November 2016 Ezine Wordplay at Work, Issue 39

To our winners, to all our RCLAS members, and to all followers and lovers of the arts in Metro Vancouver: It is with great pleasure to announce our 2016 winners of the Cogswell Award contest. It was yet another rich year of wonderful poetry, and this year was by far the most successful of all RCLAS’s Cogswell awards. We began the Cogswell Award in 2014 and it has been growing since then, becoming one of the most popular of our contests. We received a record number of books from poetry enthusiasts from all across the country, and the great Canadian poet Mr. George Fetherling was our judge, reading the entries and selecting the winners:

1st Place ($500): Emily Pohl-Weary, GHOST SICK: a poetry of witness (Tightrope Books) 2nd Place ($250): Carolyn Smart, CAREEN (Brick Books) 3rd Place ($100): Mark Abley, THE TONGUES OF EARTH: New and Selected Poems (Coteau Books) Emily, Carolyn and Mark: my best wishes to you and your future endeavors and achievements. I proudly congratulate you all for your superb work and your appreciation of the art of poetry.

Nasreen Pejvack President of RCLAS nasreenpejvack@rclas.com www.rclas.com Royal City Literary Arts Society Box #308 - 720 6th Street New Westminster, BC V3L 3C5

Emily Pohl-Weary is an award-winning author, editor and arts educator. She is the author of seven books. Her latest are Ghost Sick, a collection of poetry about tragedy and resilience in downtown Toronto, and Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl, a young adult fantasy novel. She has also written a Hugo Award-winning biography, a ghost love story, a second poetry collection, a girl pirate comic, and she edited a female superhero anthology. As of January, she will be on faculty at University of British Columbia. Visit her online at www.emilypohlweary.com

Carolyn Smart’s collections of poetry have been Swimmers in Oblivion (York Publishing, 1981), Power Sources (Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1982), Stoning the Moon (Oberon Press, 1986), The Way to Come Home (Brick Books, 1993), and Hooked: seven poems (Brick Books, 2009). Her memoir At the End of the Day was published by Penumbra Press in 2001, and an excerpt won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. She has taught poetry at the Banff Centre and participated online for Writers in Electronic Residence. She is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, poetry editor for the MacLennan Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press, and since 1989 has been Professor of Creative Writing at Queen’s University. Hooked: seven poems has become a performance piece, featured at the Edinburgh and Seattle Fringe Festivals in 2013 and at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2015. She lives in the country north of Kingston, Ontario where she and her husband have raised three boys.

Mark Abley is the author of three poetry collections, four non-fiction books, among them Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages, and two novels for young readers. A specialist in the development and usage of language, he writes the Watchwords column for the Montreal Gazette. He is also the editor of collections of short stories and poetry. Mark’s awards include a National Newspaper Award for critical writing, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the LiberPress Prize for international authors. His work has been three times shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation poetry prize, and also for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Mark was educated at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Oxford, and currently resides in Montreal.

RCLAS WRITER OF THE MONTH

Nasreen Pejvack

Nasreen Pejvack is a published author. Her novel “Amity” was launched by Inanna Publications (York University Press) on October 15th 2015 and soon after was shortlisted for the BC Ethel Wilson Book Prize. http://www.inanna.ca/catalog/amity/ She perceives planet Earth to be her country, and so there is only one country for all. She was born, therefore, in the province of Iran and the city of Tehran, and today lives in the province of Canada near the city of Vancouver. She left Iran a few years after the 1979 revolution in Iran. She lived in Athens for several months, and then left Greece for Canada to begin a new life in a more peaceful environment.

In Ottawa she studied computer programming at Algonquin College and worked in the field for over 11 years as a programmer and application developer in Canada. She also worked as a Systems Analyst/Project Manager for CNet in California during the tech boom of the late 1990s.

After several years she returned to her new homeland of Canada and her beloved BC where she left the IT field and decided to start a new chapter in her life, making a conscious decision to work with people instead of coding.

While working as a counselor and educator, she completed a degree in Psychology.

Aside from her successful novel Amity, her poems, short stories and second novel are in the process of completion.

Nasreen’s other hobby is to research, design, develop and present a variety of workshops on social issues. She has also picked up a new challenge as President of the Royal City Literary Art Society.

Are We There Yet?

by Nasreen Pejvack

Women have always been the essential foundation of every aspect of our lives, but they have consistently been deprived of their rights, and their talents and achievements have often gone unrecognized while those of men are routinely praised.

Charlotte Bronte the famous English author said, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” Yet, in her time, she was precluded even of publishing her books under her own name, and her most famous book, “Jane Eyre,” was first released in 1846 under a male pen name. After that, from 1848 to the mid-1850s, she fought for her right to have her own name on her own books as author. She, alongside many other women, fought for women’s basic rights and accomplished much. But the question today is: “Are we there yet?”

