Conyer Clayton : Scrapbook : Failing to find a line by Robert Creeley in a book by Frank Stanford

folio : Scrapbook

 

 

He had a heart I wish I had.
          —Robert Creeley 

I guess I placed two white
orchid flowers between 

these pages but I forget
when. They didn’t exist 

until today when they
crumbled onto my lap.

 

 

“Failing to find a line by Robert Creeley in a book by Frank Stanford” does not appear in the lake-shaped excuse (Buckrider Books, 2026).

 

 

 

 

Conyer Clayton [photo credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey] is a queer writer and editor from Louisville, a dual US-Canadian citizen living between Ottawa and Kentucky. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the Ottawa Book Award), and many chapbooks. Conyer’s novel-in-progress has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship, a McCormack Writing Centre Scholarship, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and The City of Ottawa. the lake-shaped excuse (Buckrider Books, Wolsak and Wynn) is their third book.

Conyer Clayton : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Gwen Aube

Gwen Aube is the author of Missed Connections with Tall Girls (LittlePuss Press, 2026). She is a 2026 Al Purdy A-Frame Artist-In-Residence & 2025 AiR with the Ontario Heritage Council. She was a finalist for the 2025 PEN Canada New Voices Award, as well as a Kevin Killian Scholarship recipient for the Jack Kerouac School. Her chapbook pulp necrosis was published by above/ground press.

Gwen Aube reads in Ottawa alongside Claudia Coutu Radmore and D.A. Lockhart on Wednesday, March 25, 2026 as part of VERSeFest2026.

Conyer Clayton: Right from the start of the collection, with the epigraph from Richard Rohr (“God loves things by becoming them. We love God by continuing the same pattern.” p.11), we see a gesturing towards the divine through both revolutionary practices and literal religious spaces. I was struck by the following lines:

“THE SACRED AND THE LIBERATORY
BLUR BECAUSE THEY ARE BOTH MYSTERY—
BOTH STRUGGLE —BOTH LOVE—” (p.52)

and

“for this fate, i prayed at the unitarian church
& the week after at the anglican church
& the week after at the gnostic church
in the yoga studio, progressively finding myself 

in stupider & stupider places, cooking down
pomp & circumstance to its base components:
mother, child, moon, blood, sex, time,” (p.86)

Can you speak about your handling of this theme?

Gwen Aube:

So for background, I’ve had a twin set of religious experiences over the last few years. First, I started attending the aforementioned Anglican church, as well as reading theology & post-secular philosophy & such. Second, I (finally!) attended several Radical Faerie gatherings, basically mystical pagan dionysian festivals of queer holiness, which shook me to my core. Both of these spaces are primarily spiritual sites for me, but they’re also inseparably political in nature, with people advocating “works”, a radical theosis, or liberation as a spiritual cause.

The book plays with transgenderISM as virus & civilizational death-cult a lot, and for me this is really in conversation with the bits about motherhood—I don’t want this queerphobia keeping us from the human project, which one could “cook down” to that shit in the quote, mother child moon blood sex time. This, to me, is a deeply spiritual hope, situating love not just among those known to us, but among our ancestors and those who will come after us. Richard Gilman-Opalsky says that love is fundamentally outside exchange-value. Time (in this regard) acts as an illusory function of capital, and to situate storge (greekin out bitch) within deep time, beyond the functional unit, is a holy & revolutionary practice, whatever that’s worth. Like, Cuba’s Family Code is a lovely move. God willing they survive the horrific siege against them. It all just makes you want to pray, yknow?

I should say also, like many, I’ve been struck by Simone Weil. I heard about her thru Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia (in hindsight, I don’t love its read of Weil, but it’s a nice book). I really, really fell in love with her. The way Weil talks about love, God, and “the good” as basically synonyms really shaped these poems. At one point I was at Webster Library daily reading her (& Diogenes Allen’s readings of her), walking around all day replaying David Cayley’s wonderful CBC radio series on her. I cried alongside the trans-canada highway at Cayley’s daughter’s reading of Weil’s quotes, which she does with such humanity.

Sorry if I’m just like name-dropping here, others are infinitely smarter than this at me & I’m still a novice reader of it, but I’m deeply grateful to be taking in the liturgy and the communal-cooking forest-orgy and writing towards the thing. I have always loved, above all, this beatific feeling.

CC: There is an incredible and effective blend of humour, desire, and violence (“if beauty is violence, let us be beautiful. / if god suffers with us, let us suffer.” p.91), and in particular, as the speaker thinks about their yearning for connection/love with/for trans women (“she shall be loved the way i have been loved—like an attack / on the stupid immutable flesh of the world. // brutally, relentlessly, without condition or mercy or pause, / she shall be loved by me.” p. 92).

How did you approach balancing love and violence around this topic?

