News

When Blue = Happy

I’m practicing what I call ‘colour therapy’….wearing and working with bright colours to shift a stubbornly low mood. I found this beautiful blue wool in my fibre stash, a long-ago gift from my sister. Every day for a couple of weeks I had this glowing, deep blue stuff nearby–on my desk, in my hands, in … Read more

Alone at Acadia

I’ve got a textile piece in this exhibition, which runs February 10- April 13th at the Acadia University Art Gallery. I’m working on it over the duration of the show, so please go have a look, and then go back for another look later! Because of the pandemic, everything is online, and the curator has … Read more

Working Backwards

I’m not really convinced there’s ‘forward’ or ‘backwards’ with movement or making, but I do like to joke about working backwards. Setting type unfolds upside-down AND backwards. I’m left-handed, so I often start at the right side of an image and work right to left so I don’t drag my hand across wet media or graphite and make a mess. And then there is unmaking or obscuring; that’s the ‘backwards’ I’m thinking about lately…working from a “something” (text or image) towards a “nothing” that’s not really nothing. This week, I’m working backwords from a failed broadside until it becomes nearly unrecognizable, a process I find much more intriguing than starting with a blank page.

Eroding Alphabets

Before I had the vocabulary to describe it, I perceived certain forms and beings in the landscape as ‘texts’: tracks, patterns in dry earth or tree bark, lichens and mushrooms fruiting, stones piled on a beach, waves, plant structures, and so on. These forms and patterns were communicating something, even if that something was inscrutable, … Read more

Slow and steady…

doesn’t win the race, but eventually finishes something… sometime. Some days I love facing a creative jumble on my desk, other days, it’s crazy-making. In my efforts to free up space (both mental and physical) I’ve been attempting to complete projects that have been lying around half-finished. This month, that means binding books…soft cover and … Read more

In/quietude

How was your year? Mine has felt like an exercise in contrasts. The out-in-the-world activities of January and February seem like a lifetime ago. Garden season raced and dragged. Now it’s late autumn, and the weather feels like summer. It’s disorienting. The antidote, for me, is to slow things down with textile works and other … Read more

A Year in Review

News: not my forte. Nonetheless, it was a good year for my new book, Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots, which was shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham poetry award, and won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry from the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. My 2015 collection Niche continues to resonate with readers and educators, … Read more

Nocturne

Last year, fellow poet Sean Howard and I created a poetry installation, called “Poemtree” for Lumière Cape Breton. This year, we have been invited to bring the Poemtree to Halifax for Nocturne, in an exchange between the two festivals. We’ll be adding poems to a beautiful Russian olive on the waterfront near the bottom of … Read more

Thin Air: Winnipeg International Writers Festival

I had a great time debuting Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. I had the opportunity to read in Brandon and Winnipeg, see old friends and colleagues, meet new writers, and hear some dazzling, funny, visionary poetry at Voices in the Circle. Thanks, WIWF!

Words, Ghosts & Apricots

I’ll be launching my new poetry collection with poet Sean Howard at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, 1113 Marginal Road, Halifax, on Friday, October 12, from 7:00-8:30 p.m. Everyone is warmly invited to join us for short readings from the new works, discussion, and light refreshments.