Thank you to Derek Hanebury, host and MC of Electric Mermaid “live reads” for inviting me to be the feature reader on Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 6 p.m. Pacific. If you’re in Port Alberni, B.C., Char’s Landing at 4815 Argyle Street is the place to go. Otherwise, you can Zoom in to hear the open mic readers that will begin the readings, followed by me reading poems, old and new. Here’s a link to the Char’s Landing website for the Zoom link. Look under “Events.”

The “hybrid” reading event will be recorded so if you can’t attend on the date, it will be on the Char’s Landing You Tube channel following the readings.

And how about writing some poems of your own?

Several years ago (more than twenty), I offered poetry circles called “Just Like Making Soup.” I figured that writing a poem is like following a well-loved recipe. There are guidelines to follow, to which we can add our own special additions, flavours, and surprises to make that soup or poem our own.

While you’re standing at the stove stirring the soup or sitting at the table writing the poem, you are in the moment while memories of having eaten that soup before, with loved ones, arrive like gifts on the page.

One of the “Just Like Making Soup” circles was at Eramosa Eden, a retreat centre on the Eramosa River in Rockwood, Ontario. In more recent years, I’ve been leading writing circles at Bethlehem Centre on Westwood Lake in Nanaimo, B.C. A new one in the works is “Bringing Poems to Life,” a one-day writing circle, on Saturday, March 21, World Poetry Day, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.. We’ll gather to celebrate and discover the many gifts of poetry.

“Bringing poems to life” is to craft new poems as inspired by a memory, an image, someone else’s poem. And the phrase can also mean bringing poems by others into our life so as to appreciate those illuminations of all aspects of life.

“I don’t know if I breathed the poem or the poem breathed me,” Natalie Goldberg writes in “How Poetry Saved My Life,” the opening essay in Top of My Lungs (The Overlook Press, 2002).

Reading French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, helped me to define poetry for myself.

Poetry is the soul creating a ceremony out of an ordinary event.

Whether you are new to the practice or a seasoned poet, reading and writing poetry is a praise practice that can illuminate the sacred in the ordinary. Poems can contain small fictions, arrive as gifts, be surprisingly prescient at times, honour a person, place or event, and always serves as your own way of embracing the richness of life.

I invite you to join me on World Poetry Day, Saturday, March 21, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Bethlehem Centre in Nanaimo.
Here’s the link to a description and to register: Bethlehem Centre. 

I’ve been leading writing circles since 1997 as well as all-day circles and retreats. The writing circles offer a place for voices to be heard. We create a sacred container together with some guidelines so voices, stories and poems can be honoured.

At Bethlehem Centre, we’ll have an opportunity to walk the beautiful grounds for some further contemplation and enjoy some social time at a nourishing lunch prepared for us.

I look forward to these opportunities to share and to write poetry. I hope you can join me!

If my dear old dad was still alive, I would have given him a call on the weekend to tell him The Northlander is back. As Taras Grescoe wrote in his Saturday Globe and Mail opinion piece: “For the first time in 14 years, a passenger train headed for the eastern shores of Ontario’s Lake Nipissing and points north will roll out of Union Station.”

When the inaugural run takes place some time this year, The Northlander will take passengers eight hours and 40 minutes if they travel all the way from Toronto’s Union Station to Timmins where there’s a newly built station. The train service between Toronto and Timmins ended in 2012, two years before my father died. The train will again link the Great Lakes to James Bay. He’d be pleased I think.

“In 1964, the northern part of the line began to cater to tourists with the launch of the Polar Bear Express excursion train, which still runs between Cochrane and Moosonee,” the Globe article says.

I have my own memories of the Polar Bear express as Dad, Bob Moore, worked for the Ontario Northland from the time he was a teenager until he ended up working in public relations for the company before retiring to British Columbia.

Ghost Stories

The train will leave Union Station and go North to
where I’ll see my father who will engineer the
Ontario Northland from Cochrane, the Polar Bear
Express. I’ll visit his home where a woman called
Alice shares his bed.

He will never marry Alice – he’ll wait for Audrey,
citified and proper, a homophobe, which won’t
be apparent to me until some years later.

We pass Moose River Crossing where my father
grew up with eleven siblings though there were more –
a son born to his father’s lover the same year
I was born. Three others after my grandmother died.

In Moosonee, the Anglican chapel has prayer books
in Cree. It will be decades before I go west to Lytton
to learn more about my great uncle, an Anglican
priest, once principal of an Indian Residential School.

On the way south and home, a dining car with white
tablecloths and silver coffee urns. The daily newspaper
available if we want – my own news, I decide at seventeen
not to live with my mother and her third husband.

