Christina Wells : Letters from the Field: (mostly) St. John’s, Newfoundland

 

 

Notes: Poetry Events in and around St. John’s
Date: July 15, 2026 

At Kym Greeley’s artist talk last night for her new exhibition, The Borrowing Days, I got talking to one of the artists in attendance, Gary Smith, who told me his wife is organizing a poetry reading at The Battery Cafe sometime in August. This feels very ‘Battery’—this openness to hosting on-the-ground, local events. The Battery cafe is at the bottom of Signal Hill and although it’s quite small, there are events cropping up there constantly: jazz, storytelling circles, poetry nights, open mics. It’s a go-to place to encounter local music and art.

The Theatre Hill Bar + Cafe at The Majestic is also open to hosting new events. While celebrating poetry month back in April, The Theatre collaborated with writers Nicole Haldoupis and Kathrine Abbass to organize and emcee a Poetry & Prose night, with featured readers and an open mic. I read my poetry at the first of these events with my friend, Ophelia Fernandes. The event was so well attended that now they hold one every month. You get to immerse yourself in the work of featured readers, but the open mic portion of the evening is where the event really shines. Every month there’s something new to tease the palette—a smorgasbord of locals, tourists, published poets, and first timers showing up to share their work and cheer each other on. In a short amount of time, Nicole, Katherine, and The Theatre have whipped up a staple for the creative community. I’ll definitely be back as an open mic’er next time.

And this isn’t the only duo waxing poetic around town. The Sad Clown Collective is a St. John’s group that hosts spoken word events, poetry readings, and writing events. According to their Instagram, hosts Sara Anne Meyer and Lucan Ings-Simms are “two clowns just holding space for spoken word performers and poets.” I haven’t made it out for an event yet, but a pic from their February gathering at The Newfoundland Embassy displayed the festivities:

Pool Hall Poetry Prompts:

1. Diamonte Poem

2. Write what you noticed about a stranger today

3. Write a love note to a ghost

4. A screaming song. 

A somewhat newer entity, Low Tide Collective is a community-centred poetic partnership between myself and Mercy Williams. Our goal is to contribute to the community by organizing local, paid opportunities for both emerging and established poets. In November 2025, we collaborated with O’Brien Farm to put off a Learning to Listen evening, complete with a fire by the barn, charcuterie, local beers, and poetry readings. Local poets Darren Ivany, Susan White, Nicole Haldoupis, Mercy, and I read alongside the wonderfully kind and lovely Don McKay. This summer we’ve teamed up with MUN’s Botanical Garden for their Twilight Thursday events. On July 9th, we led a poetry walk through the gardens. Participants carried their poetry note books to collect sounds or impressions, and we stopped throughout the walk to listen to poetry: Joy Abraham in the greenhouse, Taylor Brown in the pagoda, Matthew Hollett  by the lake, and Susan White and Darren Ivany in the woods. Mercy and I will facilitate a nature and place-based writing workshop there on July 23rd and experiment with mixing sound bathing and poetry at our final event on August 9th.

        

Notes: Journals and Magazines
Date: July 16, 2026 

Moving from practice to print, Memorial University’s student-run literary journal, Paragon, has been in existence since 2007 but publication has been sporadic, depending on student interest and availability. In 2023, Nicole Haldoupis, an MA student at the time, re-ignited the energy around Paragon and in 2024, I joined her in the effort to revive it. We’ve put together three issues so far as co-managing editors—issues #9, #10, and #11. Past student editors include Katie Baggs, Randy Drover, and Allison Graves, to name just a few. The current faculty supervisor is Dr. Michelle Porter. Together, we’re just starting to dig into issue #12.

It’s unclear if we can claim Horseshoe as the western Newfoundland equivalent to Paragon, or Paragon as the eastern Newfoundland equivalent to Horseshoe, but it is also edited in part by graduate students in the Master of Applied Literary Arts program at MUN’s Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook, NL. I’m not sure exactly who’s running the show over there these days, but whenever I’ve communicated with the journal, it’s the wonderful poet Adam Beardsworth who emails back.

Toothcut is a quirky and refreshingly feisty new literary journal out of St. John’s. Something you can really cut your teeth on (as they like to say). This journal, welcoming both literary pieces and saucy secrets, is put together by a fabulous team: Caleb J. Browne, Jenna James, Tanner Hudson, and Nick Corcoran. I met Anna Hansen-robitschek, their board chair, at the Sparks Literary Festival in April of this year (Paragon and Toothcut were tabling buddies) and she was brimming with collaborative ideas for how to bring Paragon and Toothcut together. Perhaps there’s a joint book-sale fundraiser in our future?

