Our Winnipeg:

Okay, so we spent the weekend in Winnipeg, for the sake of Christine's family things. Her mother is from there, so our whole crew, plus Christine's brother and his family, met up with mother-in-law and her two Winnipeg-based sisters, to acknowledge what would have been Christine's grandfather's one hundredth birthday. The last time I was in Winnipeg was for the sake of the ARP launch in 2023, which was plenty fun [see my report on such here], but this trip more for a couple of family events, and the kids seeing cousins. I've been moving around a lot lately, far more than usual, catching a recent week at the Banff Centre [see my report here] and an exciting weekend in Victoria, with three events in two days [see my reports on such here]. Otherwise, our last family trips would be Park Omega in February [a quick overnight, see my report] or that trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland last July, following Rose and her choir around as they performed [see my reports on such here], or even Calgary, the November prior (where Christine and I also read, and Rose had a birthday) [see my report on such here]. There is talk of our household (sans cats) attempting to drive to Halifax later this summer to visit Christine's brother and his family, but nothing is settled quite yet.

We spent the weekend in Winnipeg, landing Friday just before noon, and the young ladies and I left Christine to rest in our hotel room while we ran off to the Assiniboine Park Zoo [our young ladies have requested fewer pictures of them online, by the way], another Robert Kroetsch reference, his poem "The Winnipeg Zoo" [see also: Mile Zero]. Although, if this zoo (established 1904) was always known as the Assiniboine Park Zoo, why did Kroetsch title his poem thus? Was it the presumption that folk beyond the city's boundaries wouldn't have known the reference? Or was he, in New York State, misremembering? Mid-point through the zoo adventure, we met up with Winnipeg poet Melanie Dennis Unrau [see my review of her debut here], which did prompt Rose to complain less about having to be out at all, at a zoo, whatever. Aoife was having a grand time. She wanted to see snakes! She wanted to see polar bears! Melanie showed us the polar bears, who seemed tired, bored. But the heat was some thirty degrees. One barely poked his head up from the pool.

After the zoo, we went off to meet up with Christine, and then with her brother and his family for dinner, before they took the kids to the pool, and I wandered out to a pub night with various Winnipeg writers (Christine had considered joining, but her energy didn't allow for such), including Unrau [pictured], Marjorie Poor, melanie brannagan frederiksen, K.I. Press, Angeline Schellenberg, Julian Day and Kathy Block at a local place called Barn Hammer, which I quite liked. It was good to meet Schellenberg, who I hadn't prior [she had a "Tuesday poem" back in 2022], and I'd forgotten that Poor actually used to work at the late, lamented Heaven Art & Book Cafe, so we hadn't seen each other since the end-of-Heaven party back in, what, June 1999? Apparently Block had attended, during Covid, an online chapbook-making conversation I was invited to do, sponsored through one of the provincial Writers Guilds (Alberta? most likely). And did you know that Unrau has a new chapbook with Gap Riot Press? It is a lovely thing, hoping to get my hands on a copy of my own at some point. It was a grand adventure! Always good to see folk, certainly.

The next morning, a brunch, as our young ladies hung out with their cousins. More time at the pool, in which the young ladies hung out with their cousins [and I began to read the book, above, that Christine found at the Ottawa airport, as we were leaving]. And a bbq at Christine's auntie's house, where the young ladies hung out further with their cousins, a wall of photographs of Christine's grandparents. Christine's brother's family live in Halifax, after all, so we're only able to see them a couple of times a year. And at the bbq, a birthday cake or two for Christine, to mark her own birthday [do you remember the birthday poem I wrote her in 2011?], even wearing the birthday pin that I got her (or was it the one her mother got her? we each picked up the same). 

We visited the graveyard, on Sunday, where mother-in-law's parents lay, and a quick trip to Red River Books (finally) and then the Manitoba Museum before heading back to the airport. So quick! The big ship at the back of the Museum was pretty cool. Go see that!

And did you know that Winnipeg is the Slurpee Capital of the World? I had no idea! Although we did appreciate it, in the thirty-plus degree heat.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Melanie Dennis Unrau

Melanie Dennis Unrau [photo credit: Jason Unrau] is a poet, editor, scholar, and climate organizer of mixed European ancestry from Winnipeg, Manitoba, traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Red River Métis. She is the author of the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024) and the poetry collection Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). A former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine, Melanie also co-edited I’ll Get Right on It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Fernwood, 2025). Her latest title is Goose (Assembly Press, 2025).