The thing is, I never attended my parents’ multiple nuptials,
never thought about the train as time, the standing
still of it, the future, the past of it, a porter with white gloves.
A woman saying my dad was on his best behaviour when I came to visit.

The “lover” I refer to was Elizabeth who became my grandfather Ernie’s second wife after my grandmother Nora May died in 1961. Ernie and Elizabeth had three more children together.

Would Dad and I have talked about that situation? There would probably have been some reference to it but mostly he would recall his days working for the Ontario Northland.

Some of what I learned about Dad’s railroad career was from an interview he did with Murray McLauchlan for Murray’s song “Railroad Man” released in 1984.

Dad read my poem “Railroad Man,” a pantoum I wrote, included in my collection Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014). I had written about him sanding the walks at the North Bay engine roundhouse with a repeated line from Murray’s song: “I started with a shovel. I started with a dream.”

After the war, Dad was given a wheelbarrow for his work before progressing on to becoming a fireman and then engineer.

I was a fireman before I became an engineer.
Mother waved a tea towel as the train passed through.
I’d blow the whistle from two miles back.
Everyone knew that Bob Moore was coming into town.

And another poem for Dad, Bob Moore (June 9, 1926 – October 19, 2014), with thanks to Billy Collins who wrote “Litany.”

Happy Hour

You are the engine steaming north,
the soapstone walrus with his tusks,
the tamped-down pipe,
the fishing fly.
You are happy hour at four.

You are not the hand-written letter,
the game of solitaire.

It is possible you are the wooden birdhouse,
the last rose of summer,
but you are not even close
to being an island,
a fir tree,
moss on craggy rocks.

It will interest you to know,
I am the camellia rooted up,
the shiny bits a crow collects.
I am a poem freshly made.

But don’t worry, I’m not the engine steaming north.
You will always be the engine steaming north,
the whistle blowing,
not to mention the pipe
and somehow, happy hour at four.

I’ve found that writing, using different forms, can reveal epiphanies as something new gets revealed through a different lens. Just last week I offered a women’s writing circle online called “Dwell in Possibility.” We explored fiction or re-envisioning in poetry as well as the anaphora and the hermit crab.

Besides following a particular form, I wonder also about crafting and revising a poem and letting it say what it needs to say. Could that be an epiphany?

I remember my late friend poet Richard Osler emailing me some years ago about our love of John’s Fox’s work with writing as healing and our love of Patrick Lane’s teaching which was about the craft of poetry. Richard said he had sought a middle place. Patrick taught us that in crafting and revising the heart of the poem can be found. Perhaps that’s an epiphany.

Do you have any thoughts about epiphany? I find that doing an acrostic of a word can be revealing.
Here’s mine for the word “epiphany”:

Ecstatic
Peering
Into
Potent
Hypnotic
Arrivals –
Near, not
Yonder

Writing from Epiphany

A few years ago I was writing an essay for Freefall magazine on the subject of fiction in poetry. One of the poets I got in touch with on the theme was Tawhida Tanya Evanson, who is a writer and performer, and a Whirling Dervish, who lives in Tiohtia:ke/Montreal. She told me in an email: “I write from epiphany that is then crafted. The result may want to remain on the page or take another art form. I try not to get in the way. Prayer is part of my spiritual practice. Linking the two would entail a much longer conversation about the essence of prayer and the essence of art.”

You’ll find some of Tawhida’s video poems on her website here.

An Unveiling of Reality

I was fascinated to read what the late Lithuania-born poet Czeslaw Milosz said about epiphany.In an anthology of poems he edited, A Book of Luminous Things (Harcourt, 1996), Milosz wrote: “Epiphany is an unveiling of reality. What in Greek was called epipaneia meant the appearance, the arrival, of a divinity among mortals or its recognition under a familiar shape of man or woman. Epiphany thus interrupts the everyday flow of time and enters as one privileged moment when we intuitively grasp a deeper, more essential reality hidden in things or persons. A poem-epiphany tells about one moment-event and this imposes a certain form.”

Can you recall a “privileged moment” when someone appeared in your life to offer something new or something that really celebrated who you are? It could have been a person or another entity. I’m thinking of a social worker, like an angel, calling to tell me the Children’s Aid had a baby for us. This could have been intuitive grasping, an essential reality, and was definitely an interruption in the “everyday flow of time.”

Epiphanies of a Landscape

Also, on the subject of ephiphany, Czeslaw Milosz wrote in A Book of Luminous Things: “Epiphany may also mean a privileged moment in our life among the things of this world, in which they suddenly reveal something we have not noticed until now; and that something is like an intimation of their mysterious, hidden side. In a way poetry is an attempt to break through the density of reality into a zone where the simplest things are again as fresh as if they were being seen by a child.”

