Self-Publishing Seminar at Wild Writers Literary Festival

Self-publishing is good for many things.

It's also not very good for many things.

From revolutions to ripoffs, I'll be talking about all of those things as part of the Wild Writers Festival, presented by The New Quarterly, on November 17.

Details here:

I'll be at Western University on October 20

I'll be appearing at Western University, in London ON, on October 20 as part of the Write Now! series. I'll do a reading and a Q&A with the audience about poetry, writing, and publishing. Ask me anything!

It starts at 4pm in UCC56, and is free and open to Western students, staff and faculty. I'm looking forward to getting back to my UWO roots.

Find all the details here.

The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing is set to launch June 23

For the past year I've been working with a marvellous team of faculty and students from the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College to develop a new literary magazine called The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing, and we are set to launch our first issue next week! 

In this debut issue, we are proud to include new work by some of Canada’s most exciting contemporary writers. This issue features an exclusive interview with Amanda Leduc, new fiction by Jordan Abel and Jess Taylor, poetry by two former Sheridan writers-in-residence Liz Howard and Gary Barwin, among many other treasures.

We will be having a virtual launch for the debut issue on June 23 at 7pm EDT. 

To register for the event, please click here.

Talking about Shared Universe, the future, and culture on My Summer Lair

Thanks to Sammy Younan for having me back to his pop culture podcast My Summer Lair to talk about my latest book SHARED UNIVERSE, the future, and the relationships between poetries and mass culture.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO GO TO THE PODCAST

Mike the Headless Chicken (a digital poem)

 

Parallel Careers: a new podcast from The New Quarterly hosted by Claire Tacon

It was a pleasure to be interviewed by the talented Claire Tacon for the new Parallel Careers Podcast from The New Quarterly: Canadian Writers & Writing. And I'm grateful for the music that Amadeo Ventura has written for this episode!

In this episode, I discuss discusses how, to become an artist, you must commit to a life-long process of learning. Here are some time markers for topics in this episode:

00:40 | My recent collection Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020
02:08 | The optimism of the atomic age and our current fixation with dystopia
08:26 | Helping students expand their work past preconceived boundaries of poetic form
11:44 | Ekphrastic poetry and its pitfalls
13:38 | Teaching a course on Self-Publishing at Sheridan College 
17:10 | How literature can help shape the future

Click here to go to the podcast.

My 2020 Shared Universe Pandemic Book Tour

My big cross-country 2020 book tour didn't turn out the way I had planned, but it was an interesting year to say the least, so I put together this little video to commemorate all the places I went to in 2020.

The music in this video is by LASERGNU. Learn more the band here: https://www.lasergnu.com