When I saw on Facebook that my poet, writer and writing mentor friend Susan Olding keeps a running list of books she’s read, I figured I could admit that I do the same. She categorized her 2020 reading list and has been posting the lists separately.  Thank you for the inspiration Susan! Susan credits poet and professor Tanis MacDonald with her inspiration – a poet I haven’t seen since my Toronto days but I’m glad we remain connected through various poetic threads.

Last year, I was happy to support local bookstores including Windowseat Books in Nanaimo; Fireside Books in Parksville; and Salamander Books in Ladysmith. There are several more to support including Well Read Books in Nanaimo (where I donated books) and when it’s okay to travel out of our area again, it will be worth the trip north and south to check out independent bookstores.

Sarah ordered books from Russell Books in Victoria and it is possible to order online from other independent bookstores. In some cases, you can order directly from the publisher such as House of Anansi where I ordered their Heartfelt-Reads Bundle including Emily Urquhart’s memoir which I’ve noted below in the “memoir” category.

I was glad to continue to support fellow writers and publishers through several reviews I wrote. You’ll find the links below.

And there was our local library open again following the spring closure so we could request books online or have a gaze along the one aisle of books that are available.

I usually have a few books on the go at the same time as I read different things at different times of the day. Poetry is usually for the morning. While I continue to read individual poems, these are […]

You may think that a book entitled Haiku in Canada would be a very thick one. There’s a lot of territory to cover going back to the 1940s when haiku was written by Japanese people forced to live in internment camps in Canada during the second world war.

But haiku is short, remember?  English-language haiku are usually fewer than 17 syllables, written on three horizontal lines. As Terry Ann Carter says in her new book, Haiku in Canada (Ekstasis Editions, 2020): “In Japanese, haiku consists of 17 morae or on, “sound beats written vertically.”

In her introduction to the book, Terry Ann says: “A haiku attempts to capture the ‘aha moment’ – the moment, not the syllables, is what matters most.” Haiku in Canada is full of those illuminating “aha moments.”

As Stephen Addiss said in his book, The Art of Haiku (Shambhala, 2012), “Haiku can find an inner truth from an outward phenomenon, and ultimately use words to go beyond words.”

“Another definition of haiku is ‘one-breath poetry,’ “ Terry Ann says.

Terry Ann has done a masterful job with her book as she combines “one breath poetry” with the organizational skills and the attention to detail needed to gather names and dates; book titles for the reference section; lists of conferences and haiku websites. And she weaves her own reminiscences of her life in haiku into this tribute to Haiku in Canada.

I remember writing haiku more than fifteen years ago when Sarah and I still lived in Guelph, Ontario.  The Arboretum at the University of Guelph featured several gardens including the Japanese Garden. It’s various elements such as the pathway to the teahouse, the salutation gateway, stepping stones, a reflecting pool, the kenninji-gaki bamboo fence and the […]

I have a daily morning practice of sitting at a table in front of my bedroom window. I greet all my guides including the mountain known as the Grandmother of All Surrounding Mountains to the Snuneymuxw First Nation on whose unceded land I live. I write my dreams in a journal and continue writing memories that could become a personal essay or a series of poems. I’ve realized that while my morning practice isn’t meant to “accomplish” anything, that can happen as I write a bit each day. I’ve done that with reading books of poetry too, reading a few poems a day until I’ve completed the collection. One of them was To the Wren: Collected & New Poems, 1991-2019 by the late Jane Mead which is almost 600 pages long.

Eric Maisel, a creativity coach in California, has a new book entitled The Power of Daily Practice (New World Library, 2020). Eric has written more than fifty books and one of them, A Writer’s San Francisco (New World Library, 2006), prompted me to name this blog “A Poet’s Nanaimo.” (I’ve been following his work for about twenty years!)

Eric accomplishes a lot and I’m getting an idea as to how he does it by treating each day as a series of daily practices. He says daily practice “is as much about paying attention to your life purpose choices as it is about getting something done.”

Thinking in those terms, chores and tasks such as grocery shopping take on new meaning. If one of my daily practices is to tend to my body with healthy food and exercise, then choosing food for the week is tending to that practice.

A daily practice as Eric describes it “is the […]

Nanaimo has an abundance of writers including poets, spoken word performers, novelists, short story writers, humorists, bloggers, storytellers, historians, and journalists. Among the novelists and short story writers is Carol Windley, an award-winning, Vancouver Island-born writer.

Carol has two story collections including Home Schooling, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. An earlier novel is Breathing Under Water and her latest, published this year by HarperCollins, is Midnight Train to Prague.

Carol was born in Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island and her brother Steve Guppy was born in Nanaimo. He is also a writer and as Carol describes him: “a wonderful poet and an accomplished short story writer, novelist, and former creative writing prof at VIU [Vancouver Island University].” Steve’s wife Nelly Kazenbroot is a poet and has published books for children.

Two writers in the family “was probably more than enough,” Carol told me when I asked her lots of questions about the writing of her new novel. She remembers when she and Steve were children: “When Steve and I were about six and ten we’d write stories and then ask Mom to pick the one she liked best. Wisely, she said she liked both stories and couldn’t decide.”

Robert Windley, Carol’s husband, took the lovely photograph of her. They met in Nanaimo and have lived in various places on the island before settling her Nanaimo. They have a daughter, Tara.

Writing Practice

I asked Carol about her writing practice and routine and wondered if she is one who writes first and does research later or the reverse? She said: “I love the early, quiet hours of the day. If I can, I get up at about five, […]

Mary Pipher, a “baby boomer” born in 1947, wrote Writing to Change The World, a book I continue to dip into. Turns out, I was born in 1947 too. Mary was born in the Missouri Ozarks in the United States and I was born in North Bay, Ontario, Canada.

Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age (Bloomsbury, 2019) is Mary’s latest book and is for women transitioning from middle age to old age. There can be a tendency to think about what she didn’t cover when it comes to women aging but the book has been written as if seamlessly, blending Mary’s own story with the stories of the women she interviewed and with some facts, figures and pertinent quotes from poets and writers. And if your story is missing, I say, it’s time to write it!

The focus of the book is on women, who like Mary “are on the cusp of change.” She turned seventy when she was writing the book. “Women in their sixties and early seventies are crossing a border and everything interesting happens at borders,” she writes.

Women were interviewed from all over the United States “from many different educational, economic, and cultural backgrounds.” They aren’t identified by race. As Mary notes, “Women our age vary by race, cultural background, employment, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and sexual preferences. Likewise, we range from women who are full-time caregivers to those who have no such responsibilities.”

Many women’s stories are told or combined and there is a focus on four women called Willow, Kestrel, Emma and Sylvia.

Mary has learned that she needs constant “reminders to be present and grateful.” That’s the case for most of us and as she has realized: […]