I call this blog A Poet’s Nanaimo as I live in a city full of poets and poetry events. In May, my partner Sarah Clark and I will have lived in Nanaimo for twenty years. We’ve made a lot of friends during the years and taken part in many literary events including some organized by the four poet laureates we’ve had during that time.

In 2023, MJ Burrows, Marlene Dean and I published chapbooks of poetry through house of appleton, Sarah’s imprint. We really missed doing that last year so this year, we’re doing it again. MJ, Marlene and I met in the Writing Life women’s circle I lead and some of the poems got started when we were writing together.

MJ’s chapbook is What You Left Behind, dedicated to her late mother Evelyn. Marlene’s is Menagerie, all about her love of animals, with drawings by her sister-in-law Christine Dean. My chapbook is Modern Words for Beauty, named for a poem I wrote some time ago.  The dress on the cover, designed by Sarah, was inspired by that poem.

Other poems in my chapbook are more recent such as “Night Work on 10^th Street.” When I saw the sign on the road on the way to the grocery store, I thought it would make a great name for a rock band or a poem. I’ll include it below.

We three poets along with our publisher, Sarah Clark of house of appleton, and Nanaimo’s current poet laureate, Neil Surkan, will launch our chapbooks on Sunday, April 27 at 2 p.m. at Bethlehem Centre in Nanaimo. We’ll be in a building called Shepherd Hall where I launched my full-length book of poetry, Fishing for Mermaids, and more recently, lead writing circles called Writing for the Love of It.

Here’s the link to further information about the launch and about the books which can be ordered through house of appleton.

It’s a pleasure to take poems out into the world to be shared with others. Very different from the introspective nature of writing the poems and I love both aspects: the inner journey and the outer celebration.

And I don’t want to forget the time of rest. Marie Metaphor, who just finished her term as poet laureate of Victoria, reminded me of that in her recent social media post:

In some ways, I feel like I’m sitting out poetry month this year (at least in a public sense), but integration, rest and reflection are a part of the artistic process.
I just wanted to say: Hello, loves. I’m still here. Still a poet. Still a performer. Just resting (for now).

Introspection, celebration, integration, reflection and rest. Happy Poetry Month!

 Night Work on 10^th Street

The road sign reads: Night work on 10^th Street.
Once I’ve been to the grocery store, it’s unlikely
I’ll be out after dark. Rather, I’ll be home in bed,
not working, nothing, noticeably, to fix. Unless,
I wake at midnight; then again at 3 a.m.

I begin to recite lists to distract
my spinning mind: Beatles’ songs,
girls’ names, bird species, rivers
of the world: Ganges, Muskwa, Meander.

What of my own mending? In the quiet, the cat
padding down the hall, shall I give myself credit?
Be grateful? Forgive myself?

My night work, intense. My own, solitary repair.

Mary Ann Moore

As we approach World Poetry Day on March 21^st and Poetry Month in April, I have a few writing circles coming up with a focus on reading and writing poems. Maybe you’d like to join me on Zoom or in person in Nanaimo? (You’ll find info below about a one-day writing circle on March 21 in Nanaimo and half day women’s writing circles on March 6 on Zoom and April 2 in Nanaimo.)

I decided to go with “make” in the title of two of the writing circles as the word “poem” in English, going back to the sixteenth century, means “to designate a form of fabrication, a type of composition, a made thing.” Thank you to Edward Hirsch who wrote How to Read a Poem (And Fall in Love with Poetry). I like the notion of a poem being a “made thing.”

If you love poetry and would like to write your own, I’d be pleased if you could join me, and others, to make poems together. You may want to consider your poem making to be an exploration in beauty and form. We won’t be looking at poems to see what they “mean.” We’ll see what poems (by several poets) have to tell us, to let the language show us what’s possible, and to follow nudges for our own poem making which will appear, as if by magic, on the page.

If you’re nervous about poetry, these poem making opportunities are for you as well. A word or a prompt will help you get started and that simple beginning can turn into finding your voice. Experimenting and playing with form can open you to new ideas. Or, there can be no form at all! Let the words tumble onto the page, creating a form of their own as penned by you.

The upcoming writing circles are for those who write in journals, make notes on the corners of paper serviettes, love to read, appreciate being in a community of other writers.

Francis Weller, writer and soul activist, who describes the times we are in now as “the long dark,” says we need three medicines. The first medicine we require for these times is friendship and community. In a writing circle, we create connections to and with one another and become a community in which we are seen and heard.