GA: That quoted poem is about my trans-mother, Ottawa-born novelist and painter Sybil Lamb. We lived together for like 8 years, and one time, years ago now, she was goading me on cuz she was in a bad mood. She wouldn’t fuck off, so I slapped her hard in the face. Six seconds of mutual flailing later she had me in a chokehold up against the unfinished drywall. Winner, Gagnon! I won’t ever do it again, I should plead here, don’t hit people—it was parental, yknow? We’ve carried our friend with multiple-sclerosis home together, we’ve kept the cops out when runaway girls got into fist-fights over cig money, we’ve dug pits and hopped trains together. Our love has been lived in the body, and that poem reflects our context.

More broadly, the majority of the world, much of which works in slave conditions to procure our pulp & ink, is a fundamentally violent one. Primarily cuz colonial domination, but also cuz the frictionless society of the western professional-managerial arts worker is a fiction provided thru that subjugation. I grew up in a relatively violent environment & also one which was overflowing with love. Bataille has the thing about Eros and Death, which isn’t really what I’m working with (I think the love in this book is rarely eros), but there’s something of that type of fundamental tension here, too.

As for the mentioned violence of beauty, I still don’t know how to talk about this well. I think in general I’m quite intimidated by beauty as a topic. Suffice it to say the esthetician’s office is a clinical site of pure violence, going there for laser hair removal is like touching Hell, yet I too desire to get my shit peeled back for the 8-trillion-dollar Helen-of-Troy-face surgery.

CC: The importance of maintaining class consciousness is apparent within your narrative choices. The book is dedicated to homeless people, one of the sections is titled “Wearing a Fur Coat to the Welfare Office,” and various character’s positions within capitalism are continually addressed. Given the largely queer and trans speakers and characters, can you expand on the elevated importance of class consciousness to you within this book’s context?

GA: There was a study some years back in the UK (it was the British Sociological Foundation one, I think) which showed that among professional artists, those with working-class backgrounds had dropped from 16% to 8% in a decade or something. This means 92% of artists working professionally in the UK had went to Wiggly Cockswallow’s Finishing School, or whatever. When I open a litmag, it is often a bunch of elegies about getting micro-agressed by your thesis advisor. I’m empathetic of course, but as art it’s just awful. I’ve known plenty crackheads, and they have great stories to tell, and language which tastes like something. We need more crackheads in the fine arts. For that to happen, Ontario Works needs to give more than $733 per month.

Of interest to the book, queer and trans people are of course more likely to face employment discrimination and live in abject poverty. Queers are also, like the unwashed masses more broadly, cockroach-esque in our resilience, which I find beautiful. Equally interesting, however, is how trans women have that (seemingly-real??) internal petit-bourgeoisie of tech-job girlies—which is fascinating when you view us economically & culturally as a “diaspora”, and even juicier when you get into the ways in which surveillance tech fucks over poor trannies. But those are the girls mutual-aids’ing our tits fatter, too! Those girls have paid my rent, and my proximity to them is due to my transsexuality! There’s a Marxist analysis of the puppygirl polycule to be made, and I don’t think my book does it, but (like the puppygirl herself) it’s fun to poke around in.

In the closing long poem, For Herma, I cast the pregnant woman and the sea-monster in Gustav Klimt’s painting Hope 1 as lesbian lovers. They are unable to birth their unborn child because they’re literally in a painting, and thus figures of “the Imaginary”, cut-off by capital-H History, a sort of blockage of possibility within a world which irritatingly necessitates the materialist appraisal. The importance of the class analysis, which has been downgraded by an arts culture steeped in liberal institutions, is not exactly elevated within the queer context, but rather the queer subject is beautifully both within and therefore kinda the whole of the proletarian (ultimately, human!!!) subject. Yet, like the figures in the painting, one dreams of a time when the working class is not needed to be the driving force of history, when the fae may take the reigns. 

CC: I was delighted by the way you use sound play to amplify moments of hedonism. For example, in “SIN”:

“under the moon i confuse you for a fruit
your tinny iridescence & little pure 

caloric value. in the muck we suck
at the memory of colour, of the gay 

guy who snuck his fuck into the pool
next door.” (p.51)

I’d love to hear more about these craft decisions, as well as other form choices like your use of all caps (like in the quotations in earlier questions, a style used throughout the book).

GA: In the section you quoted earlier, the ALL-CAPS SCREEDS work well to delineate text into separate, cycling clauses. They also allow for a shift of voice within a poem—for example, to introduce a sense of authority, a sense of nuts-ass hollering, or an intermediate position within those. My family’s facebook posts aura farm similarly: “CARVED PUMPKINS TODAY HAHA JAMES DID YOUNG SHELDON! HAPPY HALLOWEEN LOVE YA BIG!!!” One presumes the semiotic residue of art naif within the tool’s function is self-evident, darling.