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I don’t know if the first book changed my life—that was Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). I mean, I wrote the book about things that changed my life—almost becoming a parent, then becoming one. And I wrote it while I was doing a one-year MA program, researching and writing about feminist poetry about motherhood, and getting involved with a group of women visual artists I would collaborate with for the next ten years. And then it was published while I was working for a scrappy magazine I loved, but which I would soon leave to go back to grad school again. I suppose that book gave me credibility as a poet. It taught me I could write a book. It marked a shift from more typical prairie lyrics into something more experimental, and after it was published I decided to lean even more into visual poetry, found text, research, and collaboration. I’m super grateful for that book. Also, of course, the chapbooks I have published with you, rob, and elsewhere.

I think it’s funny that my first book was about motherhood and my new one, Goose, is in a sense about fatherhood. Both are feminist books, and this new one is more overtly anticolonial and antiracist. Goose feels different because the first book was very personal. Some of the poems in The Happiness Threads were impossible for me to read aloud because they were still so painful. Goose is intentionally and ironically impersonal. It’s difficult to read aloud for its own reasons—because it’s visual poetry and doesn’t always work that way. Although The Happiness Threads is funny at times, and it’s about a wide range of emotions, the dominant mood is quite sad. With Goose, the silliness is at the forefront, with deep critique and sadness in the background. Both books ask a lot of questions about what we love, and why, and how.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I honestly don’t remember. It’s just always been that way. I love reading, language, sound, and ideas. I had to memorize a lot of Bible verses as a kid, and I read a lot of flowery and archaic and difficult language as part of a strict religious upbringing. Maybe that? I remember writing playground rhymes, limericks, jingles, and parodies all the time when I was young. I used to believe that I could write pretty much anything, but I don’t think that anymore.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I can write lyric poetry quickly. Early drafts of Goose were lyrics, written in the evenings while visiting “father of the tar sands” S.C. Ells’s fonds at the National Archive. Poems like that just come sometimes, and I jot and revise them in my journal, but I don’t really assume that they will turn into anything I would want to publish or turn into a bigger project. I’m glad I wrote those lyrics about Ells, capturing my strong sense of his presence haunting the archive, trying to control it even then. But those poems kind of got digested into the visual poetry, so that eventually I felt the project didn’t need them anymore. And the visual poems developed more slowly. rob, you published early drafts of these poems—the lyrics, then the word-processed found poetry that would eventually lead into the hand-tracing method I eventually figured out. It took a long time to land on what this project—or at least the book version of this project—would be. I don’t usually start writing poems with notes, but for this book I kept a list of concepts for poems on a sticky note inside a copy of Ells’s Northland Trails. It took several years for Goose to come together.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Until I know I am working on a project or a book, poems begin as words, phrases, ideas that I put in my notebook (which I try to write in every night). I am best at making poems when I am busy doing other things like reading, editing, researching, etc. I am terrible at setting myself the task to create something when I have no idea what I want to write, and I hate doing creative writing on a computer. So I do a lot of rolling things around in my mind before I write them down. With both books, there came a moment when I knew I was making a book, and then things started to make sense. With Happiness Threads I knew at the same moment how I was going to make it—I listed out the titles of all the remaining poems I was going to write, and those would become the main part of the book. With Goose, it took longer to figure that out. Once I know what the project is and how to do it, I make one poem or more every day if I can.

