Canadian Literature Centre (CLC) Brown Bag Lunch Podcast

Quatre femmes se rencontrent au cœur de la poésie. Dans un ici/maintenant planétaire, leurs voix s'interrogent sur la fragilité et le courage d'être au monde.

Une table ronde réunissant:
Nicole Brossard
Vanessa Courville
Louise Dupré
Evelyne Gagnon 

Animée par Dr. Nicoletta Dolce (Université de Montréal)

Crédits de l'enregistrement audio: Diane Régimbald
Conception visuelle et graphique: Éric Lafrenière

Le risque, la douleur, la résistance: rencontre avec quatre femmes poètes

As the presence of Artificial Intelligence evolves and its reach continues to expand, writers are forced to ask themselves: What does this mean for me and my work? The topic of AI is multi-faceted, and while AI promises endless possibilities for artists and writers alike, it also brings with it fear and uncertainty. What lines have been drawn between AI as a supplemental tool and AI as the career-crushing thief many believe it could be?

Controversy @ Noon

Alice Major has published eleven collections of poetry, two novels for young adults, and an award-winning collection of essays about poetry and science. Alice is the founder of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, was the first poet laureate of Edmonton, and the past president of both the Writers Guild of Alberta and the League of Canadian Poets.

Hari Alluri (he/him/siya [pronounced sha]) is an uninvited migrant poet of Philippine and South Asian descent living, writing, and working on unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and Kwantlen, Katzie and Kwikwetlem lands of Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking peoples. Author of The Flayed City (Kaya Press), chapbook Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page Press) and, forthcoming in 2025, Like a Feather Holds the Sky (Brick Books), he is a co-founding editor at Locked Horn Press, a workshop facilitator, and a bookseller at Massy Books. His award-winning work can be found in journals, anthologies, and online. 

Dr. Michelle Porter is a writer and scholar from Alberta and living in Newfoundland and Labrador. She is the descendent of a long line of Métis storytellers. Many of her ancestors (the Goulet family) told stories using music and today she tells stories using the written word. She is the author of Approaching Fire, Scratching River. Her first novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story (Penguin 2023), was a finalist for the Atwood-Gibson Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction in 2023. Her first book of poetry, Inquiries, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry, Canada 2019 and was a finalist for the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award 2021. She teaches creative writing at Memorial University in Newfoundland.

CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast - Episode 12 - Alice Major, Hari Alluri & Michelle Porter

On October 20, 2023, the Centre for Literatures in Canada, in partnership with LitFest, hosted Trina Moyles and Omar Mouallem for a public event that was part of the CLC's 2023-24 Reading and Conversation Series on the theme of "Air and Fire."

Trina Moyles is an author, journalist, and creative producer based between Alberta and the Yukon Territory. She is the author of three non-fiction books, including Women Who Dig (2018), Lookout (2021), which won the 2022 Alberta Memoir Award, and Black Bear, which is forthcoming with Alfred A. Knopf in 2025. Her first book, Women Who Dig, is being adapted into a documentary film series by Edmonton-based filmmaker and director, Anna Kuelken. Her award-winning writing, often focusing on social and environmental justice issues, has been published in the Globe and Mail, Hakai Magazine, The Walrus, and Canadian Geographic. In 2022, she received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. 

Omar Mouallem is an author, filmmaker, and educator. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, WIRED, and The Wall Street Journal. He coauthored Inside the Inferno: A Firefighter’s Story of the Brotherhood that Saved Fort McMurray, with firefighter Damian Asher, which was a national bestseller. His latest book Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas won the 2022 Wilfred Eggelston Nonfiction Award and was named one of the Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2021. His documentary The Lebanese Burger Mafia, which documents the unlikely link between fast-food and Lebanese immigrants, won the 2023 Audience Choice for Best Doc at Northwest International Documentary Festival. He also teaches creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College and is the "fake dean" of Pandemic University School of Writing, a virtual school he founded in support of writers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trina Moyles & Omar Mouallem | "Air and Fire" Series | Reading + Q & A

We are thrilled to present the latest episode of the Canadian Literature Centre podcast. In this episode, also part of the “Air and Fire” series of readings and conversations this year, Hari Alluri, Alice Major, and Michelle Porter explore the literal and metaphorical significance of fire in a brilliant, wide-ranging reading and conversation.