As far as sound-play in poetry, this year I’ve been falling in love with Joshua Beckman, who can make any phrase sound delightful. I also listen constantly to a big variety of rap, so rhyme & assonance is really wedged in my head. I guess it’s a game of when can I get away with it? I like to laugh in bed. Sex and drugs are funny and loopy and it’s worth honouring them thusly.

In the section Shemalaise, there’s some notations in the poems, right-aligned on the page. Those I stole from parapolitical CIA researcher & Montreal poet, Peter Dale Scott. He uses them primarily for actual citation, as many of his poems require it, but they’re lovely little intrusions,  so I adopted them for the book. His work is one of the most exciting things I’ve read recently.

This is your last question so I have to come up with other formal total geniusisms I have so I can keep talking—Dramatic dialogue has been a delightful addition to play with, I wanna do that more. I probably say internet words too much but I’m scared, were I not to, that I would be ignoring the world-as-it-is. Uhm…what else? I spent probably longer than is cool writing this, I’m really navel-gazing hard here. Thanks for caring. Reader, please let me sleep on your couch. Please google “cute baby cow”. Please find and read Lilith Latini’s poems.

Thank you for this, Conyer, your questions have been so, so thoughtful and kind.

 

 

 

Conyer Clayton [photo credit: Joanna Eldridge Morrisey] is a queer writer and editor from Louisville, Kentucky living in Ottawa. A MacDowell Fellow, Tin House Novel Summer Scholar, and author of two award-winning poetry collections and ten chapbooks, their third full-length collection of poetry, the lake-shaped excuse, is forthcoming in fall 2026 with Wolsak and Wynn.

Conyer Clayton : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Chris Turnbull

 

 

 

 

Chris Turnbull is the author of cipher forthcoming from Beautiful Outlaw Press in spring 2024, [ untitled ] in o w n (CUE Books 2014), and Continua (Chaudiere Books 2015). Her poetry chapbooks, collaborations, and installation pieces are in print, online, and within landscapes. She curates a footpress, rout/e, whereby poetry can be found on trails (www.etuor.wordpress.com).

Chris Turnbull reads in Ottawa on Saturday, March 23,2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.

Conyer Clayton: You have a new book coming out, cipher (Beautiful Outlaw Press) — very exciting! Can you tell readers a bit about it?

Chris Turnbull: cipher considers landscape refashioned by disaster and cyber, including the adoption of words used to refer to tangible/physical experiences and realities. Several figures — The Curator, the kids, “we” — flicker in and out. Duration is difficult to pinpoint.

I’ve been working slowly on this manuscript for several years — and over this period considering seeming societal withdrawals ‘from’ the outdoors. I wonder how other generations might mediate their experiences of, or limit fears of, various elements of our physical worlds. I think this conundrum is important — there is no conclusion, but cipher presents possibilities. How do these generations relate to or make world(s)? Land does not take precedence, screens, networks, are central and unbound: the marsh is ripped at corner.

CC: I’ve been following along your project rout/e for a while now, where you place poems along trails. On the website, you say, “Language is visual, sonic, and kinetic. When I return to the poems in rout/e, they’ve usually changed in some way — a crease in the paper shifts a line’s interpretation; condensation may obscure the clarity of how a word is visualized; the branches from a fallen tree might cause difficulty in reading the poem or navigating a trail, or someone may have taken the entire poem away.” In your new forthcoming book cipher, you say, “the kids refuse the forest.” Is there a connection in the poetics of rout/e and cipher?

CT: No, not really. rout/e was initially a small press publication that I had started in Vancouver and, eventually, didn’t want to continue publishing it in paper format. I am outdoors a fair amount — rout/e started as a result of my experiences outdoors and some thinking about how poetry (language) can be experienced. I started placing/planting poems on trails with an idea that discovering a poem on a trail might enable access, in a way, to poetry outside of a school or scholastic setting. It was a way to get poems off the shelf and out of archive — to try to enable a different form of encounter. Outdoors, a poem might (like the landscape folks walk through/with) not be in a form that’s expected. rout/e and cipher aren’t that much alike in form or impetus.

CC: Can you speak to what change or loss is being mediated throughout your book? What surrounding is cipher attempting to navigate through language?

CT: Our surroundings and relationships are mediated through language and through our senses. Language itself is a surrounding — how a sentence is ordered, or what is left out of a line — organizing syntax to make “sense” or present perspective. Change and loss are different things. cipher presents possibilities of both, experienced through forms of absence and forms of focus.  In cipher, continuities are disrupted by eco-disasters; the figures in cipher are intermittent and from different periods of time. How do they describe their experiences, what they feel, what is remembered? Maybe none of cipher is grounded in ways we understand, maybe experience is best explained by wearables and augmentation — if so, can language adequately describe our sensory and cognitive experiences, such as love? When I started writing cipher, what I wanted was a different lexicon for a changing, curious, time…and as I thought about it, I saw that the language (in English) that we use to describe our environments and the interactions within those environments, have become transposed.

