Real Vancouver Writers Series at the W2 Culture + Media House – Located at 112 East Hastings Street across from the refurbished Woodwards Building in Downtown Vancouver.  This series started on Wednesday, February 3.

Chris Hutchinson reads from his new book Other People’s Lives on Wednesday, February 17 at 7 p.m. in an evening hosted by Elizabeth Bachinsky and featuring Teresa McWhirter, Lee Henderson, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Heather Susan Haley, Nikki Reimer, Chris Hutchinson, Dina Del Bucchia, Amber Dawn, Donato Mancini, Sonnet L’Abbe, Jonathon Wilcke, Catherine Owen.

Here is the line-up week by week http://realvancouverwriters.com/the-line-ups/

Congratulations to Lorri Neilsen Glenn (Halifax, N.S.), Tricia Dower (Victoria, B.C.), and Melissa Jacques (Edmonton, AB) on winning The Malahat Review’s inaugural 2010 Open Season Awards in the Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Non-fiction categories respectively.

Of Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s winning poem, “You think of Meister Eckhart,” Judges Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane said: “this poem reminds us again of poetry’s connection with song. How smoothly the phrases move through the mind and into music. It’s a small tour de force of sound and meaning, lyricism at its most brilliant.”

Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s forthcoming collection is Lost Gospels (Brick Books, 2010). A poet, essayist, and ethnographer, Lorri has published four collections of poetry, several books on literacy and inquiry, and is currently working on a collection of essays and an anthology about mothers. Lorri has been writer in residence at St. Peter’s College and Los Parronales, and scholar in residence at Edith Cowan University, James Cook University, among other locations. Lorri works with youth writers and participates in the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia mentorship program. She has taught writing in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Chile, and across Canada, most recently at Nova Scotia’s Great Blue Heron Workshop. Lorri’s poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, CV2, Arc, Event, The Antigonish Review, as well as in several anthologies. She served as Halifax’s Poet Laureate for 2005-2009.

For the full story, see http://www.malahatreview.ca/open_season/2010_winner.html

Finely crafted divagations – Michael Kenyon explores the meaning of home in a new collection

The Daily Review, Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Reviewed by Judith Fitzgerald

A fabulous collection, The Last House, British Columbian Michael Kenyon’s third full-length volume (following Rack of Lamb and The Sutler), wrestles with conceptions of “self” and “otherness” from the get-go in its finely crafted divagations:

“In a new country you neither / belong nor don’t but hope to guess your soul’s / purpose.”

Kenyon, born in the UK, came home from away in 1967; thus, issues of emigration in the lost and foundering spirit of settling sinuously dominate these exquisitely shaped reflections, combining the physical vernacular with the visionary spectacular.

What makes a homeland a home; how can a house turn upsy-turvily into a haven for sorrow and joy; and, most keenly, why has “the climax of the capitalist dream and the urge (nostalgia?) for a simpler life . . . a small house, a smaller house, no house” driven citizens of this grievous world to the fringes of muddle-class despair? Here’s What We Have:

… Exile breathes in the fat shadows of trees.
I give up listing my different selves,
measuring the distance from outside to
inside, from urban to rural. The thump
of a grouse intersects the jet’s thin jazz.
The walls of this world are quite soft and rain
on palm fronds whispers like people coming
through the forest whose floor unleashes green
heads of new ferns. I keep going over
the same ground. Ghosts, music, all under wraps.

Contributing reviewer and In Other Words blogger Judith Fitzgerald lives in Northern Ontario’s Almaguin Highlands. She is completing her 30th work, a poetry collection provisionally titled Rogue Lightning, slated for 2010 release.