Thursday, December 21, 2023
Episode 12 - Hari Alluri & Michelle Porter, hosted by Alice Major
We are thrilled to present the latest episode of our podcast. In episode 12, which is also part of our “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. Their words crackle with energy, burn and smoulder, warm and renew, sparking new ways of imagining this powerful element, whose increasing presence in our lives demands reflection and articulation.
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.
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.
Friday, January 20, 2023
Épisode 11 - Marjorie Beaucage & Marie-Andrée Gill
Écoutez un nouvel épisode des midis littéraires du CLC avec la vidéaste activiste Métis Marjorie Beaucage et la poète Innue Marie-Andrée Gill. Dans l’épisode 11, c’est deux écrivaines renommées parlent de leur expérience formative—grandir dans le bois (Beaucage) et passer une adolescence au lac (Gill)—et la façon que ses expériences les ont aidées à développer un sens non seulement pour la justice social, mais aussi la justice pour les éléments.
Marjorie Beaucage est une aînée franco-métisse originaire de Vassar, au sud-est du Manitoba. Le partage est au cœur de la vie et du parcours de cette raconteuse, artiste et éducatrice. Son parcourt professionnel débute comme éducatrice. Marjorie utilise l’art de raconter des histoires pour apporter des changements sociaux. Elle produira plus d’une trentaine d’œuvres cinématographiques pendant plus de trente ans. Son travail donne une voix aux groupes et aux individus marginalisés, aux femmes, aux peuples autochtones, et aux causes environnementales plus particulièrement. En 2021 et 2022 à l’âge de 74 ans, Marjorie commence une marche pour l’eau de inspirée par Josephine Mandamin. La marche Saskatchewan River Water Walk a pour but d’aider la rivière, en péril. Leur parcours de plus d’un mois débute dans les montagnes Rocheuses en Alberta, et se termine à la fourche près de Prince Albert. La marche reprend l’été suivant, tout au long de la rivière Saskatchewan Sud.
Marie-Andrée Gill est autrice, poète, scénariste, animatrice de balados décolonisants (Laisser-nous raconter : l’histoire crochie, Les mots de Joséphine ) de la communauté des Pekuakamiulnuatsh. Elle possède également une maitrise en lettres et enseigne la littérature autochtone à l’université. Elle a publié trois recueils de poésie aux éditions La Peuplade ainsi que dans de nombreux collectifs. Son écriture cotoie l’intime, la relation aux éléments et à la quotidienneté comme guérison ainsi que le rapprochement bienveillant entre les nations.
Friday, December 16, 2022
Episode 10 - Moni Brar & Randy Lundy
Tune in to Episode 10 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast! Randy Lundy and Moni Brar take us deep into their attachments to land and water, the complexities of which—for both poets—stem from childhoods spent in industrial towns. Their poetry shows us, through acts of noticing, how the land and water become kin and teacher.
Moni Brar (she/her) was born in rural India, raised in northern British Columbia, and now gratefully divides her time between the unceded territories of the Treaty 7 signatories and Métis Nation Region 3 (Calgary) and the Syilx Okanagan Nation (Oliver). She has multiple nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, was the winner of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, and has received writing awards and honours from PRISM international, Room Magazine, SAAG, Blood Orange Review, and Subnivean. Her creative work explores the interrelation of place, time and identity in the immigrant experience, diasporic guilt, and religious violence. She has been published in Best Canadian Poetry, The Literary Review of Canada, The New Quarterly, Passages North, Prairie Fire, and Hobart, among others. She is an alum of Tin House and The Banff Centre. She believes art contains the possibility of healing.
Randy Lundy is Cree, Irish, and Norwegian and a member of the Barren Lands First Nation, Brochet, Manitoba, in Treaty 10 territory. He is the author of four award-winning full-length books of poetry, most recently Field Notes for the Self (2020) and Blackbird Song (2018), as well as the chapbook In the Dark Times (2022). Randy grew up in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan and lived for more than twenty years in Treaty 4 territory, also in Saskatchewan. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, where he resides as companion to two female dogs. He is the Editor of the Oskana Poetry & Poetics series at University of Regina Press.
Thursday, March 24, 2022
Épisode 9 - Chloé Savoie-Bernard & Lorrie Jean-Louis
Le 24 mars 2022, écoutez un nouvel épisode des midis littéraires du CLC avec les écrivaines renommées, Chloé Savoie-Bernard et Lorrie Jean-Louis!