Alice Major hosts Michelle Porter and Hari Alluri

The ethics of writing on social issues can be a complicated topic of conversation for writers: What does it mean, really? Are certain issues off-limits for particular writers? What are the types of issues that fall under this very broad theme? How can we strive to write characters and narratives that feel meaningful, informed, and appropriate to the story we’re trying to tell? Join our group of panellists as they discuss the ethics of writing on social issues during our first Controversy @ Noon panel in 2024.

About The Panellists
Dr. Jenna Butler (she/her)
www.jennabutler.com

Dr. Jenna Butler (she/her) is an award-winning poet, essayist, mentor, and editor.

She is the author of three books of poetry, Seldom Seen Road, Wells, and Aphelion; a collection of ecological essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail; and the Arctic travelogue Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard. Her book, Revery: A Year of Bees, essays about beekeeping, climate grief, and trauma recovery, was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award in Non-Fiction and a longlisted title for CBC Canada Reads 2023.

Butler teaches creative writing at the University of Saskatchewan and serves as the Environmental Writing Fellow for the Spring Creek Project and Oregon Wild. She teaches for Calgary’s Alexandra Writers’ Centre as their outgoing Writer in Residence, focusing on ecological writing. Her work has its roots in the off-grid organic farm she runs with her husband in northern Treaty 6, Alberta.

Natasha Deen
natashadeen.com

Recent works: The Spooky Sleuths series, Book three, Don’t Go Near the Water!

Guyanese-Canadian NATASHA DEEN is a best-selling author, with novels for kids, teens, and adults, and she’s a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal. Her novel, In the Key of Nira Ghani, won the Amy Mather Teen Book Award and her most recent YA title, The Signs and Wonders of Tuna Rashad was a Globe & Mail‘s Top 100 Books for 2022. When she’s not writing, she teaches Introduction to Children’s Writing with the University of Toronto’s SCS and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to convince her pets that she’s the boss of the house. 

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike
www.instagram.com/uche_peter_umez/

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is the author of literary works such as there’s more (2023), Double Wahala, Double Trouble (2021), Wish Maker (2021), and a co-editor of Wreaths for a Wayfarer (2020).

Rayanne Haines (she/her)
www.rayannehaines.com/

Rayanne Haines is an award-winning author, educator, and cultural producer. She is the creator and host of the literary podcast Crow Reads, is the President of the League of Canadian Poets, and teaches at MacEwan University. Her hybrid poetry collection, Tell the Birds Your Body is Not a Gun won the 2022 Stephan G. Stephansson Alberta Literary Award and was shortlisted for both the Robert Kroetch Award and the ReLit Award. She’s been published in the Globe and Mail, Minola Review, Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire and others. A CNF poetry and essay collection exploring grief, identity, and gendered trauma is forthcoming from Frontenac House September 2024

Bibliography:
1 - https://bookriot.com/mistreatment-of-women-in-game-of-thrones/
2 - https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/kosoko-jackson-a-place-for-wolves.html#
3 - https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/american-dirt-book-controversy/
4 -https://lareviewofbooksorg/article/my-taco-laughs-at-you-on-death-threats-aimed-at-women-of-color-who-dont-fellate-white-supremacy/

Controversy At Noon: The ethics of writing on social issues

With book banning in Alberta and Canada seemingly on the rise, it’s left many wondering what this means for writers, for readers, and for the community at large. What are the ways in which censorship affects and/or impedes the literary world, and what can we do to maintain the creative freedom to read and to write what we choose to?

Controversy at Noon: Book Banning in Alberta and Canada

Does bias exist in the literary world where age is concerned? Writing is hard enough in the first place, do writers also have to worry about the continued relationship with their publisher, agent, readers, and other writers in the industry as they get older? If so, in what ways? Additionally, are writers in certain genres prone to be more successful if they fall under a particular age group? Less successful? Our panelists will examine these questions and other age-related industry issues during our April Controversy @ Noon Panel.

