Michael Edwards

Hardscrabble: bracken, western hemlock, Bony crust of ocean, tacks of mapsThe greater landscape curates, across The margins of Stanley Park (rob mclennan, from Four Poems for Lunch Poems SFU) It has been an exceptional year, this 2020. Exceptional for the immense grief, suffering and upheaval the global pandemic has brought with it — the travel…

Below are some excerpts from Kyle Flemmer’s introduction to Contemporary Haiku, a folio for periodicities journal. This is follow by a couple of haikus from Rob Taylor and Gary Barwin. Read the whole folio for yourself, which includes visual- and text-based work, here. To my mind, haiku is a living form rooted in and responding…

Rob: Often in Duende, your poems, which are so grounded in “showing” the physical world (as a creative writing instructors would preach) often give way to moments of deep, and plain, “telling”, such as “I know only that the culture / lies about youth to get even for losing it” (p. 66), which seem to be less…

Kain Stewart: All writers revise their work. Some, more than others. What does revision typically look like for you? Kayla Czaga: I revise a lot while I’m writing a first draft. I have to read my new poems out loud to myself many times. I catch a lot of awkward stuff that way. Typically, I look at…

So, 2020 is here. And the new year has me thinking of new ways to expand or grow in my writing practice. For me, the ways that I experience my writing of poetry are largely informed by what I have been reading or what I’m currently reading. And with this, I’m thinking more deeply about…

The BC westcoast winters are largely grey and rain-filled affairs. It’s true that there’s a supreme lack of sunlight and that many are seasonally affected. And the dark times around the winter holidays and Christmas are rife with stressors (financial/social/otherwise). But I’m really interested in thinking about what these dark times sound like. Their ringing,…

A workshop? More like a laboratory – the chemical and psychological kind. I mean traditional woodworking analogies still apply. Dexterity, measured planning and good old-fashioned elbow grease certainly are found there, in a sense. But so are Bunsen burners, Erlenmeyer flasks, possibly even double blinds and placebos. The philosophical, the moral. All these things I…

Last night, Nov. 7, I attended the SFU The Writer’s Studio Reading Series (TWS Reads) at Hood 29 on Main Street in Vancouver, BC. At the event, writers, mostly graduates or current student of SFU’s creative writing program read their work. Some read works-in-progress, others from published texts. (See the evening’s playbill here). As a…

Original post on my other blog: https://fishingfolkart.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/raw-logs-refined/ To the writer, a craftsman, punctuation is the sawdust between thoughts. Punctuation stands as a sign that some hard work has been done. Each sentence is shaped, shaved and chiseled from raw logs, making lots of sawdust. Thoughts and ideas are felled trees that require milling and seasoning.…

https://mysmallpresswritingday.blogspot.com/2019/11/michael-edwards-my-writing-day.html?m=1 rob mclennan of above/ground press posted this feature today. my (small press) writing day. Check it out.