Thank you for your warm response to our first author visit. We will be having a lot more authors visit and by November, you will be the warm up act so hang onto your hats as the ride begins!
Friday: Bring a poem for your workshop group and your Patrick Lane response.
Tomorrow: Bring a lunch as you might not have time to stand in the cafeteria lineup as the bus leaves promptly at noon. I'll remind you about all of this during class tomorrow morning but meet out front on the bus by 11:55. We get out of period 2 early for the Cops for Cancer event.
Also due tomorrow is your short poem. See yesterday's blog for a reminder.
Next poet visit: Friday, Oct. 12: Poet, UVic professor, and Victoria's first poet laureate, Carla Funk will be visiting our classroom.
Friday, Oct 26, the poet, Yvonne Blomer will be reading to the class.
Yvonne Blomer
Yvonne Blomer completed her MA in Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia. Her work has won awards and been published internationally. Most recently poems appear in Walk Myself Home: An Anthology to End Violence Against Women, The Best of Canadian Poetry in English by Tightrope Books and in Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry by Mother Tongue Publishing Ltd. Her first book, a broken mirror, fallen leaf, was short listed for Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry. In 2011 Yvonne will have two new books of poetry outLandscapes and Home (Leaf Press) and The Book of Places (Black Moss Press). For four years, Yvonne wrote a cycling column for the Times Colonist called Spoke 'n' Word. She has had travel writing published in Canada, England and Japan and is working on a travel memoir titled The Long Way West: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur. Yvonne has been teaching courses in poetry and memoir for several years.Wed. Oct. 31, the poet and novelist and short story writer, John Lent will be here staring at all of the students in costume.
John Lent has been publishing poetry, fiction and non-fiction nationally and internationally for the past thirty years. His work has appeared in various issues of: The Malahat Review, Event, West Coast Line, NeWest Review, Grain, Prairie Fire, CV2, The New Quarterly, This Magazine, The Canadian Forum, Matrix, Waves, Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review. He has published eight books of poetry and fiction and a book of conversations with Robert Kroetsch about the writing life, called Abundance. His last novel, So It Won’t Go Away, was short-listed for the BC Book Prizes in 2005, and Thistledown Press released a volume of Lent’s poems called Cantilevered Songs in 2009 that was long-listed for the Re-Lit Award that year. A novel, The Path To Ardroe, was released by Thistledown Press in the spring of 2012.
Lent has read his from his work in France, England and the USA, and has given Canada Council Readings of his work across Canada over the past twenty-five years, most recently in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, Calgary and Victoria. He has taught Creative Writing & Literature at various institutions in this country for the past forty years, and has, most recently, taught at The Sage Hill Writing Experience and The Victoria School of Writing. He has been writer in residence at Red Deer College and a resident writer at The Wallace Stegner House and The Leighton Artists Colony at The Banff Centre For The Arts. His most recent novel, The Path To Ardroe, is a novel that has taken over a decade to write and surfaces from experiences Lent had living in Strasbourg, France, in 1988, and Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1995.
Aesthetically, Lent will tell you that he has specialized in exploring the narrative forms connected to the genre of stream of consciousness fiction. He strives for a unique, unprecedented intimacy in his writing that comes from years of playing with different ways to represent subjectivity/consciousness in narrative,and years of studying writers like Malcolm Lowry, James Joyce, Céline, Margaret Laurence and Alistair Macleod. Lent has published and presented critical articles on spatial form in these kinds of narrative in the work of Thomas DeQuincey, Malcolm Lowry, Kristjana Gunnars, Mavis Gallant, Wilfred Watson, Sheila Watson & Robert Kroetsch. Lent considers The Path To Ardroe to be a breakthrough result of all this work and hopes to reach a wide audience through it.
Lent lives in Vernon, BC, with his wife, the artist Jude Clarke, and plays in The Lent/Fraser/Wall Trio, a jazz and roots group. He is one of the founders of Kalamalka Press and The Kalamalka Institute For Working Writers, and though he has taught Creative Writing and Literature classes for years, and served as the Regional Dean, North Okanagan, for Okanagan College, for the past five years, John Lent is currently, and happily, retired.
