Open to the irritation, grit forms a pearl it’s been said. Fish for mermaids, dive for pearls . . creativity@maryannmoore.ca
Let’s Make Some Poems!

Let’s Make Some Poems!

As we approach World Poetry Day on March 21st and Poetry Month in April, I have a few writing circles coming up with a focus on reading and writing poems. Maybe you’d like to join me on Zoom or in person in Nanaimo? (You’ll find info below about a one-day writing circle on March 21 in Nanaimo and half day women’s writing circles on March 6 on Zoom and April 2 in Nanaimo.)

I decided to go with “make” in the title of two of the writing circles as the word “poem” in English, going back to the sixteenth century, means “to designate a form of fabrication, a type of composition, a made thing.” Thank you to Edward Hirsch who wrote How to Read a Poem (And Fall in Love with Poetry). I like the notion of a poem being a “made thing.”

If you love poetry and would like to write your own, I’d be pleased if you could join me, and others, to make poems together. You may want to consider your poem making to be an exploration in beauty and form. We won’t be looking at poems to see what they “mean.” We’ll see what poems (by several poets) have to tell us, to let the language show us what’s possible, and to follow nudges for our own poem making which will appear, as if by magic, on the page.

If you’re nervous about poetry, these poem making opportunities are for you as well. A word or a prompt will help you get started and that simple beginning can turn into finding your voice. Experimenting and playing with form can open you to new ideas. Or, there can be no form at all! Let the words tumble onto the page, creating a form of their own as penned by you.

The upcoming writing circles are for those who write in journals, make notes on the corners of paper serviettes, love to read, appreciate being in a community of other writers.

Francis Weller, writer and soul activist, who describes the times we are in now as “the long dark,” says we need three medicines. The first medicine we require for these times is friendship and community. In a writing circle, we create connections to and with one another and become a community in which we are seen and heard.

The second medicine we need for the long dark is imagination

The third medicine we need for the long dark is to remember our deep time ancestral inheritance.

The writing circles offer these medicines, as suggested by Francis Weller, as well as poetry itself. Our ancestral inheritance could be the elders we are related to as well as those who have inspired us for years such as the writers and poets who bring us much wisdom and inspiration.

What is a writing circle like?

Several years ago, a woman called Ine in a writing circle in Guelph, Ontario said: “Mary Ann opens up unknown territories in our soul. Then, in her gentle way, tells us that we’re special and creative.” It’s still true. Perhaps those “unknown territories” were known in the past and haven’t been visited in awhile.

In a writing circle, we follow writing invitations which could be in the form of a question or a particular poem to inspire our own words. Sharing isn’t mandatory. The responses we give to someone reading aloud are to echo back something that resonated with us. Comments are meant to encourage rather than critique. All the writing is meant to have you be in touch with what matters to you. Along the way, there can be new discoveries, fresh insight, or simply an acknowledgement of the way things are.

The very act of making offers something new in the world. A “newness gets added to the universe in the process of the piece itself becoming” as Jan Phillips says in “The Artist’s Creed.”

Who am I?

In case you haven’t worked with me before, I’m Mary Ann Moore, a poet, writer and writing mentor who has been leading writing circles since 1997. I’ve also been writing for a long time: poetry, personal essays, writing guides, book reviews, a blog. My new chapbook of poetry, Modern Words for Beauty, will be published in April 2025.

Here are the dates and descriptions of the upcoming writing circles:

Writing for the Love of It, a one-day writing circle
open to everyone
at Bethlehem Centre, Nanaimo
on Friday, March 21, 2025 (World Poetry Day), 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“Writing for the Love of It” is an invitation to embody and create writing as your own spiritual practice. Together, we’ll create a sacred ceremony of writing, sharing and listening to yourself and others. On World Poetry Day, March 21st, you will be encouraged and enlightened by the gifts of poetry as solace, refuge and as a way to express grief, joy and all that is between. “Poetry gives us a way to inhabit our lives,” poet Marie Howe says. You will discover a variety of ways to share your own way of looking at things and embrace the fullness of the stories from your life. It has been said of Mary Ann Moore’s writing circles that they are places where unsuspecting poets are born.

You can register here: https://bethlehemcentre.com/program/3046/writing-for-the-love-of-it/

 Let’s Make Some Poems!
a women’s writing circle on Zoom wherever you are
on Thursday, March 6, 2025, 10: 30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific time
Fee: $60 payable via e-transfer to creativity@maryannmoore.ca
or by cheque sent to Mary Ann Moore at 76 Colwell Road, Nanaimo, B.C. V9X 1E4

Poetry offers a doorway in and a welcome home. Let’s do some reading, listening, reflecting and the making of some poems together. Don’t worry if you’ve never written a poem: “This isn’t / a contest but the doorway / into thanks, a silence in which / another voice may speak.” (from “Prayer” by Mary Oliver.) That voice may be spirit or your own voice, neglected until now.

Please email me to let me know of your interest or if you have any questions.

Let’s Make Some Poems!
a women’s writing circle at Mary Ann’s home in Nanaimo
on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 1 to 3:30 p.m.
Fee: $60 payable via e-transfer to creativity@maryannmoore.ca
or by cheque sent to Mary Ann Moore at 76 Colwell Road, Nanaimo, B.C. V9X 1E4

Poetry offers a doorway in and a welcome home. Let’s do some reading, listening, reflecting and the making of some poems together. Don’t worry if you’ve never written a poem: “This isn’t / a contest but the doorway / into thanks, a silence in which / another voice may speak.” (from “Prayer” by Mary Oliver.) That voice may be spirit or your own voice, neglected until now.

Please email me to let me know of your interest or if you have any questions.

The Sacred Heart Motel

The Sacred Heart Motel

The cover of The Sacred Heart Motel by Niki Hoi (Metonymy Press, 2024) is delightful. The drawings of domestic scenes appear to be done in oil pastel so have a softened effect with rounded edges.

The poems inside Grace Kwan’s (they/them) debut collection are edgier – whether in the kitchen or the areas particular to a motel – rodents die on sticky traps and kitchen knives are dangerous. In “Room 209,” “what’s a love / story without its ghosts – more than a few bullet / wounds in the floor.”

The contents page is a “directory” that includes “The Moonlight Suite,” “Kitchen: Back Exit,” “Next Door, A Bar,” “Room 209,” “Fire Escape,” and “Front Desk.”

One section, “Love, Honour, & Other Stories,” relates to “Dollar bills rescued / from the laundry, numbers kissed / onto napkins,” and other possible objects found in a motel.

Motels are often seedier than hotels and act as places of in between. In Kwan’s case, as a child, in Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur, they accompanied their parents to their father’s acting jobs and the family would stay in motels or hotels.

As Kwan said in an interview: “It really always felt very temporary and kind of transient, and I found it hard to pinpoint where I really belonged or what I called home.”

Regarding motels, Kwan said: “I really like their grittiness and that kind of sleaziness – almost kind of dirty . . . It’s not a place that you book in advance; it’s something that you stumble upon in the middle of the night.”

Kwan was working as a server at a hotel restaurant when they started putting the collection of poems together. As they say on their website: “[I] became enamoured with the romance of temporary lodgings as sites where abstract ideas of placelessness, unbelonging, and memory could be situated in space.”

In “Glue Trap,” the domestic scene is a dangerous one – especially for mice. And the speaker’s heart “looks like the old yellow house where thin, mouse-bitten / walls separated our part of the basement from another / Chinese family.”

The poem ends:

. . . . And I can’t deny every time someone tells, confesses,
intimates that they love me, I feel a deep grief ripple
out from inside me – the dearths left by mice
with broken heads and songs unfinished.

In “Gender Studies,” the speaker says:

Beauty was once a country
I belonged to now I’m a migrant
placeless and still hovering
On the limn trying on wages
radium and high heels as a second language .

Kwan says of the poem: “I’m putting the experience of migration alongside the experience of queerness and desire and beauty – and experimenting with how they speak to one another.” While Kwan was writing the poem, they were “thinking of that feeling of transience and not belonging and how that translates into the experience of being queer, and the alienation and isolation that that can bring.”

A knife appears in “Yellow Light” as well as sex in the kitchen. The colours are also of a navel orange, blood, and bodies that are black and blue. You can see Heather O’Neil’s surrealism inspired Kwan’s poems such as this one. Novelist O’Neill is a favorite of Kwan’s who also influenced the title of the book.

In the poem, “The Sacred Heart,” the poet muses: “or maybe a heart’s / a mystery novel.” In the end is the heart:

in communion producing something
quantifiably and qualitatively more magic
than flesh and air.

The hopefulness of the “sacred heart” is at the centre of this splendid collection while the motel opens a door to Grace Kwan’s stunning expressions of longing, melancholy, and the precarious nature of displacement and alienation.

Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer based in “Vancouver, British Columbia,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Find them at grckwn.com.