Please join us. #hamont

These came and I wasn't quite expecting them yet and it's a small oddity of the writing life that a stranger will come to your door and hand you what you've been working on for years. Here they are among some of their influences, I think they're starting to feel at home with me.

My thanks to On Creative Writing for the chance to talk about the writing process & software that writes for us & other matters.

Some years require a lot of lanterns.

Found some old papers and there was a Phill Hall line I'd written out to hang over my writing table.

Hey, would you like to support Kirby's stellar small press, which nourishes writers and makes beautiful books, and also receive their chapbook in which I wrote about how literature is a miraculous and double-edged medium?

Dear people, my new book of essays is here 🧡! In The Field comes out in October, but you can pre-order it from Palimpsest Press now if you like: palimpsestpress.ca/books/in-the.... You can also make a purchase request at your local library and read it that way.

In this essay I follow the route of Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum from Amsterdam to Westerbork, and I'm grateful to TNQ for including it in their summer issue. One would like to be a balm on many wounds, are Hillesum's journal's near-last words. Please read her any chance you get.

Thank you TNQ - & dear reader, I wrote about the remarkable Etty Hillesum.

When summer came, the reflective driveway marker was no longer lonesome in a white windswept vastness.

However they pull these pigments out of the soil makes each of them a genius.

Hello to the Summer issue of BRICK 💙 & thanks to the editors for including my essay Dwaallichtjes (little-wandering-lights) ✨.

Wrote this poem for the Skeleton Press issue on 'Gatherings' based on the conversation at a community Iftar in March. My thanks to all who attended 💚.

Upgraded the bike to gold duct tape ✨.

'Before you tell the story, you have to prepare the room for the story.' Zehra Naqvi

Hey #ygk, tell us what the Causeway meant to you & you'll be contributing to a collaborative community poem: www.cityofkingston.ca/arts-culture...

🧡

like something almost being said /

PLEASE SHARE! I am raising funds for a dear friend and member of the literary as well as arts communities. $5 and $10 goes a long way! Reshares even further! We are just $800 from our goal and my hope is bluesky can take us the rest of the way. 💛💛💛 chuffed.org/project/1299...

I've returned from the Escuela de Otoño de Traducción Literaria in Buenos Aires with even deeper appreciation for the people who perform the sensitive transformation of a book from elsewhere into their own language.

Reading...

#ygk You're invited to join us tomorrow - hear poems on dancing to the radio, on what to do with a Phoenix feather, on the sound of slush, on the emotions of trees, on what home means after migration...

In mailboxes soon 🧡...

Dear #ygk, What are your memories of the Causeway when it was still the background music of the city? Please tell us and you'll be contributing to a community poem to commemorate the bridge: cityofkingston.ca/poem

I was writing and then went to reread this Anne-Marie Turza poem because I had a lurking suspicion I was unconsciously drawing from it. And then when I read it I thought, if I am invoking this poem at all then things are going well.

In which I briefly look directly at the sun and ask myself what writing is... thank you for your future reading.

#ygk. You're invited to an afternoon of poetry - I've had the pleasure of mentoring five equally enthusiastic and aesthetically diverse emerging poets, and on Saturday April 19th they'll share their work with you - please join us, details are on the library website: calendar.kfpl.ca/event/

From Aisha Sasha John's new book of poetry 'Total', which I would've read in one absorbed streak if the cafeteria hadn't closed.

All the trees are chandeliers this morning and I hear them tinkling in the wind.

I still have the leaf, it got a little older, but the chapbook's new - please place a preorder if you'd like a copy.

reading... 'All through the party - and we stayed all night - it was as if I was being reminded what art was for. Or not even reminded: as if I was learning what art was for, learning again what art could be, as if for the first time.'

If you're in Toronto, get yourself to Flying Books this evening - wish I could be there.

'Goodmorning, little crocuses, it froze by two degrees, is that why you're so forlorn and inconsolable in that chocolate-sprinkles-box?' Etty Hillesum, March 23 1942

Jessica Hiemstra's Bloodroot is out in the world. A fierce and gorgeous book. As editor I admired how Jessica could take a breath and bravely answer to what a poem was asking for, even when that also meant a revision of the self. The result is so breathtaking - I hope it finds all the readers.

Such a pleasure when the design feels so in tune with the writing - thank you, Kirby & r. kowele. If you'd like to hold this in your hands, please place your preorder here (link in the thread).

#ygk Please join us in a celebration of International Women's Day - I'm honoured to open this evening of art, justice, and community with poetry. calendar.kfpl.ca/event/12978963

Although the former term is still on the reference card, Tri-Art has changed the name of this paint colour and I am pleased. #ygk

#ygk If you live in Kingston, write poetry, and would like me to have a look at your work, you are invited to apply for our spring poetry mentorship program - details here: www.kingstonist.com/news/kfpl-la...

This evening...

#ygk The Skeleton Press is out now and I'm grateful to Qazi Mustabeen Noor for contributing their beautiful translation of Shaheed Quaderi's funny, subversive poem 'The Story Of A Rise And Fall.'