Goose poems start as an idea about Northland Trails—like I’m going to find every adjective used to describe geese, or I’m going to make a deconstructive reading of this one poem that highlights how sexist it is. Then I start tracing words and images and see how my poem shapes up. If I make a mistake, or change the procedure/method for the poem, I start over. Each poem gets remade several times. Depending on how complex the poem is, each version can take an hour or longer.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m honoured to get to do readings, but I am a quiet and private person, and readings are challenging for me. I do like being part of a community of writers and readers, so I do them. And I do them to honour the work.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Yes, always, but I try to keep these in the background—I’m not interested in writing theoretical or philosophical poetry. I would say I wrote Goose with literary-critical and environmental concerns. It is a reading or interpretation of Ells’s Northland Trails that does its work by making poems with and about Northland Trails. The questions it asks are questions like: What if Sid Ells liked to think of himself as a goose? How would I use his creative works to “prove” that, and what could I do with that evidence? What would it say about him? Do the geese or the land or the northern peoples in Northland Trails exceed or undermine what Ells tries to make them say, and how might I highlight those voices? What values and ideas and land relations were foundational to the tar sands industry, and are they still at work in the industry and in Canada today? What do we do with the legacies of “founding fathers” like Ells in the time of decarbonization and decolonization? Who speaks for the land? How can the image of this honking founding father serve as a warning or a corrective to the “great men,” grandiose plans and “nation-building projects” that are being sold to us today?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

It’s a writer’s job to pay attention, to reach for ways of expressing things that are happening right now in the world and in our cultures, and, while resisting silly or grandiose ideas about the impact of art or literature, to try to write ethically and in ways that matter. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Both, but more essential than difficult. I would not publish a book without being edited, and I’m so grateful for the editors who have worked on my books with me—who have helped me see and fine-tune what the books are doing, and who have taught me so much. Much gratitude and love to you, Catherine Hunter, Clarise Foster, Jordan Abel, Andrew Faulkner, and Leigh Nash. And thanks to the other editors who alternately encouraged my projects along and rejected them when they were half-baked.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Jordan Abel said something in a mentorship session at a Banff Centre writing residency—something like “I would never take on a project that I couldn’t enjoy.” That advice changed Goose and my perspective on making poetry, even so-called experimental or visual or difficult poetry.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Easy. For me, poetry was an unintended byproduct of grad school and scholarly writing, editing, and publishing. I would write the scholarly version of what I was working through, but I would also be compelled to write the poetry version. Eventually, I learned to let the poetry infect the scholarly writing, and I wrote some neat creative academic work as a result. I think I’m finished being an academic now, and what I’m most proud of about my scholarly work is that I did it like a poet.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t really have one. I have never been only a writer—always an editor or student or scholar who also made time to write. I usually wait until I have an idea before devoting much time and attention to my creative writing. I used to go for a run to figure out writing tangles, and now walking every day is good for me and my writing. And I know it helps to write in my journal every night. I’m a neurodivergent person, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to focus only on one project. I will probably always do lots of other things, and those other things will somehow also help me write.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Hmm. The everyday? The world? Environmental activism? Or I read, or I throw myself into some other project or editing someone else’s writing. I don’t worry very much about this. 

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

I bought a box of cheesy, vintage homemade costumes at a yard sale, then wore the one my kids didn’t want to wear. I think it was a lion.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? 

I am not a bird-watcher, but I have paid more attention to geese while making Goose. I LOVE them, in a very unscientific and silly way. And I have visited the Athabasca River several times while making this book, also the Assiniboine River almost every day, so I think of my writing as being in relation or conversation with these beloved rivers. Visual art, especially by the artists I have collaborated with through Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA) in Winnipeg (Yvette Cenerini, Brenna George, Sandra Brown, Carolina Araneda, to name a few). Other influences for Goose include COVID-era Zoom meetings and podcasts, and lots of music (two songs to highlight: Tanya Tagaq’s “Retribution” and John K. Samson’s “Vampire Alberta Blues”). And the other forms I want to mention are DIY and amateurish aesthetics—zines, comics, the self-published, the protest poster or slogan or song.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Where to begin? And end? Books: Kate Beaton’s Ducks, Alvena Strasbourg’s Memories of a Métis Woman, Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, K.B. Thors’s Vulgar Mechanics, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Kazim Ali’s Northern Light, Douglas Walbourne-Gough’s Crow Gulch, Richard van Camp’s Godless but Loyal to Heaven, Evan J’s Ripping Down Half the Trees, Joanna Lilley’s Endlings, Matthew James Weigel’s Whitemud Walking, Owen Toews’s Stolen City, Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism. And writers: Jordan Abel, Madhur Anand, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Jenna Butler, Dionne Brand, Di Brandt, Moni Brar, Warren Cariou, Rina Garcia Chua, Ariel Gordon, Stephen Collis, Marvin Francis, Samantha F. Jones, Katłıà, Kaie Kellough, Sonnet L’Abbé, Christine Leclerc, Cecily Nicholson, Jamie Paris, Shane Rhodes, Kelly Shepherd, Kate Siklosi, Dani Spinosa, Jennifer Still, Michael Trussler, Katherena Vermette, Joshua Whitehead, Rita Wong, Syd Zolf.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 

