Poets Corner Reading Series

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A Sense of Belonging

Posted on behalf of Evelyn Schofield

 

Our November reading demonstrated again the love of poetry that draws people to brave downtown Vancouver traffic to attend in person at FDU or to zoom in online from places and time zones as far away as Ontario and California.  As usual, we had a full complement of incredible open mic readers and we hope that they will all sign up for our Open Mic Contest on December 13 (details soon to be announced.)

Our two feature readers, Tāriq Malik and Jónína Kirton, were both there in person to share poetry that explored themes of the human need to belong, the comfort of home and family, and the importance of remembering our cultural roots.

Tāriq read poems that elaborated on these themes from the point of view of an immigrant who has survived wars and a long migration from the Pakistani Punjab to the deserts of Kuwait and eventually here to Vancouver. He read selections from Exit Wounds and his upcoming Blood of Stone that spoke eloquently of the struggles of refugees in surviving the trauma of being uprooted and the challenge of creating a new identity and being accepted in their newly adopted homeland.

Jónína read poems that honoured her heritage and the strong impressions she has retained from her Icelandic grandmother and her Métis ancestors. She read selections from An Honest Woman and Standing in a River of Time that had helped her to come to terms with death and suffering and bore witness to her efforts to heal, by celebrating her Métis roots and building a sense of hope and purpose on a foundation that is rooted in family.

In the lively Q&A session at the end of the reading, the poets shared some tips from their writing practice. We learned that Tāriq gets up to write at 2 o’clock in the morning because “associations are better when you are half asleep” and that Jónína has now adopted the computer as a creative part of her writing and not just a tool for editing.  The day after the reading, Jónína commented “I like that there were many older poets there. We all benefit from intergenerational gatherings. We all need each other.”  Amen.

January’s Reading at Poets Corner: Ellie Sawatzky and shauna paull

Join us Wednesday, January 19 at 7:30 virtually for Ellie Sawatsky and shauna paull

Due to Omicron, we are once again virtual.  To register, click on this link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEtce2grjkrEteYkMISUlS9wX5VzZwekKVX

 

Ellie Sawatzky is a writer from Kenora, Ontario. A finalist for the 2019 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and the recipient of CV2’s 2017 Foster Poetry Prize, she has been published widely in literary journals such as Grain, The FiddleheadPRISM InternationalThe Matador ReviewThe Puritan and Room. She works as an editor for FriesenPress, and is the curator of the Instagram account IMPROMPT(@impromptuprompts), a hub for writing prompts and literary inspiration. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC (2015) and lives in Vancouver. None of This Belongs to Me is her debut poetry collection.  www.elliesawatzky.com.

 

 

 

,shauna paull is a poet, educator and community advocate, who completed her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Paull’s first book, roughened in undercurrent, was published by Leaf Press in 2008. Since 2000, shauna has led creative writing workshops at many different  organizations in greater Vancouver, including the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on the ancestral, unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation. In community, shauna has worked extensively with migrant and refugee women in the areas of labour and mobility rights, poverty alleviation and legislative reform. Shauna represented Canada at the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2006. Her work can be found in RockSalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue, 2008), Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia (Mother Tongue, 2013) and In All the Spaces: Diverse Voices in Global Women’s Poetry (Autopress, New Delhi, 2020).

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