A Poet’s Nanaimo

I see I did another blog with the same theme and so I’ve added the year to this one. “The circle is open” is something I say at the end of a women's writing circle: The circle is open but unbroken May the love of the goddess be ever in our hearts Merry meet and merry...

Zoe Dickinson, a poet and bookseller from Victoria, B.C., is the 2022 winner of the Raven Chapbooks Contest with intertidal: poems from the littoral zone. It sounds rather erotic doesn’t it, and definitely literary. (Zoe is also Artistic Director of Planet Earth...

Lori Fox, based in Whitehorse, Yukon, describes their new book of essays, This Has Always Been a War (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021), as a “scrappy, angry little book” with its sub-title of “The Radicalization of a Working-Class Queer." In an interview with Yukon News for...

Writing in community is something I’ve done for a long time – at workshops, retreats and in writing circles I’ve offered since 1997. Even during the pandemic, I facilitated weekly women’s writing circles via email and Zoom. It was a way for us to feel connected, part...

If You are Reading This is Sheila Norgate’s a/mem.oir/ish, a book of personal essays published under her own imprint: LIP (Ladies Institute Press). As Sheila told me in a phone conversation, she’s a “one girl band” having written the book, designed it (including the...

I’m a fan of mysteries particularly detective fiction by the likes of Elizabeth George, Peter Robinson, Val McDermid, Michael Connelly, Jonathan Kellerman, David Baldacci, Louise Penny, Kate Atkinson and so many more going back to P. D. James and Agatha Christie....