Words Thaw

I'm honoured to have been asked to participate in this year's Words Thaw, a symposium at UVic that is billed as an “intellectual icebreaker at the cusp of spring.”

In addition to attending events all day, I'll be sitting on the panel The Inner Life of Our Words: Writing and the Human Spirit. The copy for the event is:

Is there a relationship between poetry and the inner life? And if there is, what form or direction—or directions—does this relationship take? Can writing and reading be a useful, even insightful tool to probe the spiritual life (or lives) of the self, of another person, of a community, or even of an age? With moderator Andrew Rippin as their “guide,” poets Marita Dachsel, Tim Lilburn, and Jane Munro, each approaching the inner life of our words from a unique perspective, talk about how poetry can be a catalyst to discovering and expressing not only “what we know,” but about “what we want to know.”

I'm hoping to listen more than speak, as I'm very much looking foreword to hearing the others' thoughts on this. It's such a wide subject and I know we're going to approach it in different ways, so it should be an enlightening and exciting conversation.

As a lead up to Words Thaw, Stephanie Harrington recently produced a podcast based on a conversation we had a few weeks ago. She's clearly talented as she took my 30+ minutes of babbling and crafted it into a concise six minute podcast. You can listen to it here.