Let’s look at one case. The question of why a towering figure in the fields of physics and astronomy, Dr. Vera Rubin, has not been awarded a Nobel Prize is not a new phenomenon. Dr. Rubin uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted

angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion, by studying galactic rotation curves. However, she was not allowed to use the Palomar Observatory apparatus until 1965, even though she already had obtained her PhD in 1954 over 10 years previously. Before that, women were not authorized to access that facility, or many other scientific facilities, in the way men freely used them as their birth right. Her work and discoveries in the field of Astronomy have earned her great acclaim and several awards, and she gained a prominent place in the history of science. Yet the Nobel committee has not selected her for that well-deserved ultimate award, the Nobel prize, even though she was a pioneer, with Kent Ford, in finding dark matter in the 1970s, one of the most fundamental discoveries of our time in astrophysics. The discovery of dark matter has opened a tremendous gateway for scientists, which has allowed them to discover much more about our universe.

Her struggle to be accepted as a scientist has haunted Dr. Rubin all her life. When she applied to Princeton as her graduate school she was rejected, as Princeton did not accept women in the field of astronomy; a policy that was not discarded until 1975. During her time at Carnegie, Rubin became the first woman to legally observe from the Palomar telescope in San Diego, blazing a path of equality at that observatory. Provoked by her own experiences of prejudice and discrimination and her battle to gain credibility as a woman astronomer, Rubin has been active and outspoken in encouraging women to pursue careers in the sciences, and continues to encourage young girls to follow their dreams of investigating the universe.

Today, Vera Rubin is 88 years old; an accomplished scientist who cares less for fame than what she learns and gives to the world. She says: “Fame is fleeting; my numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that’s my greatest compliment.” She is humble and seems indifferent towards the Nobel Prize, but my question is why this gifted scientist has not received it?

Does the boy’s-club hold the final decision, as it does in so many other fields? Why is it we still see so few women in science and technology careers?

Needless to say, many more young women are being used in advertising so that their beauty and sex appeal can produce more sales.

- Nasreen Pejvack Oct. 28. 2016

Source: http://www.amnh.org/explore/resource-collections/cosmic-horizons/profile-vera-rubin-and-dark-matter/

They Cry Too!

by Nasreen Pejvack

The sun peeks in and shines through a small hole into her tiny, dark, cold room. The smell of dirt and mould fills the air. She is tired and hungry, stretching her weak body and yawning. Her twin toddlers are all over her and searching for her breasts. They suckle contently, all the while playfully shoving each other around. They break away to play-wrestle some more, then come back for more, even though they get nothing from those empty breasts hanging on their mother’s body.

She plays with them gently, and then caresses them, holding them against her tired body and kissing them. She slowly gets up and looks around the empty and cold space, knowing they need food. She goes to the entrance and pokes her head outside. It looks nice and warm outside with the fresh smell of spring in the air. She enjoys the feel of the sun on her face very much.

She steps outside and the two little ones follow her. She stands tall in front of her home and lets the breeze pass through her beautiful, dark, thick hair. She looks around; there are only the same two paths that she remembers. If she goes to the left, she will come to that mean city with those wild and selfish people in their fancy homes; the ones who attacked her for who she is. She had to run away from them last year, so she takes the right path.

Her body is weak and she wobbles a bit as she walks. The two little ones seem fine for now; perky and playful as they happily follow her. So far they are well fed, at least up to now. She has

no milk anymore but she lets her kids suckle any time they want. Soon she is in the deep forest that she recognizes well and begins searching for berries or anything else to feed her children and fill her own empty tummy. They search for a couple of hours, but except for a few little wild berries there is nothing to be found. She arrives at the river where she used to catch fish, but the water is so low that there is no way any fish could live there. She is hungry and breathless, her kids are hungry and impatient, and she is getting worried. She hears the familiar humming and buzzing sounds of the beasts. Frightened, she pushes her children behind her and makes them understand that they must only follow her, and not get ahead of her.

They walk a bit more and arrive at the edge of another city. They see many dens, each one with large garbage bins where she may be able to find food. She gets her kids to hide and stay quiet, and then she sits with them and waits for dark. They all are hungry and she hates the garbage as she knows the food in there is not good for them, but she also knows it’s better than nothing. She sits leaning against a big tree as her kids suckle on her empty breasts. She plays with them and looks at them proudly as they wrestle together, brimful of life.

She feels it is dark enough, but she knows they still have to be quiet. She remembers well from the year before on the other side of the forest how the other monsters suddenly arrived with loud noises and colorful flashing eyes, and how, blinded, she barely escaped by running back into the woods.