I would like to be a writer in residence. I will do that this fall at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. With that happening, and two books launching this fall, I honestly haven’t thought much further ahead.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

When I was young I said I wanted to be a librarian. That would work. I don’t know, I have already done a lot of things—communications work, university student services, magazine editing, journal editing, poetry editing, copy-editing and proofreading, teaching, research/scholarship. I’m focused now on attempting primarily being a writer for a change.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? 

I write and do something else. But my something else is often pretty close to writing.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 

I’m reading Kate Briggs’s This Little Art right now. It’s fantastic. Before that it was Smokii Sumac’s Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine, which is powerful, beautiful, and heartbreaking. I recently attended a screening of the film YINTAH and was blown away. Everyone in Canada should watch it, and it’s now on Netflix.

20 - What are you currently working on? 

I’m preparing for the launches of Goose and the poetry anthology I co-edited, I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis. I have a little chapbook project with one more sequence of poems about S.C. Ells. It didn’t fit with Goose so I set it aside to finish later (now). There is an ongoing research project with the McMurray Métis and Emily Eaton at the University of Regina that is related to Goose. I’m continuing my work as part of the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition, including a public-art collaboration with visual artists Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies where we have been facilitating poster-making workshops that document the experiences of “wildfire season,” evacuations, smoke, and ongoing climate denial and delay in our province. And I’m getting ready to facilitate workshops on visual poetry and work-and-climate poetry as part of my upcoming writing residency.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Melanie Dennis Unrau, Goose

 

            Goose is a work of research-creation that blends research, literary criticism, and poetics. My tracing method pulls at and draws out threads of ideology, power, subversion, and contradiction in Northland Trails, sidelining its more overt or obvious content to pay attention to its underlying assumptions and aesthetics, along with the things it tries to hide or contain. Goose interprets Northland Trails by following a succession of clues, hunches, and ideas, driven not by the need to prove that they are correct but rather to ask, only ever half seriously, what if they were? Looking for geese in Northland Trails leads to looking for dissenting perspectives and voices more generally. It loosens Ells’s grip on geese as metaphor or pathetic fallacy, creating space for geese—along with other northern beings, including Indigenous peoples, non-human animals, and the land itself—to exist beyond and in resistance to the uses Ells puts them to. As a deconstructive project working on and against settler-colonial ideology, Goose seeks, holds space for, and invites readers to investigate Indigenous and decolonial counternarratives to Northland Trails. (“AFTERWORD”)

From Winnipeg poet, editor and scholar Melanie Dennis Unrau comes the debut full-length poetry title, Goose (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2025), a book-length visual poem project (an excerpt of which also appeared as a chapbook through above/ground press a while back, as well as through the Spotlight series) of simultaneous excavation and erasure that emerges from the work of “Canadian Development of Mines expert and Word War I veteran” Sidney Clarke Ells (1878-1971), the self-declared “father of the tar sands,” specifically his 1938 collection of poems, short stories and essays, Northland Trails (1938). Through an expansive visual sequence, Unrau works her project as one of critical response, working to engage with and, specifically, against the original intent of Ell’s language back into itself, and the implications of what those original intents have wrought. The book is set with an afterword by the author, and an opening “FOREWORD” by McMurray Métis, that opens: “There is a long history in Canada and indeed across the world of European ‘explorers’ appropriating the knowledge, skills, and labour of Indigenous peoples for their personal and collective gain, only to tur around and declare the territories of Indigenous peoples ‘terra nullius,’ and their cultures and ways of live inferior and unworthy of respect. This dialectic of appropriation-negation is familiar to Indigenous people across the globe. And so it is with Fort McMurray, its oil sands, and their ‘father,’ Sidley Ells. Through research, community and public awareness, and the construction of our cultural centre, McMurray Métis hope to correct these self-serving and distorted narratives, and assert our historic and continued presence, way of life, and self-determination. Let this foreword be one small step in that direction.”

