RCLAS March 2016 E-Zine, Wordplay at Work Issue 33, ISSN 2291- 4269

RCLAS Write On! Contest 2016   

Submissions open now Deadline April 1, 2016 Winners will be announced April 15, 2016

Submission Rules: 

3 categories: o non-fiction, (1500 words max) o fiction (1500 words max,) o poetry (1 page single spaced max) o Submit entry as a Word Document ( Font Times New Roman, Size 12)

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1st prize - $100, 2nd prize - $50, 3rd prize - $25 3 honourable mentions in each category.

Winners and honourable mentions will be published in RCLAS E-Zine, Wordplay at Work.  Winners invited to read at LitFest New West, May 14, 2016.  Fees $10 per submission for members, $20 per submission for non-members.  Maximum three submissions per person, total combined in any of our categories.  Previously published work will be accepted as long as author retains copyright.  Cover letter to include Name, Address, Email, Phone, Category, Title, Payment info.  Blind judging. Submissions to judges are anonymous.  Current Board Members are not eligible to submit.

SUBMISSION and Payment OPTION 1: Pay via Paypal at www.rclas.com AND email entry and cover letter to secretary@rclas.com SUBMISSION and PAYMENT OPTION 2: Email Word Document entry to secretary@rclas.com (DO NOT mail submission) and mail your cheque or money order to: Royal City Literary Arts Society Box #308 – 720 6th Street New Westminster, BC V3L 3C5 For further information Email: secretary@rclas.com

FULL DETAILS & PAYMENT OPTIONS

2016 Write On! Contest Poetry Judge Alan Girling is a sometime poet and full time teacher who grew up in North Vancouver, lived in Tokyo for six years where he started a family, and now lives in the community of Burkeville, Richmond.

Once, he wrote primarily short fiction and memoir, but over time that evolved into poetry as more and more often he came to see the stories he wrote as essentially poems waiting to reveal themselves. Since then, he has tried his best to explore the language of poetry in all its forms and to share his discoveries where he can. His work, for instance, has been found in journals and anthologies, heard on the radio and at live readings, and even viewed in shop windows. These opportunities include Lichen Arts and Letters, Pagitica, Hobart, The MacGuffin, Smokelong Quarterly, FreeFall, Galleon, In My Bed, Body Breakdowns, Blue Skies, Black Heart, Canadian Stories, CBC Radio, World Poetry Café, Poetic Justice, Surrey Muse and the downtown streets of Hamilton, Ontario and New Westminster, B.C. His chapbook, To Talk Less, is also available to anyone who asks.

He was a 2003 Larry Turner Award for non-fiction finalist, and his play, ‘Whatever Happened to Tom Dudkowski’ was produced in 2007 for Vancouver's Walking Fish Festival.He is happy to have won two prizes for his poetry, the 2006 Vancouver Co-op Radio Community Dreams Contest and the 2015 Royal City Literary Arts Society Write On! Contest.

Currently, he sits on the board of the Royal City Literary Arts Society where he hopes to be able to recognize and promote the best work of others.

2016 Write On! Contest Fiction Judge Elizabeth Houlton Schofield writes about the mundane and the everyday, who doesn’t have a little drama in their life?

Liz’s stories have appeared in the Globe and Mail, and been published in Drunk Monkeys and in Hearing Voices, the Bareback Anthology, 2014. She won the Honorable Mention at The Surrey International Writer’s Festival, 2013, and 2014 and was published in the conference anthologies.

Photo Credit: Pharos 2014 Shortlisted for Literary Writes 2013 (Federation of BC Writers), and Room magazine’s Reader’s Choice Awards 2012, she won the RCLAS Write On! 2015 fiction contest, came second in the same category and won honourable mentions in creative non-fiction and fiction in 2014 and 2015. Her poem, He’s Not My Daddy, was one of those chosen for the poetry walk to mark the unveiling of the Wait For me, Daddy monument in New Westminster, BC, October 2014 Liz recently left Beautiful British Columbia after twenty years, following her heart back to Manchester, UK, finally sleeping in the same bed every night as her lifetime love. She travels back to BC regularly, it’s her ‘other’ home. She is currently working on the first of a three novel trilogy set in Port Moody, compiling two books of short stories, and planning her vegetable and herb garden.

