP Members receive access to an exclusive entry fee: only $2.50 per submission to Very Small Verse Contest and $5 per submission to the Broadsheet Contest. Submissions from general public have the standard submissions fee of $5 for Very Small Verse Contest and $10 for Broadsheet Contest. SAVE 5$! If your submission fees total $25 or more, use the coupon code ONEMOREPOEM to get $5 off your total (LCP Member and General Public)! Deadline is January 16, 2023. Find out more and enter the contests.

The New Quarterly Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest $1000 for one glorious poem. This contest is

The graduate students of the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation are excited to announce a call for submissions for our 2023 conference titled, “Transforming Our Social World: Radical Practices of World Building & Destruction”. The conference will be held as an in person/online hybrid from March 2324, 2023. We are inviting activists, collectives, community members, scholars, artists, writers, and graduate students to submit presentation proposals for projects that call for transformative social change and abolition politics. We invite submissions that call for the generative destruction of all systems of power (abolition) so that we can build systems that value all bodyminds and leave no one behind (transformation). We seek presentations that acknowledge the inevitability of harm and activate our capacity to feel it and heal it. We want to cultivate a space for collective participation where we can bring to life a world that centers consent, collective self-determination, belonging,

accountability, connection, care, and harm reduction. We are hoping to host a multimedia conference where presenters can use any form of knowledge-making, such as, but not limited to: stories (written and oral), songs, poetry, poster presentations, paintings or other artforms, podcasts, PowerPoints, research papers, TikToks or any other methods. Group presentations or activities are welcomed and encouraged. We are welcoming submissions in English, French, and American Sign Language. Kindly submit your application with the following content in one .pdf copy (single spacing, 12pt. font) to FISTGradCon2023@gmail. com. Apply by December 31st, 2022. Find out more.

H.E.A.L Healthcare – Call for Proposals HARC seeks proposals for a project entitled H.E.A.L. Healthcare: Hearts-based Education and An-

ti-colonial Learning. If you have ever had an idea (or an experience) that you think would be good for teaching healthcare students and/or professionals how to become conscious of their biases (that land on them via colonialism, LGBTQ2S+phobias, placeism, fatphobia, ableism, and more) and how to, well… maybe… fix/respond to/address them, then please we’d like to hear from you! Send in your idea and a proposed budget of up to $10,000 for projects that provide healthcare teaching and learning tools that are anti-oppressive, arts-based, and can be delivered via an online platform. Yes, this is vague. That’s because we seek YOUR creativity. We REALLY do want YOUR ideas. Nicole.Halbauer@unbc.ca will receive your proposals and they will be vetted via a peer review panel consisting of artists, activists, clinicians, and scholars. Learn more.