CC: I am really intrigued, as someone who has worked so deeply with the natural world as a collaborator in your poetics, with this movement into deep consideration of cyber realities and virtual environments in your new work. Can you talk a bit about this shift?

CT: We live in a very wired environment; it’s just not obvious, or perhpas is understated. I think humans are very adroit at inventing and creating environments for short term benefit, although the long term effects can have multiples of negatives and positives. I think we’re also very adroit, and invested, in creating stories about our realities and our experiences of our surroundings. I see an enormous investment of time for many of us in online, cyber mediated, realities and wonder about how we might be evolving, or how online environments affect our abilities to inter-relate or understand the varieties of interactions that occur invisibly, minutely, or obviously in a “real” world. I have been involved with a lot of kids in outdoor environments and noted symptoms of agitation and mood changes when away from their devices for a few days; I have noted the same with adults, although adults can mask a bit better. I’ve noted that the “sense” of time — typically aided by getting things done, moving around, interacting — is disrupted too. Things that should be firmanent, in cipher, aren’t. What is being navigated?

CC: Why a long, sequential poem?

CT: It just worked out that way, probably because it’s an exploratory piece. I don’t often write single poems — partially because I prefer not to title pieces and like the open nature of a sequential poem. The other component of writing a longer sequence is that pacing can be modified in ways that, in a shorter poem, is limited. cipher can be very slow in its pacing — this is deliberate — some lines clusters can be, if read out loud, related to the pace of particular movements (e.g. walking).

CC: Your work is often very visual, with ample white space. What is your method for translating your work to performance? 

CT: Well, I come to write/perform from off the page — and continua and [untitled] in o w n — are spatially oriented in ways that cipher is not. White space is an invention for paper. It’s not just visual, or seen by its contrast with the shape of letters or images: it can be represented in performance by breath, time, physical action/gesture. It contributes to the “platform” that is the page. continua, particularly, for example, is a poetry-play — a multi-voice/polyphonic poem. The white spaces are as much prop as the language or the photographs. The page is a dynamic: you can’t avoid white space — so what does that mean for the placement of words on a page, and the movement of the eye “across” or “within” the page?—the focus of one’s eyes…we’re not just reading letters into words. [untitled] is more tightly constrained, in terms of its white space, and acts as a conversation/meditation on environmental policy, degradation, and beauty, among other things. In the past, a few friends have assisted me to read continua, and we marked passages and practiced the pacing, interjection, pauses, and harmonies. The same could be done for [untitled].

Another way to perform them is via videopoem — which is a form I really enjoy developing. continua, [untitled[ in o w n, and cipher are all on vimeo in whole or part form. cipher is here: https://vimeo.com/923378242

 

 

 

 

 

Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer and editor from Kentucky now living in Ottawa, whose multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, addiction, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens. Their latest book is But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award, Anvil Press). They are a Senior Editor at Augur, Nonfiction Editor for untethered magazine, and guest edited issues of CV2 and Room Magazine. You can find their nonfiction and poetry in Best Canadian Poetry 2023, This Magazine, Room Magazine, filling Station, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Capilano Review, and others.

Kevin Spenst : Chuffed about Chapbooks: a Poetry Tour of the People’s Providence of Canada

 

 

Then let me ask
                     what is not worth preserving    what is not vanishing   as
if we are not always fading away   lonely   as if we are not all grand

Arleen Paré First, “The American Wilderness Act”

 

     I have a problem naming things. Thank goodness I don’t have children. They’d be named, renamed, forgotten and then renamed elaborately once again. In part, my problem with naming things is that I love the act of naming so much that I want to do it again and again even if it’s for the same person, place or thing. Certainly, there’s also forgetfulness, a quality which is also a central theme in my writing. I appreciate the request by rob mclennan to write a bit about my recent book tour in order to force me to sit down and remember. To put names to people, places and things.