Passionate about the story, Liz looks forward to reading and enjoying the entries in the RCLAS 2016 Write On! Contest. Tell the story, tell it well, move her to tears, laughter or joy or pain it doesn’t matter. Move her...

2016 Write On! Contest Non-Fiction Judge Christina Myers worked as a community journalist in the metro Vancouver region for more than a decade, covering a spectrum of beats. She is a past winner of provincial and national journalism awards, and has won or been shortlisted for a number of writing competitions in the last year in fiction and non-fiction, including shortlist for the 2015 Storyteller’s Award at the Surrey International Writers Conference in fiction. She is among the authors in a forthcoming book of collected non-fiction being published later this year and also contributed to the Emerge15 Anthology published last October. She was a member of The Writer's Studio at SFU in 2015, returned to the program this year as a mentor apprentice in non-fiction, and continues to freelance with local media from time to time. She holds a bachelor of arts in psychology (UBC), a bachelor of journalism (TRU) and a certificate in creative writing (SFU).

She lives with her husband and two children in a very old house in North Surrey that is too small for all of the vintage kitchenwares she can’t resist bringing home from dusty thrift shops. She has a fondness for rainbow knee socks, fascinators and geeky board games.

Find her tweeting (occasionally) on Twitter: @ChristinaMyersA.

RCLAS WRITER OF THE MONTH

Celeste Snowber

Celeste Snowber, PhD is a dancer, educator and poet/writer who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Author of Embodied prayer and co-author of Landscapes of aesthetic education, she has written extensively in the area of arts and embodiment and continues to create site-specific performances in the natural world and her last full-length performance was entitled, “Woman giving birth to a red pepper.� Her poetry has been published in journals ranging from Quills, Kurungabaa, Blue Skies, Ararat, The Armenite, Language and Literacy and Journal of Curriculum Theorizing as well as in many edited books. Celeste is passionate about creating from experiences of daily life and collaborating with other artists both in performance and writing. She has pioneered ways of writing from the body and embodied inquiry within her scholarship and teaching and is a sought after mentor for graduate students. Her most recent book of poetry is Wild tourist: Instructions to a wild tourist from the divine feminine (Silver Bow Publishing). Celeste lives outside Vancouver, B.C., with her husband and is a mother of three amazing adult sons.

Her website can be found at www.celestesnowber.com and blog is www.bodypsalms.com.

#crows

#spring

#afavouriteplace

Blue Tits © Joyce Goodwin

In the Dublin of our childhood, we had milk delivered to the front door in glass bottles. The bottle tops were made of shiny foil. In those days milk was milk and the cream always rose to the top. Our mother would carefully skim it off into a blue and white striped jug and save it for her coffee, or perhaps our jelly. My sisters and I saved up the silver tops whenever we could and gave them to “the Missions” in Africa, to help the “black babies”. We never quite understood what the children of Africa would do with all that silver; we just knew they needed it desperately.

Every morning was a race against time to save the bottle tops. There was something very attractive to the birds about that silver. My favourite bird, was then, and still is today, a cheeky, blue and yellow bird, the Blue Tit. Those little birds inhabited and sang their way through my childhood.

If we children were awake in the early hours, tucked into bed still, reluctant to get up into the unheated room, we would hear the milkman coming. The clinking of bottles was our alarm bell, one sound of the dawn chorus in the neighbourhood.

The other sound was the singing of the cheery birds as they shredded our bottle tops and drank our cream. Often we just lay there knowing what was going on outside our front door, knowing the birds had beaten us to it. The results of their vandalism lay scattered around in tiny shiny pieces. We never caught them in the act so to speak because by the time we unlocked the door to grab the milk, they had flown away and were probably watching us from the nearby chestnut tree, their little beaks dripping with cream.