About The Panelists
Norma Dunning – Moderator
Norma Dunning (PhD) is a Padlei Inuk writer, professor and grandmother. Dr Dunning has published in poetry, prose, fiction and nonfiction.

Kinauvit? (what’s your name?) a work of nonfiction shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing in 2023 and Tainna (the unseen ones) received the Governor General’s Award in literary fiction in 2021. Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (2017) received the Danuta Gleed in 2018, as well as several other literary awards. Her books have been translated into French, Greek and Amharic. Aput! (snow), a children’s book, will be released in the fall of 2024. 

Dunning lives in Regina where she teaches at the First Nations University of Canada.

Facebook

Rona Altrows – Panelist
Rona Altrows is a fiction writer, essayist, editor, and playwright. She believes literature plays a critical role in the fight for social justice. Her books of short fiction are A Run on Hose, Key in Lock, and At This Juncture, and her work has appeared in Queen’s Quarterly, The Prairie Journal, and many other magazines and e-zines in Canada and the US. She has edited or co-edited three anthologies, including You Look Good for Your Age, an exploration of women, aging, and ageism.  Honours she has received include the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize,  the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award, and two Independent Book Publishers awards.

Website, Bluesky

Sharon Butala – Panelist
Butala is the author of 22 books of both fiction and nonfiction and for nearly fifty years, at 83, has been writing and publishing with both major publishers and smaller companies. She has been agented since the eighties and has appeared at many festivals in Canada and the USA and made presentations in, besides Canada, the USA, Mexico, Ireland and the Czech Republic. Her many awards and prizes include the Marian Engel Award, the W.O. Mitchell/City of Calgary Award and the Glengarry Book Prize Award. She was recently shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her memoir, The Perfection of the Morning, was on the Canadian bestseller list for a year.

Website

Tololwa Mollel – Panelist
Edmonton-based Tololwa M. Mollel writes books, plays, and stories for performance for all ages in English and Kiswahili, the national language of Tanzania where he was born. He has published 24 books for the young in both languages. Some of the books are translated into various African, Asian, and European languages. Tololwa also performs stories, solo or with other performers or artists. He has been spreading his passion for story, performance and writing to the young and old through story workshops, performances and presentations in Alberta schools and communities.

Website

Controversy at Noon: Ageism in the Industry

This recording is from an online reading featuring finalists for the 2024 Alberta Literary Awards. 
Antoinette Bekker
Astrid Blodgett
Kate Boorman
Jennifer Bowering Delisle
Natasha Deen
Julie Sedivy
Josée Thibeault

*Note. The audio volume drops at the end of the recording during Astrid Blodgett's reading. Apologies for the inconvenience*

Reading with Alberta Literary Awards Finalists

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, and currently lives with her son in North Burnaby. Lee is a prolific and celebrated writer, editor, teacher, and radio personality who writes in an array of genres, including the literary crime novel, YA fiction, film criticism and poetry. Her first novel, The End of East (Knopf 2007) illuminates the Chinese Canadian story in Vancouver. She followed this with a Young Adult novel, Shelter (Annick Press, 2011), and another for adults, The Better Mother (Knopf, 2011), a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award and praised for its “straight-ahead page-turning brilliance.” Her literary crime novel, The Conjoined (ECW press, 2016), was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and has been praised for its “complex, refreshing and relevant departure” from the expectations of the genre.

Lee’s writing and editing projects also include Chinese New Year; a book of film criticism called Gentlemen Of The Shade: My Own Private Idaho (ECW Press, 2017); and Whatever Gets You Through, a collection of essays by writers who have survived sexual abuse (co-edited with Stacey May Fowles, Greystone Books, 2019). Lee also edits fiction for Wolsak & Wynn, teaches fiction at The Writers’ Studio Online at Simon Fraser University, and co-hosts the literary podcast "Can’t Lit."