     Over the course of planning my cross-Canada tour, which started in early January of 2023 with mostly query emails to bookstores and libraries in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec, the originally conceived 50-venue tour went from Chuffed about Chapbooks to Chuffed about Chapbooks: a Big Poetry Tour of Mixed Feelings (this was in March I think when I hadn’t heard back from several bookstores and no libraries were interested in hosting me for free) to a brief dalliance with Huffed about Puffed Chapbooks: Poetry Pops (when I was questioning my sanity over what I’d undertaken) to finally settle on Chuffed about Chapbooks: a Poetry Tour of Everywhere. I dove into the planning, after purchasing a multi-legged flight from Vancouver to Edmonton to Saskatoon to Winnipeg to Windsor and then a return from Montreal, thinking that since I’d planned a 100-venue tour in 2014 when I had no full book titles to my name (just a handful of chapbooks), a 50-venue tour would be easier. In some ways it was (I had my publisher Anvil Press covering my travel costs), but in many ways it wasn’t. It was a lot harder convincing most bookstores that I was worth their time even with the promise that I’d be reading with local authors. Most people were still coming out of the Great Period of Unsettlement and with inflation and the frayed social fabric revealed/exacerbated by COVID, goodwill seemed to be in shorter supply. From my privileged point of view, I went in thinking that I could plan a straight-forward small press book tour consisting of my last full-length collection and three new chapbooks, which had recently been published. Again: I appreciated the support and enthusiasm by the venues that did host me, the poets who agreed to read with me and the people who came out. That’s something that will always shine from the circumference of my heart as it grows past 2023, but all the same, there were some rough patches where I wondered if putting myself into the mind of a tree (and all those things we do as we descend into the writing of poems) was worth all the trouble I was putting people through. When I encountered the enthusiasm of someone like community organiser, Janet Kvammen, however, I felt assured that I was growing in the right direction.

     After I posted on Facebook in February that I was embarking on another big tour for small books, Janet Kvammen asked if I was reading in New Westminster. While I had intended to launch the tour at THIS gallery in the DTES (of Vancouver), because of scheduling conflicts, Janet and I eventually landed on a reading April 16th:

Almost On the Other Side: Writing Before and After
Q and A with Jónína Kirton, Kevin Spenst, and Alan Hill
Sunday APRIL 16, 2023 @Columbia_Square New Westminster

     Since Jónína, Alan and I had read together a few years before the pandemic, I thought it would be interesting to have us together to reflect upon some of the changes in our writing pre- and post-pandemic. I love poetry for all the linguistic fireworks that language is capable of, but I also appreciate how it engages with what cuts us to the core. Jónína and Alan did not disappoint in their engagement with issues of mental health, colonialism and trauma. It felt like the right place to start the tour.

Photo credit: Janet Kvammen

April 29th  Surrey Art Gallery with Tolu Oloruntoba Venue #2

     In February, I reached out to Jordan Strom, curator at the Surrey Art Gallery. I wanted my hometown of Surrey to be included in the tour and was hoping to do a simple pop-up reading of a couple minutes, but once again, because of scheduling, the reading landed much earlier than what I thought would be the official launch. Fortunately, because Jordan Strom is brilliant, the reading took the form of a workshop with Tolu Oloruntoba. We provided prompts to a group of about fifteen people to encourage them to write in response to the work of Charles Campbell, whose show Ocean to Livity consisted of (to quote the Surrey Art Gallery’s website), “an installation of breath recordings from Surrey and other Lower Mainland residents. Campbell strips away racial hierarchies and holds up Black breath as its own force—a carrier of ancestry and experience, a creator of community and something that, even in its most subtle presentation, changes the way we think, feel, and live.” It was a productive and meaningful afternoon where we also made chapbooks to hold the work that was written. I’m forever grateful to Jordan for reconceiving my “pop up” idea in much bigger terms and bringing Tolu into this project where we also were in dialogue (directly and indirectly) with Charles Campbell.

May 2rd at 4 -> Lower Case Reading Room at Regional Assembly of Text (Live Instagram Reading!) Venue #3

     Into every 50-venue reading tour, a bit of social media must fall. One of the best collections of artbooks, zines and chapbooks (and yes, there’s a lovely grey area between the three) is at the Regional Assembly of Text on Main Street. Brandy Fedoruk & Rebecca Dolen, owners and chief makers at the RAoT, agreed to have me for an afternoon residency of sorts. I spent an hour in the Lower Case Reading room, a space packed with hundreds (thousands?) or palm sized books. The room itself fits two people at most. I wrote a cento, a poem made up of other lines, and then read it to the people who happened to be in the store.

     I was surprised at how nervous I was to read in front of strangers. It’s something I’d done dozens of times before but somehow I feared that I risked being a pest. In the past, I threw myself into pop-up readings in front of strangers with the belief that weirdness for weirdness’ sake was worth it, but this time I felt I was treading on uncertain ground. Like I risked upsetting people who’ve already been through so much. My fears unfounded, the two women and their children seemed delighted to be part of reading number three, which I then redid for the good people of Instagram.

