An annual celebration of writers and literature
by Emily Olsen
Leanne Dunic is a musician, artist, and author of the book To Love the Coming End published by Bookthug/Chin Music Press 2017. Dunic is the singer/guitarist in the band The Deep Cove. Their debut album To Love the Coming End of the World is a companion to the lyric-prose book.…
Rose Morris: Your novel Little Sister is about a woman who can leave her body behind and inhabit the body of another person. Is writing a form of leaving your own body for other peoples’?
Barbara Gowdy: I don’t enter other bodies, no. I have to imagine them, of course, especially as most of my characters are physically different from me.…
Clea Roberts lives just outside of Whitehorse in the Yukon. Her second collection of poetry, Auguries, was published this spring by Brick Books. Her debut collection, Here is Where We Disembark (Freehand Books) was a finalist for the 2010 League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into German.…
Steven Heighton’s latest collection of poems “the Waking Comes late” is highly evolved work from a writer who “in the early evening of a life”, is a master of form and sound. The poems integrate with other texts, some anonymous or obscure, others more well known, Celan or Akhmatova for example.…
On Fire, the Afterlife, and Breaking the Line: an Interview with Poet Carla Funk
By Leah Callen
I talked to Carla Funk, former Poet Laureate of Victoria, about her latest collection, Gloryland. When I finished reading these poems, I felt like I had been in church: humbled, weirdly emotional, and longing to do something more with my life.…
Unabashedly Human: a conversation with poet, Adrienne Gruber
Interviewed by Emily McIvor
Buoyancy Control (Book Thug) is Adrienne Gruber’s second full length book of poems. This work is raw, sharp and visceral. The poems explore the strange confluence of physical and emotional being with urgent language but also with humour and kindness.…
Jan Zwicky has published nine collections of poetry, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth and Forge. Her latest collection The Long Walk forthcoming from University of Regina Press will be pre-released specially for her reading Friday September 23. Yvonne Blomer interviewed her this August about her new collection.
YB: Can you speak to where or what drives or pushes or pulls you into a poem – does the poem begin in an image or question, in a musical note or musical phrase, and from that start, where does it go or how does it unfold?…
Louise Halfe has published 4 books of poetry with Coteau Press. Miranda Pearson spoke with Louise about her latest collection Burning in this Midnight Dream.
MP: In your book Burning in the Midnight Dream you very bravely “go into the darkness” behind the exterior of truth and reconciliation. I thought it was an incredibly generous and beautiful work, despite much of the tragic content.…
Betsy Warland has published 12 books of poetry, creative nonfiction, and lyric prose, including her best-selling 2010 book of essays on writing, Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing. Nancy Pearson spoke with Betsy about her latest memoir, Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas.
NP: There are so many layers to Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas that could take our conversation in many directions.…
Kevin A. Couture grew up in a small B.C. mining town and has spent the last decade waking before dawn to write. The stories in his debut collection, Lost Animal Club, have appeared in various North American journals. Interviewed by Nancy Pearson.
N: It seems to me that the twelve stories in Lost Animal Club are about characters trying to find their place in their shifting, unsteady worlds.…