Where Are They? © Nasreen Pejvack

When I first came to Canada, I settled in Ottawa. For the first few months, I was busy finding a place for us to live, getting my son into school and then researching what I wanted to do and what kind of skills I would need to begin my new life.

During those busy few months, I kept an eye out for people who may look like those from the First Nations of this land: darker skin, beautiful long black hair, perhaps different languages. I remember one day I went to school a bit early to pick up my son, and waited by the door to see if any First Nations people came to pick up their children. None. No parents nor any students…

I began to wonder why I couldn’t see them anywhere, and even whether any had survived the wars of conquest I had heard about. I wanted to ask people, though did not know how. To my mind they were the first people of this huge continent, and they should be everywhere.

I completed a term of my new college program and managed to make some close friends. One was a sweet girl with whom I often studied. One day at our lunch break I boldly asked what happened to the people of this land from before the Europeans arrived, and why I could not see them like everybody else.

“Oh,” she said, then stared at me for a bit. “Good question, I think they are mostly living on reserves.”

“What is a reserve?” I asked “A place they have as their land and they live there together.”

“And where is that?”

“I do not know, at the edges of cities, I guess,” she said.

Well, that was not good enough for me. I wanted to know why people that I heard had lived here for thousands of years were not easily seen on the streets, at workplaces, and in schools like everybody else. Also, I learned that though my friend was a very nice person, she didn’t know much about First Nations people, nor cared to know. It was disappointing.

A few more weeks passed and the May 1st International Labor Day arrived. I knew that that celebration had been changed to the first Monday of September, though I never understood why. I went where I was told there may be some gathering in downtown Vancouver. There, after several years living in Ottawa and

now in Vancouver, I finally met a good number of First Nations people. Many seemed in very poor condition, but many were absolutely smart, walking around talking and educating.

Then I heard a strong voice with a unique accent speaking. He was communicating about “my people� so beautifully. He talked about the enforced reservations as segregation, hunger, displacement, genocide, as well as disappeared and murdered women.

It was a beautiful day, though breathing became so difficult all of a sudden.

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

RCLAS Board President: James Felton Vice-President: Janet Kvammen Secretary: Antonia Levi Treasurer: Nancy Pilling Director at Large: Aidan Chafe Director at Large: Dominic DiCarlo Director (Event Coordinator): Sonya Furst-Yuen Director at Large: Alan Girling Board Assistant Deborah L. Kelly (Membership Coordinator) Board Advisors RenĂŠe Saklikar Sylvia Taylor

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 & Prose Open Call for Submissions including the following themes/features: National Poetry Month April/May Themes: Poems written after your favourite poet, Rain, and Open Call (Poetry, Short Stories, Book excerpts & lyrics are all welcome for submission to future issues of Wordplay at work.) Deadline 15th of the month.

June: Open Call. No Theme. Deadline 15th of May. No E-zine in July and August.

Submit Word documents (include your name on document title) to janetkvammen@rclas.com

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED! If you would like to participate in a single event, or make an even bigger contribution, please contact our event coordinator.

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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Renaissance Books

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100 Braid Street Studios

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The Network Hub - New Westminster

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Boston Pizza

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The Heritage Grill

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Original’s Restaurante Mexicano

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

– Sylvia Plath “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” ― Stephen King “You can make anything by writing.” ― C.S. Lewis

See upcoming events at www.rclas.com www.poeticjusticenewwest.org g

March 2016 Wordplay at work ISSN 2291- 4269 Facebook

Contact: janetkvammen@rclas.com RCLAS Vice-President/ E-zine Design

Afterbirth © Janet Kvammen nesting branches of birch cascade, grasping robins egg speckled sky blue gnarled roots upended reveal subterrain – wide open water breaks, promise fulfilled the extraction of spring torn from winter’s icy womb in flood of march showers afterbirth splatters trees with pink blossom dawn’s second coming heralded the soulful cry of birds in chorus red with blood feathers charred by virgin sun Bless barren fields coastal mountains distant earth mother witness passage witness renewal