And finally, Lee is also a popular CBC Radio personality: she has been a regular contributor on The Next Chapter and Definitely Not the Opera, and a frequent co-host for the Studio One Book Club. In this podcast, Lee reads from The Conjoined as well as her forthcoming collection of poetry, and reflects on the impact of the pandemic on her writing life, the role of art and literature in these times, and must-reads of the moment.

CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast - Episode 1 - Jen Sookfong Lee

Canisia Lubrin grew up in St. Lucia before moving to Canada, where she studied at York and Guelph Universities and now teaches at OCAD and U of T, while also working as a writer and editor. Anthologized and translated internationally, Lubrin’s poetry and fiction has been nominated for, among others, the Toronto Book Award, the Journey Prize, and the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her first collection of poetry, Voodoo Hypothesis, is, in the author’s words, “a subversion of the imperial construct of ‘blackness.’” Named a CBC Best Poetry book of 2017 and one of the ten “must-read” books of that year by the League of Canadian Poets, longlisted for the Gerald Lampert and Pat Lowther Memorial awards, and shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, Voodoo Hypothesis has been described as at once “epic” and “intimate.” As one reviewer put it, the collection is “a lush, urgent, cosmological accounting of generations of the African Diaspora.” Lubrin’s second poetry collection, Dyzgraphyxst, is a polyvocal exploration of kinship. It was published this year by McClelland & Stewart at Penguin/Random House. Her debut collection of short fiction is forthcoming from Knopf.

Lubrin’s writing is an act of witnessing that both clarifies and subverts the hierarchical structures of oppression.  In "53 Acts of Living," her stunning prose-poem written in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, Lubrin offers a moving meditation on the role of the poet as listener to the world, with its “hard-edged roads and meanings” -- as one whose vocation it is to “make something of silence”: 

"You are looking out from here and maybe wondering what is next, how can you begin again? All I know is if my pen hovers over the page long enough because I am listening to the world, hearing what is revealed, what is felt and held because I am still here—because I am travelling the hard-edged roads and meanings of this place, things will eventually announce themselves. In all that living there is war, there is madness, there is music. In that music I find poetry. Whether or not I write it down is, of course, a matter of choice. If I write it down be sure that I make something of silence.”

CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast - Episode 2 - Canisia Lubrin

Rebecca Thomas is a Mi’kmaq poet, spoken-word artist, and activist raised in Moncton, NB. A former Poet Laureate of Halifax (2016-18), Thomas is the winner of an Indigenous Artist Recognition Award; she has performed with Juno Award-winning artists A Tribe Called Red, and has written for the CBC and Washington Post as well as multiple books for children. For Thomas, poetry and storytelling are important tools for education and empowerment, illuminating racism and inequality, creating empathy, and honouring Indigenous experiences. "My biggest dirty secret,” she once admitted, “is that I'm a poet laureate who doesn’t want to be a poet… I want to be a change-maker, and I just happen to use poetry to do that." Described as “open,” “honest,” and “distinctive,” Thomas’s poetic voice has prompted change in her community and beyond.  Her first book, I’m Finding My Talk (2019, Nimbus), is about cultural reclamation and was written as a companion piece to the famous poem, I Lost My Talk, by Rita Joe, who attended the same residential school as Thomas’s father. Thomas’s second book for children, Swift Fox All Along, was published in September 2020 by Annick Press. Her first collection of poetry, I Place You Into the Fire, was published by Nimbus in October, 2020.

CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast - Episode 3 - Rebecca Thomas

J.R. Carpenter is a UK-based artist, writer, performer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. Born in Nova Scotia, she lived in Montreal for many years before emigrating to the United Kingdom in 2009. Her pioneering web-based works have been presented in museums, galleries, and festivals around the world. She is a winner of the CBC Quebec Writing Competition, the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Award, Expozine Alternative Press Award, the Dot Award for Digital Literature, and the New Media Writing Prize. Her debut poetry collection, An Ocean of Static, was highly commended for the Forward Prizes 2018. Her latest collection, This is a Picture of Wind, is based on a web-app by the same name and was included in The Guardian’s “Best poetry books of 2020.” She is a Fellow of the Eccles Centre For North American Studies at the British Library and the Moore Institute at NUI Galway. She delivered this podcast reading for the CLC as the 2020-21 Writer-in-Residence at University of Alberta. 