Her young ones sense that they must be quiet while following their mother, as she stealthily approaches one of the smaller bins and tries to open it. She works away and eventually opens it to drag out a few plastic bags which she carries quickly back to the forest, hiding behind some trees. They are so hungry as they rip apart the foul smelling bags, and they eat whatever can be found that’s edible.

Walking slowly into the forest after their meal, she remembers the fresh fish her mother used to catch and feed to her, along with fresh berries every spring. She doesn't understand what happened to all that abundance of food.

She climbs a tree and pulls up her kids so they can relax on her chest and get some rest after their adventurous day. They both are uncomfortable and restless because of the unsavory food they ate, but they manage to sleep through the night and some of the next morning. For the rest of the day they search around for berries, but any direction they go they face those mean creatures living in their dens. It seems that as time passes, every time she wakes up there is less and less space for her and the neighbors like her and their children, who all live in the same forest. She doesn't have anywhere to go, as those loud creatures take up more and more of the space with more and more of their dens.

Desperately she comes back to the same place as the previous night, waiting again for nightfall, and then approaches another garbage bin. However, before she can open it, lights suddenly flash in her eyes and those monsters start shouting. Panicking, she runs back into the forest and yells for her kids. They follow her, but so do four of the monsters. She hears a loud bang and then a sudden pain in her body. She tries to continue running but she is too weak and she falls. Her kids jump onto her, and she tries to hide them in her hairy belly, but she has no energy. She tries to lick them, but all of a sudden they are lifted up and carried away. She looks desperately at her children who are screaming for her as they are carried away toward those colorful flashing eyes of the monsters.

She tries to get up, but she cannot, as she has lost too much blood. She moans and looks in the direction that her children were taken away and she desperately tries to see them, but she can only hear their cries. Her tears run down her face, as she weakly calls to them.

Two police officers stand over her head. The tall one says, "Why did you shoot her, you moron?"

"He is in among our homes and into the garbage. We can’t have that; besides, I thought he was ready to attack me."

"He? Don’t be so clueless! She is a mother bear; just a hungry mother bear trying to feed her cubs. Just like me and you that work for our own kids; just like us! But we have taken over all their territories, and wherever these guys go, they see only houses, condos and hundreds of greedy people taking over more and more of their space. We are pushing them from every direction."

Her ears are up, trying frantically to listen to her children’s cries. She takes her last breath, as the moron says, "Is she crying? I didn’t know bears cry too!"

-------------------------------------------------------------------- copyright Nasreen Pejvack

www.poeticjusticenewwest.org

HEllowEEn hIjinx! gOOd times!

Poets Wanted: Dead or Alive 2016 Video Playlist Thanks, Video Guy!

I have hosted and organized Poets Wanted: Dead or Alive for 5 years, maybe 6! As we all know, time goes by so quickly. It is always guaranteed to be fun. Thanks to my spooktacular co-host and partner-in-crime, Deborah “Witch Hazel” Kelly. Thanks, Deborah for your contributions to our costume/raffle prizes. Congratulations to Lavana LaBrey who won First Place for Best Costume. Thank you to our special guest, Candice James, and to our Open Mic readers. We had readings by Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, PK Page, Robin Skelton, Milton Acorn, Count Vlad, and more. We continued our traditional reading of The Raven by Poe and enjoyed a new slew of Halloween spooks. See you next year!

- Janet “Lady Raven” Kvammen

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WORDPLAY AT WORK FEEDBACK & E-ZINE SUBMISSIONS

Janet Kvammen, RCLAS Vice-President/E-zine janetkvammen@rclas.com Antonia Levi secretary@rclas.com

Open Call for Submissions - RCLAS Members Only Poetry, Short Stories, Book excerpts, articles & lyrics are all welcome for submission to future issues of Wordplay at work.

Upcoming Special Feature Theme: New Westminster.

DEADLINE Nov 20.2016 Dec 2016 Issue 40 DEADLINE NOV 20.2016 Jan 2017 Issue 41 DEADLINE Dec 15.2016 Submit Word documents (include your name on document) to janetkvammen@rclas.com

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED! If you are interested please contact:

Director/Event Coordinator, Sonya Furst-Yuen sonya.yuen@rclas.com

Thank you to our Sponsors 

City of New Westminster

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Arts Council of New Westminster

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New Westminster Public Library

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Judy Darcy, MLA

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Boston Pizza, Columbia Square

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The Heritage Grill

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Renaissance Books

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100 Braid Street Studios

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Buy-Low Foods

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

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November 2016 Wordplay at work ISSN 2291- 4269 Contact: janetkvammen@rclas.com RCLAS Vice-President/ E-zine