     Here’s how the next two short readings went: I tagged myself at the end of two Jane’s Walks that I’d organized in the West End and then in Mount Pleasant:

West End Poetry Walkabout (May 6) 11am to 1pm starting at the corner of Guildford and Beach in front of the Sylvia Hotel: Kevin Spenst will read West End poems from A Verse Map of Vancouver (edited by George McWhirter) -> on grass in front of Parks Board offices: poetry from Jennifer Zilm (“Vancouvering”) and Jules Wilson  ->  at the corner of Lost Lagoon: poetry from Veronika Gorlova and  Betsy Warland  -> at the parklet at Guildford and Haro: poetry from Bill Richardson and Emily Chou, with additional poems by Jeff Steudel read by Kevin Spenst Venue  #4

Veronika Gorlova and Jules Wilson ; photo credit: Jane’s Walks

Mount Pleasant Poetry Walkabout (May 6) 2:30 to 4:30 starting at Mount Pleasant Community Garden (3161 Ontario Street) poetry and song from Lori Weidenhammer and Tariq Hussain -> outside the Western Front: poems from Jane Ellison and Lois Klassen  ->  Lydia Kwa and Elena Johnson to read by murals off Main Street street (between fourth and fifth) ->  Selina Boan and Rita Wong - daylighting project on Saint George and 5th Venue  #5

 

Tariq Hussain started the afternoon off with some music

      This was one of the highlights of the tour. There was a turnout of about thirty people at each walk. The fear of the earlier reading was replaced with confidence, bolstered by being in the midst of so many of my poetry pals. As host, I was able to share my enthusiasm for others and this opened me up. What was especially lovely was that there were strangers and people who were new to poetry. Lingering in conversation, the last two people at the second venue of the day had learned about the walk through EventBrite. “I wanted to do something special each day of my birthday week and I wanted to know more about Mount Pleasant and poetry, so I came to this,” the brand-new twenty-year-old told me and my partner.

May 12th Vancouver Chuffed about Chapbooks at THIS gallery from six to eight with Evelyn Lau and Joanne Arnott hosted by Geoff Nilson #6

     The official launch was finally here! With exceptionally astute help from my partner, Cheryl Rossi, I had sent out a spiffy press release that garnered a bit of attention. Ultimately, I don’t know if the article in Createastir brought anyone out, but it felt good to have some official recognition for the small press scene, and adjacent arts communities, upon which I was hoping to help shed a little light. While I found out later that one arts editor for a major paper considered the press release fraudulent (“Is this guy this popular or is this a joke?”) and I didn’t hear back from one call for writing about book tour planning, it was good to have some official press in the world backing up the tour. A poem might be an invitation to a private place shared between the imaginations of strangers, but a book tour for those poems needs some evidence of its existence outside of one’s head.

     Unfortunately, at the last minute, Joanne Arnott wasn’t able to make the reading. Her presence and poetry was dearly missed. Evelyn Lau read worlds into existence in front of our eyes and ears. Geoff did a fantastic job of hosting and adding some of his own poems. Shannon Pawliw, the curator at THIS, was a superb host. The gallery was packed to standing room only. Afterwards, just like old times, we went to the Alibi room for drinks (a place that’s been around since the late 90s.)

VICTORIA:
May 18th Victoria at Russell Books May 18th Arleen Paré and Anne-Marie Turza venue #7

     The first part of the tour that took me some distance from home was Victoria. On the bus to the ferry, I made my first on-the-road chapbook. There was a woman across from me who had a tote bag with a mediaeval unicorn on it. I had a paper transit pass that I folded into a micro-chapbook and I tried writing something about unicorns. The ink didn’t quite stick to the glossiness of the paper. “Pardon my low-budget solicitation. I’m reading in Victoria with two writers who I’m sure you’d love,” I said, explaining that the cover of Ann-Marie Turza’s book consisted of a mediaeval scene from The Unicorn Tapestries. I gave her the micro-chapbook. The reading that night was lovely and this stranger from the bus, a harpsichordist as it turned out, was in attendance.

WE ATE PICKLES TOGETHER, SAYS A DEAD SOMEONE

Someone has made a tiny ladder out of paperclips.
A tiny bird flies through the ladder’s rungs.

        Ann-Marie Turza, Fugue with Bedbug

     While in Victoria, I stayed with Dennis Bolan and Soressa Gardiner. Not only were they gracious hosts (Dennis even let me beat him at pool a couple times) but they came out to my poetry crawl the following day. Also in attendance were Yvonne Blomer and Carrie Walker. It was a good sized group and we got a lot of writing done in response to the following places:

 

Poetry Crawl May 19th Friday:
Open Space Arts Society May 19th at 2pm pop up writing and reading #8
Gage Gallery Arts Collective May 19th at 2:30pm pop up writing and reading #9
Bastion Books - Rare and Second Hand Books in Victoria May 19th at 3pm pop up writing and reading #10
The Regional Assembly of Text May 19th at 3:30pm pop up writing and reading #11

     Back in Vancouver, I had two other pop up readings before my flight to Edmonton. Getting punched in the face (it was a random blow that came out of nowhere one late afternoon as I was cycling through East Vancouver) was something I didn’t need. I did write about it the next day at the DTES Writers Festival, where I facilitated a writing station.