Carpenter has been praised as a poet who “gives shape to the ineffable.” Themes of place, displacement, migration, and climate change have long pervaded her writing. In Edmonton, which she has come to know during the pandemic, her work has been inspired by the North Saskatchewan River, by walking, by mulling over stones and dinosaur bones, by the questioning and reckoning that comes with migratory and colonial relationships to place, and by the surprising relationships that have flourished despite the isolation of this year. Her residency has been a tremendous gift to the university and the local writing community amidst the unprecedented challenges of this year.

CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast - Episode 4 - J.R. Carpenter

Shannon Webb-Campbell is a mixed Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) settler poet, writer, and critic. Her books include: Still No Word (Breakwater 2015), the recipient of Eagle Canada’s Out in Print Award, I Am A Body of Land (Book*hug 2019), and Lunar Tides (forthcoming with Book*hug in 2022). Shannon holds a MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia, and a MA in English Literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, and is a doctoral student at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of English. She is the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine.

Committed to reparation, self-education, and healing, Webb-Campbell writes out of a deep sense of responsibility to Indigenous communities. Her collection I am a Body of Land, is, as Carol Rose Daniels puts it, “forces readers out of polite conversation and into a realm where despair and hard truths are being told, being heard and finding the emotional strength to learn from it, find our way out and embrace our beauty as Indigenous women.” In Susan Musgrave’s words, this is “Poetry awake with the winds from the Four Directions, poetry that crosses borders, margins, treaties, yellow tape warning: Police Line. Do Not Cross. Poetry whose traditional territory, through colonization, has become trauma and shame. Unceded poetry. Read. Respect. Weep.”

In this podcast, which includes readings from her forthcoming collection, Lunar Tides, Webb-Campbell’s poems range across theory, the legacies of colonialism, kinship, and Indigenous resurgence. Her words follow the rhythms of the body, the water, the cycles of the moon, and long and deep familial relationships amid the profound grief of losing her mother. You can hear, too, her eloquent review of her recommended pandemic reading: Shalan Joudry’s Waking Ground.

CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast - Episode 5 - Shannon Webb-Campbell

Louise Bernice Halfe, whose Cree name is Sky Dancer, is married with two adult children and three grandsons. Raised on the Saddle Lake Reserve in Alberta, she attended Blue Quills Residential School before earning a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Regina. She completed two years of Nechi Training in St. Albert’s Nechi Institute: Centre of Indigenous Learning, where she has also facilitated the program. Halfe has been awarded honorary degrees from Wilfred Laurier University, the University of Saskatchewan, and Mount Royal University. As well as serving as Saskatchewan’s Poet Laureate for two years, she’s been a keynote speaker at numerous conferences. In this podcast, Halfe reads to us from her four books, Bear Bones and Feathers, Blue Marrow, The Crooked Good, and Burning In This Midnight Dream. All have received numerous accolades and awards, and will be reprinted next year by Brick Books and Kegedonce Press. A collection of selected poems, Sôhkêyihta (which means “have courage” or “be strong”), was published by Wilfred Laurier in 2018, and an eagerly awaited new collection, awâsis -- kinky and dishevelled will be released on April 1st, 2021, by Brick Books. 

Halfe’s poetry earned her a Lifetime Achievement Award from the League of Canadian Poets, and last year, she received the 2020 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. The jury of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize describe her literary impact in the following way: “Halfe’s poetics refuse the hierarchies of colonial literary critique, instead affirming the equality of the contemporary, the ancestral, and the mythological; holding a multiplicity of cosmologies and quotidian realities as relevant and urgent…” Thus, they go on, “Her work cannot be assimilated in the canon of contemporary Canadian literature; instead, it must be ingested, transforming our collective literature on a cellular level, reimagining our identities, languages, and memories as denizens of Turtle Island.”

CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast - Episode 6 - Louise Bernice Halfe

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