Of course, I can’t end this post without mentioning the quintessential literary magazines of Newfoundland and Labrador. The NL Quarterly has been in existence for, wait for it, 125 years! (a moment for rapturous applause). It’s the longest running journal in Canada (that’s still under the same name). That’s hard to take in, but impressively true. The managing  editor over there is the indefatigable Joan Sullivan. Then there’s Riddle Fence, where many a writer and artist have gotten their start. The staff and board page is a who’s who list of writers these days, featuring: novelist Elisabeth De Mariaffi as executive director, fiction writer Carmella Gray-Cosgrove as managing editor, and writers such as Randy Drover, Anna Swanson, Susie Taylor, and Sharon Bala as associate editors. Last, but never least, we can’t forget the amazing Them Days, a magazine run out of Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador. Them Days first began as a Heritage Society project in 1973 and became available to the public in ‘75. The long-serving founding editor was Doris (Martin) Saunders. These days, Aimee Chalk has the reins and the whole staff are passionate about documenting and connecting Labrador communities and voices.

Squeaking in one last note. WritersNL supports writers at all levels and stages of their careers here in NL. A strong advocate for literary arts in the province, WritersNL annually offers the NL book awards, the Fresh Fish Award for emerging writers, an in-demand mentorship program, and more. This year’s poetry mentor is none other than wordsmith, Matthew Hollett! A huge shoutout to George Murray—one of Canada’s leading poets, a steadfast community organizer, and a mentor to many—who’s currently serving as executive director.

Notes: Recent Poetry Publications
Date: July 17, 2026 

Finally, it bears mentioning the wealth of fresh, delightful poetry that Newfoundland and Labrador is constantly pumping out. Here are a few recent(ish) publications I’ve enjoyed lately:

No Place Like by Adam Beardsworth (Gaspereau Press, 2023)

Chores by Maggie Burton (Breakwater Books, 2023)

The Debt by Andreae Callanan (Biblioasis, 2021)

Romantic by Mark Callanan (Bibioasis, 2021)

Interrobang by Mary Dalton (Vehicule Press, 2024)

The Chrome Chair by Danielle Devereaux (Riddle Fence Debuts, 2024)

I Dreamed I was an Afterthought by Allie Duff (Guernica Editions, 2024)

Optic Nerve by Matthew Hollett (Brick Books, 2023)

And you Can’t Help but Listen by Jamie Jackman (Brack and Brine, 2024)

Water/Wept by Daze Jefferies (Anstruther Press, 2023)

Lurch by Don McKay (McClelland and Stewart, 2021)

Familiar Monsters of the Flood by Tia McLennan (Riddle Fence Debuts, 2024)

A Long Goodbye to the River Styx by Sara Anne Meyer (self-published, 2024)

Black Girl in the Ring by Delores V. Mullings (Breakwater Books, 2026)

Last Hours by Jennifer May Newhook (Riddle Fence Debuts, 2024)

Inquiries by Michelle Porter (Breakwater Books, 2019)

Total Party Kill by Craig Frances Power (Breakwater Books, 2024)

Where the Sea Kuniks the Land by Ashley Qilavaq-Savard (Inhabit Books, 2022)

Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson (Brick Books, 2025)

Island by Douglas Walbourne-Gough (Goose Lane Editions, 2024)

The Wind Has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman by Agnes Walsh (Breakwater Books, 2024)

I suppose I’ll leave my new chapbook here too, recently published by above/ground press (thanks rob!). The Unknotter is a short collection of poems I compiled from a larger working manuscript, Speaking in Tongues.

Reflections: I really do think that what people say is true—in Newfoundland, you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a writer!

 

 

photo captions:
: Ophelia Fernandez at The Theatre Hill, 2026.
: Poetry Walk with Low Tide Collective at the MUN Botanical Garden, 2026
: Nicole Haldoupis at the Paragon table, Sparks Literary Festival, 2026

 

 

Christina Wells (she/her) is a multi-genre writer from Northern Arm, NL/Ktaqmkuk. Her award-winning work, which explores memory and place, has appeared in The New Quarterly, ROOM, Riddle Fence, Horseshoe Magazine, The Newfoundland Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Yolk. She holds an MA from MUN and is now a PhD student there. She currently lives in St. John’s, NL.

