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January 2014 President’s Message
We held our first AGM on Nov 2, 2013 and the illustrious
ever talented Dennis E. Bolen was our keynote speaker.
He was informative, interesting and very welcoming in his
speech. Thank you Dennis!
Our new Board Composition is much the same with
President, Candice James; Vice President, Manolis
Aligizakis; Treasurer. Ken Ader; Secretary, Deborah
Kelly; Director, Janet Kvammen; Director, Renee Saklikar;
and we welcome new Director, Jennifer Ryan.
In 2013 we held a number of workshops: From Scribbles To
Publication; Memoir Writing; Dynamic Presenter; Blue
Pencil Session; Neruda Night Translations; Linking
Inspiration With Imagination; The Real Genius Is In The
Rewrite; Self Publishing / E-Publishing; Art of Memoir
Writing. Each workshop was well attended with the
exception of the Blue Pencil Session, so we will not
offer a blue pencil session in 2014.
We sponsored a number of book launches including
“Shorelines” (Candice James); “The Broken Word” (Alan
Hill); “Royal City Poets 3”; “Children of Air India”
(Renee Saklikar); “Postcards” (Ben Nuttall-Smith); and “A
Moment in Eternity” (Ben Nuttall-Smith).
We started Songwriter Nights in May 2013, running every
Sunday Night at the Heritage Grill backstage room from 7-
9 PM. They seem to be filling a missing niche in New
Westminster, and Enrico Renz and Lawren Nemeth have be
very welcoming hosts of this growing weekly event.
Our Short Story Nights which happen twice a month on a
Wednesday evening hosted by Margo Prentice began in June
2013. This event is a bit sporadic currently but we have
high hopes that it will grow as the songwriter nights
have done.
Poetic Justice and Poetry In The Park have been running
smoothly since 2010 and RCLAS is proud to have them under
our umbrella. Franci Louann and many other hosts
throughout the year are an integral part of these events
and we thank them for their tireless efforts on behalf of
poetry and poets.
Our first WRITE ON contest, which will become annual, was
well received and we were pleased by the quality of
submissions we received. There were three (1st,2nd,3rd
place) winners in each category of Fiction, Non-Fiction,
and Poetry. All 9 winners received cash prizes totally
$525. And the 3 first place winners read at the Lit Fest
New West gala evening event in the Muir Theatre at
Douglas College.
We had a wonderful and successful membership drive in
September with features Fred Wah (Canadian Parliamentary
Poet Laureate); Richard Olafson (Poet, Publisher of PRRB
and Ekstasis Editions) and P.W. Bridgman short story
writer and novelist.
We held our first Christmas Party on December 10th and it
was very well attended and a lot of fun with lots of
schmoozing, networking and an open mic.
We have applied for the following City of New Westminster
grants Awards Night Grant; Workshops Grant; Weekly PJ and
PIP events to give a small honorarium payment to our
features.
We thank the City of New Westminster; The Arts Council
New Westminster; The New Westminster Public Library and
The Heritage Grill for their ongoing support of Royal
City Literary Arts Society and their donations in kind.
Also a big thank you to Janet Kvammen for taking care of
all the media liaison, website updates, and newsletters
for us and thanks to Deb Kelly for taking care of the
growing membership roster and their questions as they
come in. These two ladies are tireless in their efforts
on behalf of RCLAS, and finally, thank you to Ken Ader
for all his time and effort taking videos and uploading
them to our sites for our members to enjoy and to Manolis
Aligizakis for bringing translations into our literary
realm.
We are looking forward to a great 2014 and we are putting
out a call for volunteer(s) to organize 2 schmooze nights
(early spring and late summer) annually for RCLAS.
We would also welcome volunteers for grant writing,
income tax preparation, and volunteer co-ordinator.
In closing I want to say to all our executive, directors,
members and participants, THANK YOU, for making RCLAS so
successful in its first year of operation. You rock! !
Best Regards,
Candice James
President
• Submissions open now
• Deadline March 15,2014
• Winners will be announced April 1st,
2014
Submission Rules:
• 3 categories:
o non-fiction, (1500 words max)
o fiction (1500 words max)
o poetry (1 page single spaced max)
• 1st
prize, 2nd
prize, 3rd
prize,cash prize winners each category
• 3 honourable mentions in each category
• Winners and honourable mentions will be published
• Lit Fest New West Showcase April 26, 2014 featuring the First
Place Winners
• Fees $10 per entry for members, $20 per entry for non-members
• Previously published work will be accepted as long as author
retains copyright. Multiple entries are allowed.
• Submit as a Word Document. Blind judging.
SUBMISSION and Payment OPTION 1:
Pay via Paypal at www.rclas.com
AND email Word Document entries to [email protected]
SUBMISSION and PAYMENT OPTION 2:
Email Word Document entry to [email protected]
(DO NOT mail submission) and mail your cheque or money order to:
Royal City Literary Arts Society
Box 5 - 720 Sixth Street
New Westminster, BC V3L 3C5
For further information Email: [email protected]
Phone: 778-714-1772
RCLAS Write On!
