I wish that Robert Kroetsch had been a friend of mine. He was a virtual mentor, a writer whose talent I adored from afar. I was lucky enough to visit with him numerous times over the years, at readings or launches or those lovely, boozy post-poetry parties that are iconic of the writing world, it […]
“All language is a longing for home,” claimed the 13th century Persian poet Rumi. Although our own writing is influenced by our musings on “home and away,” Angela and I hoped the theme would inspire the gifted poets of Alberta too. If we can gauge it by the deluge of submissions to this anthology project, […]
# 1 bluer than his blind eye is the letter my Opa holds in his enormous hands, my mother’s pen has tattooed the frail paper with this month’s immigration stories, cheery bravado disguises her endless dismay at Canada’s unforgiving climate, the cabin’s rough boards forever leaving splinters in her dancer’s feet. memory clear as a […]
after we immigrated, Holland and its tangle of noisy, loving relatives ceased to exist. in my preschool mind the plane had rocketed us through space and home had spun away endlessly lost somewhere between Greenland and the stars. except for Opa’s warm ghost who recited poetry to me in each new bedroom long after my […]
Walking the puppy amid the ruins of another long winter, lawns sepia with mould, the snow dying without grace, gumbo on my heels, the dog is happy, her tail a flag of joy but I curse this exile north of 55 and the circumpolar wind, ugly as seal breath, that haunts a landscape unfit for […]