Chloé Savoie-Bernard est née à Montréal, où elle vit toujours. Elle a écrit plusieurs recueils de poésie, dont le dernier en lice est Sainte Chloé de l’amour (octobre 2021, Hexagone). Chez Triptyque, elle a publié le recueil de nouvelles Des femmes savantes (Triptyque, 2016) et dirigé le collectif Corps (2018). Mémoire d’encrier a fait paraitre sa première traduction littéraire de l’anglais, Anatomie de ma honte, de Tessa McWatt, en 2021. Après avoir soutenu une thèse sur la littérature féministe au Québec, elle est désormais stagiaire postdoctorale en recherche-création à l’Université Sherbrooke. Elle travaille de surcroit comme éditrice de poésie chez l’Hexagone et comme membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Estuaire.
Née à Montréal, Lorrie Jean-Louis publie en 2020 son premier recueil, La femme cent couleurs qui remporte le prix des Libraires en 2021. Elle a également une maîtrise en littérature. Elle publie son premier album jeunesse, Philibert, le garçon qui pliait son cœur en août 2021. L’album est illustré par Nahid Kazemi. Elle est aussi bibliothécaire. Elle se consacre à l’écriture.
Monday, November 15, 2021
Episode 8 - Jael Richardson & Téa Mutonji
Catch Jael Richardson and Téa Mutonji in conversation on Episode 8 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast!
Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. The Stone Thrower was adapted into a children’s book in 2016 and was shortlisted for a Canadian picture book award. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC’s q. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and serves as the Executive Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutter Child is a dystopian story of courage and resilience and arrives January 2021 with HarperCollins Canada.
Born in Congo-Kinshasa, Téa Mutonji is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty, is the first title from Vivek Shraya’s imprint, VS. Books. It was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019), and won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award (2020) and the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji is the recipient of the Jill Davis Fellowship at NYU.
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Épisode 7 - Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau
Le 17 mars 2021, écoutez un nouvel épisode des midis littéraires du CLC avec l'écrivaine renommée, Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau !
Née en Jamésie, au nord-ouest du Québec, Bordeleau est une artiste multidisciplinaire eeyou qui œuvre depuis 40 ans. En 2006, elle obtient le prix d’excellence en région remis par le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec en plus de la mention de Télé-Québec du prix littéraire de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue pour son recueil de poésie, De rouge et de blanc, et en 2012, elle est lauréate pour le Prix littéraire de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue. Depuis 2007, elle a publié 3 romans, 3 recueils de poésie, un livre de contes, un essai et un livre d’art. Elle obtient le prix de l’artiste de l’année en Abitibi-Témiscamingue remis par le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec en 2020.
Son dernier livre, Ourse bleue – Piciskanâw mask iskwew (2020), est une rétrospective poétique de sa carrière artistique qui inclut des histoires, réflexions et anecdotes. D’après le Musée d’art de Rouyn-Noranda, le recueil, accompagné d’une exposition au MA, Musée d’art en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, « trace le parcours artistique et personnel d’une artiste importante en Abitibi-Témiscamingue et au Canada, et la force considérable qu’elle a su déployer en s’imposant comme femme artiste eeyou dans le milieu culturel. Il est possible de mieux cerner la réalité autochtone telle qu’elle a été vécue au siècle dernier, période de grands bouleversements pour les premiers habitants du territoire ».
Dans cet épisode, Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau nous engage du début avec une lecture passionnée de son recueil percutant paru en 2018, Poésie en marche pour Sindy. Cette collection fait référence à Sindy Ruperhouse, une femme de la Première Nation Abitibiwinni de Pikogan, qui est disparue depuis avril 2014, et [je cite] « exprime [l’indignation de l’auteure] et nous fait part de ses questionnements sur le mépris et la haine dont les femmes autochtones sont l’objet, en particulier, mais également toutes les femmes ». Elle nous emporte par après sur un parcours personnel du deuil jusqu’à l’espoir avec une lecture de son texte, Je te veux vivant, aussi paru en 2018.
Thursday, February 4, 2021
Episode 6 - Louise Bernice Halfe
Listen to Episode 6 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast with Canada's parliamentary poet laureate, Louise Bernice Halfe!
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.”
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Episode 5 - Shannon Webb-Campbell
Tune in to Episode 5 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast with Shannon Webb-Campbell!
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.
Monday, January 11, 2021
Episode 4 - J.R. Carpenter
Don't miss Episode 4 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast!
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.
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Episode 3 - Rebecca Thomas
Check out our final Brown Bag Lunch Podcast of the CLC's Fall 2020 Program with Mi’kmaq writer, performer, and activist Rebecca Thomas!
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.
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
Episode 2 - Canisia Lubrin
Listen to Canisia Lubrin reading “53 Acts of Living,” along with poems from both Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphyxst, in Episode 2 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast.
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.”
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
Episode 1 - Jen Sookfong Lee
clcualberta · CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast - Episode 1 - Jen Sookfong Lee
Tune in to our first ever Brown Bag Lunch Podcast with the celebrated writer, radio host, and podcaster Jen Sookfong Lee!
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, The Shadow List, 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.