I really do love looking at “the things of this world.” So many poets have done this so well. Jane Hirshfield and Lorna Crozier pop immediately into mind.

Milosz gave a couple of examples of Japanese haiku which, he wrote, “are often flashes, or glimpses, and things appear like lightning, or as if in the light of a flare: epiphanies of a landscape.”

Kikaku (1661 – 1707)
Above the boat,
bellies
of wild geese.

Issa (1763 – 1827)

From the bough
floating down river,
insect song.

Notice, in the haiku above, the translations haven’t followed the five, seven, five syllables “rule.”

Terry Ann Carter says in her book, Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir (Ekstasis Editions, 2020): “A haiku attempts to capture the ‘aha moment’ – the moment, not the syllables, is what matters most.”

Whenever Terry Ann composes a haiku about bugs, insects, or small creatures, she says: “I automatically think of the Japanese master poet Kobayashi Issa (1763 – 1827). What a sad life; yet, such beautiful poems about flies, cicadas, snails, frogs, fireflies.”
Keeping in mind “epiphanies of a landscape,” how about you describe what you see outside your window in poems of seventeen syllables or thereabouts.

I mentioned exploring fiction at the beginning of this blog and while we may think we’re “making things up,” it looks to me that we are accessing our own wisdom and insight, an unveiling, as another character perhaps, by opening ourselves to a revisioning of one’s own truth. Perhaps “small fictions,” something poet Eve Joseph has referred to, are like epiphanies helping poets get to an unveiling of truth, when we can accept and surrender to the poem knowing more than we do.

A poem’s truth is not in its accuracy but in its small fictions. What began as a notion of fiction in poetry has become something else, just as happens in the writing of a poem. We start somewhere and end up somewhere else, privileged, one could say, by moments or flashes that interrupt the everyday flow of time.

A Summer Pop-Up women’s writing circle on Zoom: Thursday, June 26
10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific

As writing is a “whole life” practice, helping us in all aspects of our lives, I’ve planned some pop-up women’s writing circles to nourish our writing in community through the summer months. The first is on Thursday, June 26, 2025, from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific Time on Zoom. You’ll find some further info below.

With the theme of “Answering the Call,” I’ve been thinking about a book I read some years ago by Stephen Cope: The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling. Stephen, who was Director of the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living at the time the book was published in 2012, weaves the stories of people he knows and people he’s read about as he writes about dharma. Dharma means, variously, “path,” ”teaching,” or “law.” For the purposes of the book, Stephen says: “It will mean primarily ‘vocation,’ or ‘sacred duty,’ It means, most of all – and in all cases – truth.”

I was particularly drawn to Stephen’s words about Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, an “unconventional nature lover” attempted to develop a writing career in New York’s literary world “in the conventional way.” The “attempt fell flat” and after thirteen months in New York which had begun in May of 1843, Thoreau returned to Concord, Massachusetts – “to his woods, to his pond, to his father’s pencil factory, and to Emerson’s house.” As Thoreau wrote when arriving home: “Be humbly who you are.”
“Thoreau now saw clearly that the journey of a writer was not the outer journey to New York, but the inner journey to his own voice. He was going to be himself, and to hell with the naysayers . . . Walden Pond was where Henry David Thoreau would intentionally conduct this inner journey to himself.”

Victoria poet Eve Joseph says it too: “Writing is a way back to the self.” I agree with voices from the distant past as well as those writing today.

Wishing all a Happy Summer Solstice,
Mary Ann

Writing Life women’s circle with Mary Ann Moore
Nourish Yourself. Honour Your Voice. Write Your Stories.
Theme: Answering the Call
Thursday, June 26, 2025, 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific Time on Zoom

In the Writing Life circle, with its guidelines and structure, we create a sense of safety for the memories that may be evoked by a poem, a phrase, a particular topic. Together, we honour the reflections that may be joy-filled or filled with grief as we’ve been called to do. Memories and insights are from a nonlinear realm and the writing and integrating of them can be non-chronological too. The big stories can be told in small, compassionate steps. There are all sorts of ways of being called: by our name, to the world at this time, to a particular place, and of course, there is the call to write.

And a life is as natural as a leaf.
That’s what we’re looking for: not the end of a thing but the shape of it.
Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life without obliterating (getting over) a single
instant of it.

From “The Cure” by Albert Huffstickler

Fee: $60 CND 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
A PayPal invoice can be sent to those outside Canada.
Payment will confirm your space in the circle.

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