Visually expansive, with a delightful use of image and space, Unrau moves through the language, sketches and, seemingly, the typeface, of Ells’ 1938 collection to unravel an acknowledgment of the Indigenous peoples within that space, and the environment and landscape of those pilfered, poisoned lands, showcasing the illusion of self that Ells presumed upon that landscape, flipping a script of belonging that was never his to take. “Inspired by books like Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps, M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong!, Syd Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia, Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men, and Lesley Battler’s Endangers Hydrocarbons,” Unrau writes, as part of the book’s “AFTERWORD,” “I started to make visual poetry out of found text and images from Northland Trails. After some experimentation, I developed a method of building poems and critical arguments about Northland Trails by tracing words and illustrations from its pages.”

 

“In Winnipeg / I'll eat your leg.” — Dennis Lee

You know that poem, don’t you? From Dennis Lee’s classic Alligator Pie (Toronto ON: Macmillan, 1974). If you don’t have a copy, you should certainly get one. I doubt the book has been out of print since it originally appeared. Over the weekend, I made my way to Winnipeg for a quick overnight to launch my latest poetry collection, World’s End, (2023), a collection that immediately pre-dates my University of Calgary title, the book of smaller (2022). The publisher, ARP Books, had set up a group launch for a trio of their recent poetry titles, including Ottawa poet natalie hanna’s lisan al’asfour (2022) [see my review of such here] and Vancouver poet Nina Mosall’s Bebakhshid (2023), both of which mark their full-length debuts.

Oh, Winnipeg. It has been a while since I’ve been this way. The prior weekend I was at a festival in Corner Brook, Newfoundland [see my report on such here]. In December, I launched my Mansfield Press pandemic essay collection in Toronto with Stephen Brockwell and Amy Dennis, etc [see my report on such here] and another Toronto reading last July through Larry Sawyer/milk magazine [see my report here]. Remember all those? Before that, nothing back to February 2020, when Christine and I read in Vancouver as part of Lunch Poems at SFU [see my report on such here]. Did I ever do a report on my prior reading in Winnipeg? Going back through my posts, it does look like I toured a full thirty days back in 2006, posting all sorts of travel nonsense during that time [landing in Winnipeg; being in Winnipeg; leaving Winnipeg]. Has it really been that long since I read there? I know I’ve been at least once since to meet up with some of Christine’s aunties and Oma. Either way, I think my notes make more sense now.

natalie and I met at the airport at some ridiculously-early time for our shared flights (a brief stop-over in Toronto), as we shared hazy conversation until boarding (we were seated rather distantly on the flights themselves). I deliberately brought no reading material with me to force myself to finish the final edits on this forthcoming collection of short stories, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press), supposedly scheduled for next fall, if I can complete these edits in time.

We landed, we made for the hotel, we lunched. We sat for a moment, to breathe. She caught her room prior to lunch, mine wasn’t ready until after. Once we were finished our lunch, she went to crash for a bit and I wandered, ending up at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, an artist run centre almost directly across the street from our hotel, where I saw some really interesting shows (that I would completely recommend). Farah Al Qasimi’s work, The Swarm, is quite stunning. Ultimately, I was heading to the big ridiculous Winnipeg sign at The Forks, which led me more than a kilometre of walking (repeatedly asking locals if I was headed the correct way), wandering in, around and through downtown in a zigzag. I caught the Portage Place mall (where I spent many hours writing in their food court, during prior visits), and saw the march of some hundreds of people protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza, which is devastating the Palestinian people (everyone needs to stop all the bombing, please). I wandered the corner of Portage and Main for a selfie, none of which captured either sign for proof. I walked through the train station, one of the few of those original train stations still functioning across Canada (Calgary is shuttered; Edmonton and Ottawa stations relocated years ago). Once I found it, two tourists from Philadelphia were kind enough to capture the photo of me at the sign.