2023 DTES Writers Festival Create & Share - Workshop and Reading Facilitators: Fiona Tinwei Lam, Kevin Spenst, Claire Matthews Time and Date: Thursday May 25, 2023 1:30 PM-4:30 PM Location: The Field House, Oppenheimer Park: Drop In Join us for a supportive multi station generative writing session with Fiona Tinwei Lam, Claire Matthews, Kevin Spenst and other authors to create fresh local poetry. Enjoy new techniques in a supportive environment. No previous experience necessary, everyone is welcome. Open mic reading and sharing at the end of the creation session. Event runs rain or shine! ASL, Mandarin, and Cantonese interpretation provided. 有普通話和廣東話翻譯  venue #12

     Writing with others is healing. It was a warm-spirited afternoon that ended with an open mic. It was the best place to be, but it took a while for me to shake the strangeness of being randomly assaulted. Fortunately, I had the page and I was spending every hour outside of tour planning writing down details about the incident, trying to understand it.

     Two days later, the disembodiment of zoom was extra discombobulating. My jaw was still sore and I was gearing up to leave home for six weeks. The presentation that I gave (one that I’ve given many times before) felt odd. I wasn’t inside the presentation. For now, I’ll blame the violence of this world.

Simon Fraser University - The Writers Studio Saturday May 27th workshop over zoom for the Writer's Studio cohort and ending with pop up reading: venue #13

EDMONTON:
June 1st 7pm Paper Birch Books with Catherine Owen and Chris Hutchinson venue #14

 

June 2nd Edmonton Poetry Crawl:
2pm Peter Robertson Gallery pop up writing and reading  venue #15
2:30pm  Lando Gallery pop up writing and reading venue #16
4:00 Transcend Coffee, 8708 109 St  venue #17
4:45 Antique Treasure Housevenue  #18

     There were half a dozen people in attendance at the Paper Birch reading. There was an Alberta Writers Guild meeting in Calgary that weekend and several people sent their regrets. The readings were steller: Catherine shared a number of chapbooks that she’d published over the years and Chris’ poetry sparkled. The next day, one person showed up for the Poetry Crawl and we were asked to leave the first gallery we were at. It was a strange start to an afternoon that quickly fizzled out. Fortunately, I met up with Christ Hutchinson later in the day and we talked poetry. The Trobairitz reading at Catherine Owen’s the next day was the highlight of the trip. It was good to chat with a number of local authors. One hopes to sell books at a reading, but the next best thing (sometimes even better thing) is good conversation. All of the above happened at Catherine’s Trobairitz. I also stayed with Catherine, a writer who once did a six-week tour across the country, so it felt invaluable to talk about touring and the poetry world. “I’m detached with love,” she said, explaining her philosophy in regards to the poetry scene(s). Her love of poetry is evident and fierce. She also had me on her podcast, Ms. Lyrics’s Poetry Outlaws.

June 3rd Saturday,  2pm to 4pm Catherine Owen’s home reading series Trobairitz: Venue #19

SASKATOON:
June 6th Poetry Crawl
Saskatchewan Craft Council  2:00 Venue  #20
Turning the Tide 2:30 Venue #21
Pioneer Cairn 3:30 Venue #22
Art Placement 4:15 Venue  #23

     Saskatoon was stellar. A big part of the fun was getting to know a family that my ex-girlfriend had put me in touch with. Lea and Wade picked me up at the airport and we immediately got to talking about this, that and everything.

     “How many times have you been to Saskatoon?” Wade asked as he drove along the ring road which circled the city.

     “Three or four times… The first time I was hitchhiking across the country in ‘95. Actually, I was outside the city and a German picked me up in a big boat of a car. He was on his way to a pow-wow and he asked if I wanted to go with him. I ended up staying with him for a couple of nights.”

     “Oh, that’s probably Klaus,” Wade said. “He works with Lea’s mom.” Wade explained that a number of anti-nuclear energy activists from Germany had come to Saskatchewan in the 90s and several of them ended up staying. Ach du meine Güte!

     The entire trip was punctuated by moments like this. “The world is a handkerchief” is the Spanish expression. Yes, small.

     The other big part of Saskatoon was getting to know the incredibly sweet and smart John Nyman. Earlier in the year, Jackpine Press had put us in touch after we’d both contacted them independently about setting up a reading. John and I then met over zoom to talk about organizing a poetry crawl. Despite our efforts at publicising it, no one came out to join us in our crawl, but we had prompts for each other and we wrote. It felt like the perfect way to engage in a relatively unknown city. We helped each other uncover the poetics of the place and there was a small audience at each venue of surprised and people (“Am I interrupting something?” a woman said at Turning the Tide. “You’re right on time,” I replied. “Welcome to venue #21 in my 50-venue tour of the country. It’s my great pleasure to introduce the poet John Nyman…”

Peryton Books June 6: 7:00 -> 8:00 readings Kevin Spenst, John Nyman and Mari-Lou Rowley Venue #24

     For the full reading the next night at Peryton, a mostly second-hand bookstore owned and operated by Aimee Martens, we had a full house of about twenty people. There were plenty of unfamiliar faces along with some people I knew. Mari-Lou Rowley ended her remarkable set of poems on a very sexy number, proving poetry’s capacity to fluently trade in the unexpected. John’s reading was also memorable.