The second medicine we need for the long dark is imagination

The third medicine we need for the long dark is to remember our deep time ancestral inheritance.

The writing circles offer these medicines, as suggested by Francis Weller, as well as poetry itself. Our ancestral inheritance could be the elders we are related to as well as those who have inspired us for years such as the writers and poets who bring us much wisdom and inspiration.

What is a writing circle like?

Several years ago, a woman called Ine in a writing circle in Guelph, Ontario said: “Mary Ann opens up unknown territories in our soul. Then, in her gentle way, tells us that we’re special and creative.” It’s still true. Perhaps those “unknown territories” were known in the past and haven’t been visited in awhile.

In a writing circle, we follow writing invitations which could be in the form of a question or a particular poem to inspire our own words. Sharing isn’t mandatory. The responses we give to someone reading aloud are to echo back something that resonated with us. Comments are meant to encourage rather than critique. All the writing is meant to have you be in touch with what matters to you. Along the way, there can be new discoveries, fresh insight, or simply an acknowledgement of the way things are.

The very act of making offers something new in the world. A “newness gets added to the universe in the process of the piece itself becoming” as Jan Phillips says in “The Artist’s Creed.”

Who am I?

In case you haven’t worked with me before, I’m Mary Ann Moore, a poet, writer and writing mentor who has been leading writing circles since 1997. I’ve also been writing for a long time: poetry, personal essays, writing guides, book reviews, a blog. My new chapbook of poetry, Modern Words for Beauty, will be published in April 2025.

Here are the dates and descriptions of the upcoming writing circles:

Writing for the Love of It, a one-day writing circle
open to everyone
at Bethlehem Centre, Nanaimo
on Friday, March 21, 2025 (World Poetry Day), 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“Writing for the Love of It” is an invitation to embody and create writing as your own spiritual practice. Together, we’ll create a sacred ceremony of writing, sharing and listening to yourself and others. On World Poetry Day, March 21^st, you will be encouraged and enlightened by the gifts of poetry as solace, refuge and as a way to express grief, joy and all that is between. “Poetry gives us a way to inhabit our lives,” poet Marie Howe says. You will discover a variety of ways to share your own way of looking at things and embrace the fullness of the stories from your life. It has been said of Mary Ann Moore’s writing circles that they are places where unsuspecting poets are born.

You can register here: https://bethlehemcentre.com/program/3046/writing-for-the-love-of-it/

 Let’s Make Some Poems!
a women’s writing circle on Zoom wherever you are
on Thursday, March 6, 2025, 10: 30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific time
Fee: $60 payable via e-transfer to creativity@maryannmoore.ca
or by cheque sent to Mary Ann Moore at 76 Colwell Road, Nanaimo, B.C. V9X 1E4

Poetry offers a doorway in and a welcome home. Let’s do some reading, listening, reflecting and the making of some poems together. Don’t worry if you’ve never written a poem: “This isn’t / a contest but the doorway / into thanks, a silence in which / another voice may speak.” (from “Prayer” by Mary Oliver.) That voice may be spirit or your own voice, neglected until now.

Please email me to let me know of your interest or if you have any questions.

Let’s Make Some Poems!
a women’s writing circle at Mary Ann’s home in Nanaimo
on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 1 to 3:30 p.m.
Fee: $60 payable via e-transfer to creativity@maryannmoore.ca
or by cheque sent to Mary Ann Moore at 76 Colwell Road, Nanaimo, B.C. V9X 1E4

Poetry offers a doorway in and a welcome home. Let’s do some reading, listening, reflecting and the making of some poems together. Don’t worry if you’ve never written a poem: “This isn’t / a contest but the doorway / into thanks, a silence in which / another voice may speak.” (from “Prayer” by Mary Oliver.) That voice may be spirit or your own voice, neglected until now.

Please email me to let me know of your interest or if you have any questions.

The cover of The Sacred Heart Motel by Niki Hoi (Metonymy Press, 2024) is delightful. The drawings of domestic scenes appear to be done in oil pastel so have a softened effect with rounded edges.

The poems inside Grace Kwan’s (they/them) debut collection are edgier – whether in the kitchen or the areas particular to a motel – rodents die on sticky traps and kitchen knives are dangerous. In “Room 209,” “what’s a love / story without its ghosts – more than a few bullet / wounds in the floor.”

The contents page is a “directory” that includes “The Moonlight Suite,” “Kitchen: Back Exit,” “Next Door, A Bar,” “Room 209,” “Fire Escape,” and “Front Desk.”

One section, “Love, Honour, & Other Stories,” relates to “Dollar bills rescued / from the laundry, numbers kissed / onto napkins,” and other possible objects found in a motel.

Motels are often seedier than hotels and act as places of in between. In Kwan’s case, as a child, in Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur, they accompanied their parents to their father’s acting jobs and the family would stay in motels or hotels.

As Kwan said in an interview: “It really always felt very temporary and kind of transient, and I found it hard to pinpoint where I really belonged or what I called home.”

Regarding motels, Kwan said: “I really like their grittiness and that kind of sleaziness – almost kind of dirty . . . It’s not a place that you book in advance; it’s something that you stumble upon in the middle of the night.”

Kwan was working as a server at a hotel restaurant when they started putting the collection of poems together. As they say on their website: “[I] became enamoured with the romance of temporary lodgings as sites where abstract ideas of placelessness, unbelonging, and memory could be situated in space.”

In “Glue Trap,” the domestic scene is a dangerous one – especially for mice. And the speaker’s heart “looks like the old yellow house where thin, mouse-bitten / walls separated our part of the basement from another / Chinese family.”

The poem ends:

. . . . And I can’t deny every time someone tells, confesses,
intimates that they love me, I feel a deep grief ripple
out from inside me – the dearths left by mice
with broken heads and songs unfinished.

In “Gender Studies,” the speaker says:

Beauty was once a country
I belonged to now I’m a migrant
placeless and still hovering
On the limn trying on wages
radium and high heels as a second language .

Kwan says of the poem: “I’m putting the experience of migration alongside the experience of queerness and desire and beauty – and experimenting with how they speak to one another.” While Kwan was writing the poem, they were “thinking of that feeling of transience and not belonging and how that translates into the experience of being queer, and the alienation and isolation that that can bring.”

A knife appears in “Yellow Light” as well as sex in the kitchen. The colours are also of a navel orange, blood, and bodies that are black and blue. You can see Heather O’Neil’s surrealism inspired Kwan’s poems such as this one. Novelist O’Neill is a favorite of Kwan’s who also influenced the title of the book.

In the poem, “The Sacred Heart,” the poet muses: “or maybe a heart’s / a mystery novel.” In the end is the heart:

in communion producing something
quantifiably and qualitatively more magic
than flesh and air.

The hopefulness of the “sacred heart” is at the centre of this splendid collection while the motel opens a door to Grace Kwan’s stunning expressions of longing, melancholy, and the precarious nature of displacement and alienation.

Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer based in “Vancouver, British Columbia,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Find them at grckwn.com.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (Biblioasis, 2024) is a fascinating chronology from the zibaldoni kept by the people of Florence in the mid-fourteenth century to record poems in Tuscan, prayers, excerpts from books, songs recipes, lists to the many ways people have kept notebooks of their travels, recipes, and of the natural world.|

Authors’ notebooks are particularly fascinating as are the notebooks of artists like Leonardo da Vinci of which thirteen thousand pages survive.

I was drawn to the chapter “Express yourself” on journaling as self-care and the chapter on bullet journaling as created by Ryder Carroll called “Attention deficit.”

“In search of lost time” refers to journaling as a wellness practice I hadn’t heard of before. The chapter is about notebooks kept by nurses and family members of patients who are in a coma. When they awake, they learn something of what transpired around them and the practice has shown that the risk of PTSD is cut by over 60 percent.

I couldn’t help but make my own list of the many types of notebooks I’ve kept over the years. In some cases, the notebooks are made up of lists.

I have kept notebooks

• on the garden;
• about movies I’ve seen;
• books I would like to read;
• various wines and the occasions on which they were served;
• drafts of book reviews;
• notes made while watching ‘webinars;
• passwords;
• ideas for gifts and gifts given;
• jottings for poems and poem excerpts;
• a work journal (as suggested by Austin Kleon. This goes along with a scrapbook with images and collages);
• a daily journal with (night) dreams, activities and musings;
• a small handmade journal titled “What If”:
• a small notebook of written exchanges between Sarah and me.

For many years (probably 50), I’ve kept notebooks with mini reviews of books I’ve read. Sometimes, they weren’t so mini. These are notebooks separate from the ones in which I draft reviews for publication. While I still have many of those notebooks with mini reviews, I’ve transferred many of the book titles to a computer document. That’s how I know what I read in 2024. Among the books listed below, I reviewed several for The British Columbia Review, Story Circle Book Reviews, and my blog.

Poetry

• Tilling the Darkness by Susan Braley
• A Brief and Endless Sea by Barbara Pelman
• Hologram: An Homage to P.K. Page edited by Yvonne Blomer and DC Reid
• 45 by Frieda Hughes
• Water Forgets Its Own Name by Jude Neal with art by Nichola Jennings
• Midway by Kayla Czaga
• Hazard, Home by Christine Lowther
• The Meaning of Leaving by Kate Rogers
• Anatomy of the World by Celia Meade
• Doom eager by Karl Meade
• Berberitzen by Susan Alexander
• If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb by Lorraine Gane
• The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal edited by James Crews
• The Weight of Survival by Tina Biello
• Cauterized by Laura Apol
• Best Canadian Poetry 25 selected by Aislinn Hunter

Memoir

• George: A Magpie Memoir by Frieda Hughes
• Winter: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
• Permission to Land by Judy LeBlanc
• Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad
• Honeymoon in Purdah by Alison Wearing
• Splinters: another kind of love story by Leslie Jamison
• The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression by Luiz Schwarcz
• Dear Current Occupant by Chelene Knight
• A Life in Pieces, essays by Jo-Ann Wallace
• Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity by Betsy Warland
• The Upstairs Delicatessen on Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, & Eating while Reading by Dwight Garner
• Writing on Empty by Natalie Goldberg
• Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso
• This and That by Emily Carr
• Hunger: A memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
• The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl
• Travel Light, Move Fast by Alexandra Fuller

Mixed Genre

• Absence of Wings by Arleen Pare

Fiction

• The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt
• Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney
• The Wife by Meg Wolitzer
• Writers & Lovers by Lily King
• Father of the Rain by Lily King
• Euphoria by Lily King
• Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King
• We Meant Well by Erum Shazia Hasan
• This is Happiness by Niall Williams
• When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
• Little Fortified Stories by Barbara Black
• The Innocents by Michael Crummey
• The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
• Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt (reread this from several years ago – so well done!)

Crime Fiction

• Blood Test by Jonathan Kellerman
• Bury the Lead by Kate Hilton & Elizabeth Renzetti
• Past Lying: A Karen Pirie novel by Val McDermid
• Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly
• Find You First by Linwood Barclay
• A Minute to Midnight, an Atlee Pine thriller by David Baldacci
• Invisible Dead by Sam Wiebe
• What She Knew by Gilly Macmillan
• The Ghost Orchid by Jonathan Kellerman
• Disappeared by David Fraser
• Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

Non-Fiction

• Held by the Land: A Guide to Indigenous Plants for Wellness by Leigh Joseph
• How to Say Goodbye by Wendy MacNaughton
• Writing by Heart: A Poetry Path to Healing and Self-Discovery by Meredith Heller
• The Art of Flower Therapy by Dina Saalisi
• You the Story by Ruta Sepetys
• The Power of Fun by Catherine Price
• Lytton by Peter Edwards and Kevin Loring
• The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
• The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate and Daniel Mate
• Writing – the sacred art – Beyond the Page to Spiritual Practice by Rami Shapiro and Aaron Shapiro
• Stories Sell by Matthew Dicks
• Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay by Nancy Slonim Aronie

As well as astrological, tarot, palm, and tea leaf readings, much can be said about a person from the list of books they’ve read!

Happy reading in 2024.

After her husband Michael Groden (1947 – 2021) died, Molly Peacock cried for twenty-eight days straight she says in Best Canadian Poetry 2025 in which one of her poems, “Honey Crisp” from her new collection, The Widow’s Crayon Box (W. W. Norton, 2024) appears.

“On the twenty-ninth day, I woke without tears, picked up a blue mechanical pencil, and began to write the poems that would become The Widow’s Crayon Box. ‘Honey Crisp’ literally began when I walked to the refrigerator. There was my husband’s last apple – I couldn’t throw it out.”

Author Photo: Candice Ferreira 

“A mourning widow is still, gray and mauve / A mourning widow, umber, barely moves,” Molly writes in the title poem “The Widow’s Crayon Box.”

The eight child-colors of Crayola boxes
are far too basic and behaved – I feel
the one-fifty-two emotional shades:
a rose one fleurs before a peach one fades.
Scarlet, orchid, cerise umbrellas shield
me from my own tears.
                                          Then I yield.

(The colours not in italics are of past or present Crayola crayons.

Each section in the sixteen-part sonnet sequence, leads with a phrase or a complete line from the previous sonnet so that part 2 begins: “I yield to a turquoise sky.” It’s a very satisfying structure and helps to illustrate this widow’s ongoingness through the many colours of emotions, difficult as well as those that are surprising.

Some quirky humour emerges as the speaker remembers and misses her late husband, as well as with the poignancy of practicalities.

Getting rid of your clothes? Pure fantasy.
I pluck out thirty-eight pairs of socks and lay
them on the table – stripes and checks, a combo
of Crayola colors: “mango-tango,”
“radical red,” “purple heart,” and “shadow,”
once paired with Asics, now part of your myth.

The poem ends with:

raw magic below the cloud’s scrim (her/him)
casting a shadowlet of knowing
across a window: still, gray and mauve. Morning.

(The cross-out of “him” is intentional. Asics are a brand of running/walking shoes.)

The book is in four movements beginning with “After.” Part Two is “Before” with poems about hospitalization such as “Notes from Sick Rooms.” The poem takes its title from Julia Prinsep Stephen’s Notes from Sick Rooms, 1883. There are quotes from her daughter Virginia Woolf as well, particularly her work On Being Ill, 1930.

The speaker in the poem finds “love and illness mixed” to be an irritating challenge and remembers, besides caring for her husband, her sister “Born ill, a preemie after the War . . .
As her husband’s primary caregiver, the speaker says:

. . . and at 7pm I’d love-hate you most,
the exact time I had to deliver
dinner on your drug trial – timing those roast
fucking parsnips . . . that was the love-cleaver.
A caregiver really is a mother.

And at the beginning of the next section:

A caregiver really is a mother.
How exhausting it is to mix the roles up.
Couldn’t I ever just be a lover?

Molly is so honest in her poems about the resentment caregivers feel but rarely mention. In “A Tiny Mental Flash on a Red Footstool,” the resentment is reversed.

My energized posture has grown to annoy him.
Caregiving comes to this.

While masturbation is “the widow’s sex” as Molly writes in “The Widow’s Crayon Box,” in “Sex After Seventy,” there may be some literal closet cleaning going on as well as the metaphoric closet of memory. Here are the last three lines:

as a long surprise of a spring afternoon arrived
through the threshold of that closet
on a spare bed we’d been saving all our lives.

Part Three, “When” has poems such as “Deciding to End Your Life, You Thank Me” which is about MAID: Medical Assistance in Dying. Another poem, “The Next World is One of Ideas,” also references MAID. Here are the last lines:

Have you received thoughts
And wondered why they’ve not
Occurred to you before?

They could be his

In “My Next Husband is Solitude,” the speaker doesn’t plan on another husband following the death of her current one.

What if you let solitude be next for me,
your ghost on a bench overlooking
my blue austerity.

In Part Four, “Afterglow,” in a poem titled “The Afterglow,” the speaker says:

Now I live in the afterglow
Purple and peach streaks
Behind the near-night clouds.

The collection ends with “Honey Crisp” in which the speaker reflects on “that man hewed to his routines: / an apple for lunch every day” as she speaks to the apple “almost a year old” that becomes “a red angel.”
The poem begins “Hello wizenface” and ends:

Hello soft wrinkled
face in my palms.

Molly and Michael were married for twenty-eight years, beginning as high school sweethearts who broke up due to the distance between their two colleges. Two decades later, they reconnected, each having been married to other people – marrying them in the same year and divorcing them in the same year (as one another).

Michael became an internationally known James Joyce scholar and distinguished professor of English at Western University. “Over the years, his work inspired me to research and write two biographies as well as my poetry, and my creative life inspired him to write a memoir as well as pursue his scholarship. Together we were a team in every way, including sports – the badminton Fred and Ginger of our gym,” Molly wrote in an opinion piece for The Globe and Mail (November 16, 2024).

In the opinion piece, “The Virtues of Losing It,” Molly writes about “losing it” with anger at a neighbour who blew a fuse while vacuuming and at a bank manager’s instructions. Poor “bewildered” kid at the farmers’ market who couldn’t make change at whom Molly “outright yelled”!

She rarely loses it now, three-and-a half years into widowhood. Nowadays, she finds herself “very much connected to the 16-year-old who met my late husband.”

“And really, rather than losing it, I lost him – and to my surprise found a younger self that I’d abandoned.” Molly tends to have a crowded schedule that she “mostly” thrives on. And as she says of calmer moments, luxuriating “in bed with a morning tea, my weekly sonnet practice turned into a whole book of poetry.”

The Widow’s Crayon Box is a powerful and passionate expression of grief and the many aspects of it. Molly Peacock says she has found a “resting calm” she never thought she’d achieve on her own without her husband