Clare Thiessen : on Broke Press

 

 

 

Alright, fine, after years of rob hounding me for a little write-up of broke press I’m finally gonna do it! I’m gonna do it guys!!!

The backstory: I’ve been running broke press as a chapbook press that publishes literary work of all genres by emerging and established Canadian writers since 2019. Well, kind of 2018, when I was a teenager and wanted to see how you made a book so I wrote and self published an emo book of poetry just to see if I could do it. And I could! But since then, it has become a little hub of literary wonders, specializing but not limited to poetry, with a soft spot in my heart for the long poem.

The practicalities: The broke press office has had a couple of iterations, in two different basement suites in Vernon, BC, but the formula has been the same. My laundry room serves as the print room, with my old Brother office printer spitting out the innards of chapbooks, and my kitchen table serves as my design and production lab, much to my roommate’s chagrin when the table and floor are covered in chapbook trimmings a few times each year. I outsource my cover printing, because my printer just does NOT like printing a nice gradient image! My tuxedo cat, Boone, acts as assistant editor (lays on keyboard / book parts / book-making tools).

The nitty-gritty of being a chapbook press: It is a labour of love. On occasion, people ask why I am called broke press, and I look at them blankly. There is no money in it folks! But I’ve managed to carve out a model that means I break even each year and am able to keep puttering along in the time outside of my day job at the public library. My Patreon supporters truly keep me going, as subscribers to the publications that I pump out each year. Love you guys. They help cover the ongoing costs such as website fees and Adobe subscription, while my chapbook sales pay for my author honorariums and printing costs.

Enough about the back story and business side, yuck! I have a super exciting chapbook lineup coming out this year, with the first one already out (by periodicities’ own rob mclennan). Next up is a debut publication by Tristan Hohl of Kelowna, BC, titled Dream Sequence. Then I will have a repeat broke press author’s speculative essay, “Unmasking,” by the multitalented Erin Scott from Kelowna, BC. Continuing my Okanagan Valley authors theme, I get to publish the Canadian great, Sharon Thesen’s, collection of poetry titled “Everything is Huge.” And to end the 2026 lineup is Ottawa-based writer thomas gordon reynolds’ long poem, “and the cold of solid things.” Plus, maybe a bonus broadside somewhere in there, if the broke press fans are lucky! It feels super special to have gotten to the point in the broke press life where I am getting to work with writers for a second time….they like me! They really like me!!! And I love them!!!

Stay tuned, follow along on Instagram, Facebook, or bluesky, become a Patreon supporter if you can spare $10/month, or buy a chapbook at brokepress.ca to support.

 

 

 

 

 

Clare Thiessen (she/her) lives and works as a public library worker in the Okanagan Valley, BC. She operates broke press, a chapbook press, from her basement suite kitchen table. Her chapbook, tiger poems, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2023, and her long poem “No One Cares About Your Break Up Poem!!!” won the 2023 John Lent Poetry Prose Award and was published as a letterpress chapbook by Kalamalka Press in 2024. Her book-length long poem, Roadkill, will be published by Gaspereau Press in fall 2027.

Sharon Thesen : A FEW WORDS FOR BARRY MCKINNON

folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)

 

 

 

 

One of my favorite Barry poems is called “Radio On”—from his collection In the Millenium.  In the poem, the radio is on and he’s thinking about writing a story about gardening; then, after wondering where an outside noise came from, he writes the conjunction OR, and says he’s thinking about David Phillips “out in the mud of mid-life”—and that it’s 30 below and he should go outside but he must constantly think about the “stink of polluted air”.  There is no hope, he writes; yet, “live daily and sing the body electric.”  He returns to the gardening image and realizes he’s not that good at gardening, since a neighbour, “old Tom” who smoked and bowled, had advised him to “make little piles” (presumably of raked leaves?) and “don’t work so hard.”  But Barry says he knows he is likely to make a big pile.  Something keeps him working too hard “in this foliate world”—this “tyranny of systems.”

He also states in the poem that on that day he “won’t do school work” — marking papers and preparing classes.  In the interview with Paul Nelson in Cascadian Prophets, he talked about taking his kids to the ski hill on the weekend, but rather than go skiing with them, he had to sit in the car marking papers (he had an overload of classes at the college that term).  He said he felt bad about this.  In the poem, he wonders “in this task how to get out of the way of what breaks in.”

Barry never got out of the way of what breaks in.  Reading his work recently I’m more aware than ever of the italicized words, phrases, and sentences that break into the meaning or sense of the line being written.  And which can seem to the reader to come out of left field.  Expository coherence was never an interest of Barry’s —he was not a story-teller.  He was a composer, a musician, a drummer, a listener and thinker conscious of the expression of his own perceptions.  Sometimes a word or phrase from the radio would come in, either from the CBC, that frustrating cultural spouse, or the local station, CKPG.  Barry liked the Bay Day ads and the “Problem Line” and the twice daily “Messages” broadcast to outlying areas asking people to bring certain things with them to town on a Friday night, absurdly coded, such as “a few cords of wood.”