 

Delane Just (from Jackpine Press), Aimee Martens, John Nyman and myself

WINNIPEG:
June 8th: Whodunit books with Angeline Schellenberg and Ariel Gordon Venue #25

myself, Angeline Schellenberg and Ariel Gordon

June 9th Poetry Crawl
1:00 Winnipeg Art Gallery -> WAG Venue #26
1:45 Plug in Institute of Contemporary Art Venue #27
3:00 Artspace Vesti_art (corner of Arthur St. and Bannatyne Ave) Venue #28
3:30  Platform Gallery Venue #29
7:00 Private Backyard Reading Venue #30

     In Winnipeg, I stayed with Angeline Schellenberg and it was once again a pleasure to find myself in the midst of a very cool family. That first night, I Facetimed my girlfriend and introduced her to Angeline and Tony. It felt good to be able to bring her into the homes of where I was staying.

     I also had the pleasure of reading with Angeline and Ariel Gordon at Whodunit Books. Was it Mari-Lou Rowley’s poem written for a former lover that still echoed in my mind? Had it created some sort of gravity? Whatever the reason, there were a number of sexy poems that evening, prompting someone to suggest “Mennonite erotica” as a new label. There was a lot of laughter that night, which spilled into the home reading in Angeline’s backyard. I’m eternally grateful to her and Tony for their hospitality and all the thought that went into the reading.

     For the rest of the tour I leave the basics below. I will get around to writing more about the tour when time allows it. Do note that all this could be an exercise in nothing but thank yous. The point of the tour was to connect with the various poetry communities (people, places and things) across the country. In that regard, it felt like a big success. I come home with a heart full of gratitude.

WINDSOR:
Mayor’s Walk June 11th venue #31
Monday June 12th evening reading with Jade Wallace, Mark Laliberte (MA|DE) and Rawand Mustafa at Biblioasis Books venue #32

LONDON:
June 15th Poetry Crawl
2pm Museum London venue #33
2:50pm Michael Gibson Gallery venue #34
3:15pm Covent Garden Market  venue  #35
4pm TAP with Aaron Schnieder and Kit Roffey venue venue #36

Hamilton:
June 16th Printed Word with Kate Siklosi and Gary Barwin venue  #37

HAMILTON:
June 17th Poetry Crawl
1pm You Me Gallery venue  #38
1:30 Mulberry Street Coffeehouse  venue #39
2pm Centre[3] for Artistic + Social Practice venue #40
2:45 Hamilton Artists Inc. venue #41

TORONTO:
June 19th Art Bar with Catherine Graham Monday venue #42

GUELPH:
June 20 at open mic launch “In Your Own Words” at artBar, headlining with John Nyman venue  #43

TORONTO:
June 21  Flying Books with  Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin and ryan fitzpatrick venue #44

 

KINGSTON:
June 28 with Michael Casteels and Alison Chisholm  Novel Idea Books / Reading 7pm
venue #46

Michael and Allison and their little poet

OTTAWA:
June 29 reading with rob mclennan and Conyer Clayton (pictured below)
The Factory Reading Series: Ten Toes Coffee House and Laundry
837 Somerset Street West (at Rochester Street,)
venue #47

 

June 30th: 7pm Happy Goat Coffee pop up writing and reading  venue #48

Surprise pop up over Instagram venue #49!

     This penultimate reading turned out to be one that I did for my nephew who came to meet me at the train station. I was so happy to see him.

MONTREAL
July 2nd Accent reading series #50

with one of the Accent series organisers Devon Gallant (also author and publisher of Cactus Press)

   One final final note: there were other readings outside of the numbered venues above. These were on planes, trains and galleries. If I wrote something in response to a cloud or piece of art and shared it with whoever happened to be next to me, I’d announce it as a decimal point reading: 30.5 was a reading on my flight out of Winnipeg for the former CFL running back who happened to be sitting next to me on the plane. I wrote a poem about football and travel and put it on an airplane sickness bag that I turned into a chapbook. That sort of thing.
    Merci! 

 

 

 

Kevin Spenst is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse (all with Anvil Press) and over a dozen chapbooks, including Recto Verso Chez the Devil’s Printers (cowritten with Josh Pitre for Collusion Books), A Video Tape Swaddled in Purple Wool (845 Press) and Sand in the Bed (a holm with the Alfred Gustav Press). His most recent writing has appeared in the anthologies Event 50: Collected Notes on Writing and Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing. His book launch during the pandemic was featured in a book about creative practices: The Creative Instigator's Handbook. He writes chapbook reviews for subTerrain magazine, teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and he lives in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory.