A Poet’s Nanaimo
You Are Here
I started to get excited by maps in my first grade classroom when Mrs. Lett pulled down the world map in front of the blackboard and used her pointer to show us where we lived: Eganville, Ontario, Canada. Having seen the many possibilities of personal mapmaking since...
A Curious Happiness in Small Things
A Curious Happiness in Small Things (Raven Chapbooks, 2020) – such a perfect title for a book of poetry, especially this book of praise poems by David Haggart. The poem from which the book takes its title is about the narrator’s ride in the back of a pick-up driven by...
Summer Pop-Up Women’s Writing Circles
Nourish YourselfHonour Your VoiceWrite Your Stories. Summer, a time of year with little or no structure . . . a free-floating time of musing, pondering and shifting. It’s also a perfect chance to take a “time out” to connect to oneself while being in the nurturing...
April is National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month in Canada. with the theme of Joy this year. We’re all definitely in need of and ready for joy. Nanaimo, happily, is a poetry city. We have a poet laureate, Kamal Pamar, and there are always poetry events taking place at the libraries;...
Write for Life
The title of Julia Cameron’s new book, Write for Life: Creative Tools for Every Writer (St. Martin's Essentials, 2022) resonates with me as I lead women’s writing circles called Writing Life; we write from life and create writing lives for ourselves. And I’ve written...
Tuesdays in Jail: What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates
I have written in a journal, on my own, for many years and I’ve written in community in various settings with others for a long time too. One setting in which I haven’t written with others is in a jail. We do have a jail in Nanaimo, B.C. where I live but the fear of...