Barry, as  a newcomer in the mid-sixties to a rough and tumble logging town in north central BC, assumed the townspeople didn’t really care for people like him.  He found he was wrong about that; and despite bureaucratic pushback at times, he and the other English Department instructors at the college introduced a couple of generations of working people to modern and contemporary literature and poetry.  Barry was an enthusiastic host and organizer of public readings. Prince George, in the middle of nowhere, was treated to readings by famous Canadian and American writers, from Al Purdy to Margaret Atwood to Robert Creeley.  The hostility toward Barry, ironically, came from the academics at the newly-built university.   An annual Barry McKinnon Chapbook Award was cancelled.  Barry’s writing, as well as that of some of his colleagues at the college, failed to meet their standards of political correctness, punishing not only Barry himself, but also the young local writers who would have been vying for a popular and valued award.  Barry’s work always held to a conscious moral standard; in fact his arguments with himself about language and conduct were always being worked out in his writing.  Being cancelled in his own home town was profoundly demoralizing and stressful for Barry and created lasting rifts in what was once a lively and inclusive local scene.

The winning chapbook manuscript would have been beautifully published by Barry’s Gorse Press— the Gorse St. basement site of a significant production of chapbooks, broadsides, pamphlets, and folios that Barry designed and printed.  This was part of his generosity and his democratic spirit—and was also another mode of artistic and aesthetic expression.  In these sometimes large and always beautifully printed manuscripts there is something of the ancient prophetic.  Barry would construct folios of work he admired, alongside his own work, as if to record forever an astonishment of friendship in poetry.  It is deeply unfortunate that the organizers of the Literary Prince George tours boycotted Barry and Joy’s Gorse St. home—repository not only of the press, but of the McKinnons’ hospitality toward writers, artists, and poets from across the country, who had been hosted when they came to the city to do readings, talks, and workshops.  (Yes, Margaret Atwood slept there.)

There was something really special about Barry, a charisma, a sweetness, a politeness. He loved to drink and talk.  He had an exquisite sense of the absurd. He was a loyal and considerate friend and it is from the perspective of our long friendship that I try to remember him here, and realize how little I really knew about this quiet and thoughtful person, this gentle poet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sharon Thesen graduated from Prince George Senior Secondary in 1963.  In 1966 she married Brian Fawcett and their son Jesse was born in 1970, when they were both poetry students at Simon Fraser University.  Author and editor of many books of poetry, Sharon is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan campus.

 

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell : P.S., by Penn Kemp and Sharon Thesen

P.S., Penn Kemp and Sharon Thesen
Gap Riot Press, 2022

 

 

 

          The elegant lilac coloured cover of P.S. featuring two crows, symbolic messengers, encapsulates the poetic collaboration between Kemp and Thesen, each writing a poem for each month of a year. The title P.S. suggests an urgent postscript in a letter, cunningly illustrating the important themes the poets address: extreme weather, climate change, aging, pandemic, discrimination, the creative poetic process.

          Thesen opens with an elegiac bang on aging: “We die in our footsteps” from “Elegy For The Forecast, for Penn” and offers Penn: “ [...] a red cord to bind us [...] that would / anyway fray.” Kemp expands upon Thesen's poetic invitation in “Converse, for Sharon, January”: “your red cord [...] yes it frays but by then / it's a direct line inside the heart cave”, playing on aging and poetic lines, and then invokes the Celtic “Bridget spreads wide her crimson cloak” reiterating Thesen's multi-layered red image. Kemp writes in “Notes On The Text” that the two friends celebrate, challenge and validate each other’s poems.

          Diane di Prima, Circe, Imbolc, sleepy pears, smoke, an old man's dog ... populate and enliven the poems, bristling with brilliant imagery, passion and dynamic commingling. As an example, Thesen employs natural images, both figurative and literal, to capture the dreadful firestorms of summer in “Penn Poem For July”: “[...] and an orange sun / sank and no sun at all was to be seen [in daytime].”

Kemp responds in “Studies in Extreme”: a summer of fire versus water [...] unless we act on working solutions / now. Climate change changes us.”

          These few examples are just a taste of the elegant, eloquent banquet that awaits the reader. All 24 poems are dense with imagery, allusions and intelligently impassioned takes on our various present-day crises. The wry, elegiac, humorous, compassionate tone of P.S. commands a deep immersion.

 

 

 

 

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell's ninth poetry book, and art, is We Are Malala, Inanna 2019; her eighth, Dancing on a Pin, Inanna 2015, was part of the Battle of the Bards, was longlisted for Lowther Prize and 5 of the poems placed Runner Up in subTerrain's Outsider Poetry Contest. Recent poems are in Love Lies Bleeding edited by George Elliott Clarke, Poets Response to Peril edited by Richard Sitoski and Penn Kemp, and Words Gathered Vol 3 edited by Vanessa Shields and Irene Moore Davis.