Once done, I headed straight back, another kilometre-plus back into the Exchange district for the sake of Red River Books: this is one of my favourite used bookstores in Canada, and I easily mailed boxes of purchased books home from this store across those years of touring from 1997 to 2006. I made the store by 4pm, just in time to realize it had already been closed for an hour. What! And being Saturday, there was no point attempting the ArtSpace building, which houses Turnstone Press, CV2 magazine, Prairie Fire, The Manitoba Writers Guild, etcetera (I used to spend half a day on each trip wandering the building, visiting). This is when and were I first met Todd Besant, who currently runs ARP Books, during his tenure at Turnstone. Instead, I sought out a seat somewhere for the sake of some food, perhaps, and possibly a drink, landing at the Amsterdam Tea Room and Bar. I mean, I needed to be at the reading venue by 5:30pm, and it was only a couple blocks further, so there was no point in wandering back to the mall for the food court (which I did consider).

The Amsterdam was curious: a fancy bar for tea-flavoured cocktails (their menu for such was extensive; I ordered a stout, avoiding all of that). While there, I wrote postcards for the children, only to have a younger couple nearby stunned that I was writing postcards. It’s a lost art! he said. Can I take your picture writing postcards? she asked? Um, I suppose?

And did you see this? En route to the gallery: a building with a restored original front for that whole block, and new back. Completely lovely.

The reading itself was glorious! It was a small crowd, but quality. I don’t think I’d seen A.J. (Adam) Levin since 2004, when we read together at the Windsor Festival, when I launched my Palimpsest Books title (I still have copies, despite it being out of print). K.I. (Karen) Press looked no different than she had ever done. Why doesn’t she age? And it was great to finally meet (in-person) Winnipeg poets Julian Day, melanie brannagan and above/ground press author Melanie Dennis Unrau. Dennis Cooley, as well, was his usual self, his pulse of electrical energy just there beneath the surface. The benefit, also, of those latter four being above/ground press subscribers, I was able to hand them three envelopes each, which did lighten my load considerably. And did you know cam scott [did you see my review of his latest?] is part of aceart as well? I hadn’t met him yet, either. Oh, he's so good. We’ve been discussing doing a chapbook together for some time now.

Christine’s two maternal aunties were also there! They live in Winnipeg, after all. It was lovely to see them.

The last time I was at aceart, Winnipeg’s glorious artist-run centre, it was in a different location. For reasons unknown, Sylvia Legris thought I should be part of an art auction they were running back in the fall of 1999, and, given I’d recently won the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Prize for Most Promising Writer (in any genre) in Canada under 30 (their only non-cash prize, but included two free tickets to anywhere Air Canada flew), I was able to use one of those tickets to fly into Winnipeg for the sake of that auction. I stayed with Dennis Cooley, brought along terrible artwork and spent the evening working the bar at the event. At least when Karen Connelly won the same prize nearly a decade earlier, she used her tickets for a bit more purpose: flying to Thailand, where she spent a year composing her Governor General’s Award-winning travel memoir, Touch the Dragon (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1992).

natalie hanna does occupy an interesting space in Ottawa literary circles: despite this being her full-length debut, she’s been active for years (with a break mid-way for the sake of law school and articling), even back to the second half of the 1990s, when she was involved with running readings at Mother Tongue Books (a series, if I recall correctly, organized with Stephanie Bolster) and above/ground press even published a chapbook-length long poem of hers as an issue of the long poem magazine STANZAS. The reading was straightforward enough (and we were all amazing, I’ll have you know), but what was intriguing was Andrew Lee prompting a panel conversation between the three of us at the end of the event. He opened with a question, and then asked if we had questions for each other (I didn’t realize we’d had homework).

Nina, on her part, immediately jumped at the opportunity, and pulled out a whole list of questions she’d prepared (citing that, as a librarian, this was something she was quite good at). Her questions were interesting, although I made a point of prompting her to answer each one as well, after natalie and I had. After a handful of Nina’s questions, I pointed out that all of her questions seemed to be structural (ie: variations on form, as opposed to questions around content), which prompted me to ask her how her poems begin. She hadn’t even realized her direction. I feel seen! she said, startled.

K.I. (Karen) Press

All in all, a very fine event, a very fine trip. Thank you, co-readers, and to everyone at ARP Books: Todd, Irene (in absentia) and Andrew. Thank you.

myself reading! photo by Andrew Lee, ARP Books

Spotlight series #65 : Melanie Dennis Unrau

The sixty-fifth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi and New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink.
 
The whole series can be found online here.