 

Adam Beardsworth : Global Weirding: Poetry at the End of the World

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

          Things aren't going well. The globe warms. Oceans acidify, glaciers melt, seas rise, species die off. Poetry persists, but I often wonder why; or rather, I ask myself what role poetry and other aesthetic pursuits has in helping to stave off the sixth mass extinction. It's probably this question, more than any other, that troubles my own writing practice, perhaps driven by a semi-conscious guilt that I need to be doing more than playing with language when faced with such existential threats. But what is that "more" in a poetic context? The American poet Forrest Gander, like Emerson before him, says the goal of poetry is "To see what's there and not already / patterned by familiarity."[1] From an ecocritical perspective, this means paying attention to the ways the ecological itself has been "patterned by familiarity," and seeking a language capable of liberating representations of Nature from an Enlightenment rationality that has taught us to see it as either resource for human consumption or pastoral space for human retreat (which kind of amount to the same thing). Writing ecologically today must be more than writing about "Nature," with all the culturally constructed codifications that term brings to bear. Such nature writing is guilty, consciously or not, of externalizing the ecological, positing it as something outside of us, as the less privileged term in a Nature/culture binary that continues to exalt human (and humanist) interests above ecological embeddedness. Too often, in Stacy Alaimo's words, it "removes us from the scene and ignores the extent to which human agencies are entangled with those of nonhuman creatures."[2] Ecological writing today must chip away at this binary by focusing on the embodied entanglements of ecology and organism.

          The challenge of ecopoetics, as Cary Wolfe writes in relation to Wallace Stevens, is to "listen, watch, observe, and be . . .  in the context of our multitasking, ultra-distracted mediascape."[3] As if we are looking at Stevens's blackbirds. Doing so, however, requires commitment to what Timothy Morton has termed "the ecological thought," which he characterizes as "a virus that infects all other areas of thinking."[4] To think ecologically, for Morton, is to deconstruct Nature as both ideology and reified commodity. It recognizes that writing ecologically does not necessarily mean writing of forests, rivers, landscapes, or oceans. Rather, the ecological thought is "a practice and process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings--animal, vegetable, and mineral. Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy."[5]

          For me, how to write the ecological thought is a consuming question. How does one locate a poetics that, in Wolfe's words, "reproduces rather than represents the complex logic of physical (and, specifically, biological) systems in ongoing acts of meaning-making that are, at the same time, processes of individuation."[6] One possible path is through the weird, what Morton refers to as "global weirding": "In the term weird there flickers a dark pathway between causality and the aesthetic dimension, between doing and appearing, a pathway that dominant Western philosophy has blocked and suppressed."[7]  Not just paying attention but paying attention to what has always been there but has not always been seen outside of its ideological contexts. Like when Don Domanski writes of "the physical music / and the physical body / and that papery feeling / behind all physical things." (18).[8] Or when Christopher Dewdney reminds us that "the eye of the needle / is still the eye of the storm" (15).[9] It's that "papery feeling" or the "eye of the storm" that ought to direct ecological poetics, an autopoiesis that foregoes knowing in favour of letting be known, a search for the irreducibly strange, for that which renders clear the falsity of the Nature/culture binary, the logic of domination that overdetermines language in its domestication of the ecological. Easier said than done, but a direction for those of us writing on the precipice of ecological collapse.

 

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[1] Gander, Forrest. "Unto Ourselves: To See What's There." Twice Alive. New Directions, 2021.
[2] Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. pp. 144
[3] Wolfe, Cary. Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens's Birds. University of Chicago Press, 2020. pp. xii.
[4] Morton, Timothy. "The Ecological Thought." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Third Edition. Eds. Vincent Leitch et al. Norton, 2018. pp. 2621.
[5] ibid.
[6] Wolfe, Ecological Poetics. pp. xiii.
[7] Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology. Columbia UP, 2016. pp. 5.
[8] Domanski, Don. "An Evening in Cape Breton." Wolf Ladder. Coach House, 1991. pp. 18.
[9] Dewdney, Christopher. "This My Emissary." The Radiant Inventory. McClelland and Stewart, 1990. pp. 15.

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Beardsworth is the author of No Place Like (Gaspereau 2023), and the critical book Confessional Poetry in the Cold War (Palgrave 2022). He is the editor of Horseshoe Literary Magazine and a professor of Literature at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University. He lives with his family in Steady Brook, NL.