Contest 2014
P.W. Bridgman’s “enthusiasms”: Black Liquor
Dennis E. Bolen & P.W. Bridgman When kraft paper is manufactured, wood fibre must be treated chemically in a digester to remove lignin and other substances in order to turn it into pulp. The chemical agents and the substances they remove combine to form a byproduct, a toxic liquid industrial waste, called “black liquor”. I know this because my father worked for most of his life in the pulp and paper industry. I put in some hot and sweaty summers myself at a pulp mill when I was a student back in the early 1970s. So I have seen black liquor up close too, although I wouldn’t call that black liquor an enthusiasm. But Black Liquor is also the title of a newly released book of poetry by the accomplished British Columbia novelist, Dennis E. Bolen. It is published by Caitlin Press. Bolen is best known for his hard-hitting and gritty fictional writing, beginning with the ground-breaking Stupid Crimes in 1994. He experimented as a youth with poetry and, just this year, he has returned to the medium. For this we can all be grateful. Black Liquor is a tour de force. It is, most emphatically, one of my current enthusiasms. Bolen’s poetry percolates out of apparently unpoetic places. The characters who populate his poems are tough guys working in saw mills and pulp mills. Their rugged lives abound with subject matter that lends itself to poetry, but it takes the insight, imagination and hard-won experience of a Bolen or a Wayman to recognise it. As Bolen says of the eponymous “Ed”—a casualty of an industrial accident—“You said you never went in for that/that sentimental stuff/that makes you soft in the chest …”
Bolen’s poetry is intriguing to read and even more remarkable to read aloud. Black Liquoris best appreciated, though, when it is read aloud by Bolen himself. The language is sharp-edged, angular and percussive. At times it is pared down to short sequences of nouns and verbs, on occasion elegant and spare, more often (as below) unornamented, grim and machine-like in their menace:
Everybody knew somebody
Age of battered pickup Cigarette load ashtray butt Everybody knew Grease coif armpit stain Snagglepick match tooth Beyond only the responsibly parented survive Everybody knew beltless toddler Everybody Unrestrained seat bench projectile to the outskirts of wisdom …
In places, Bolen’s content, delivery and evocations call to mind those of C.R. Avery—sometimes gentle, sometimes brutal and bone-crunchingly direct, always compelling. When I heard him read from Black Liquor recently at a Poetic Justice session in New Westminster, I was taken back immediately to a favourite passage from Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi. Miller’s larger-than-life character, Katsimbalis, is described in that passage in these uncompromising terms: He could galvanize the dead with his talk. It was a sort of devouring process: when he described a place he ate into it, like a goat attacking a carpet. If he described a person, he ate him alive, from head
to toe. Read more of P.W. Bridgman’s Enthusiasms on his website http://pwbridgman.ca/p-w-bridgmans-current-enthusiasms/ Dennis E. Bolen http://dennisbolen.com/
RCLAS WRITER OF THE MONTH
Jonina Kirton
Jonina Kirton is a Métis/Icelandic poet living in New Westminster with her husband/editor. She is an active member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective – West Coast and this year she was honoured to be the Conference Coordinator for the National Indigenous Writers Conference. Her long-standing fascination with her ancestors, death, desire and divination is reflected in her writing which has been described as “dark and delicate”. Her first book of poetry and lyric prose, page as bone – ink as blood, will be released in the Fall of 2015 with Talon Books.
It has been an exciting year as she also received first prize in the Poetry category and two honourable mentions in the Royal City Literary Arts Society’s inaugural Write On Contest 2013. In addition, she was a finalist in the Burnaby Writer’s Contest. Her writing has been featured in, Royal City Poets anthology, Ricepaper’s Asian/Aboriginal issue, The Poetry of Science Chapbook Anthology, V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Anthology, home & away Chapbook Anthology, between earth and sky an international anthology, V6A Enlightening Times UK, Other Tongues: Mixed - Race Women Speak Out Anthology, Pagan Edge, First Nations Drum, Toronto Quarterly, Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, New Breed Magazine, Shine Journal, Joyful!, emerge Simon Fraser University’s Writers Studio Anthology 2007.
Jonina completed the Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio in 2007, attended the Emerging Aboriginal Writers Residency at the Banff Centre in 2008. She continues to take Ingrid Rose’s Writing from the Body several times a year.
Although writing is her first love she is also devoted to her work with women and sacred circles. Her next book will be an exploration of the importance of reclaiming our spirituality and ritual and how this can strengthen our ability to bring forth our visions and goals.
Please visit her at www.sacredcirclesbook.com.
UPCOMING WORKSHOP with Jonina Kirton
February 13, 2013 Tuesday evening 6:30pm to 8:30pm
New Westminster Library, Downstairs.
716 6th Avenue, New Westminster
RSVP [email protected]
Royal City Literary Arts Society and the New Westminster Library will be co-sponsoring Jonina’s workshop page as bone – ink as blood…
“Memory a curious creature; some feel it resides in the mind, but then others offer ideas of cellular or ancestral memory. As writers, we often seek to access memory. At times, we circle the same topic or theme over and over. Somehow we know there is more, but we do not know how to get to it. Through simple breathing techniques and group writing exercises we can find that way in. Suddenly, something that has sat with us for weeks, months and, even in some cases, years finds its way to the page and we are blessed with a piece of writing that is a sacred text. “
Jonina Kirton featured at various RCLAS events in 2013.
Large photo on left: Book launch for Royal City Poet Anthology 2013 in November.
Top Right: Lit Fest New West. Jonina is reading her winning poem.
Centre Right: Burnaby Writers Society finalist
Bottom Right: Poetry in the Park, July 2013.
Jonina will be featuring at
Poetic Justice on January 26. 2014 http://poeticjustice.ca/ai1ec_event/poetic-justice-featuring-alan-hill-jonina-kirtongarry-ward-host-sho-wiley/?instance_id=
invocation © Jonina Kirton
harmonics overtones ripple over waves
of pure potentiality reconstruct history
map space as they enter
the realm of possibility underlying baselines
nested polyrhythms circadian in nature create spirals
surrounded by fractal lights
as the golden spheres of heartfelt prayers soulful desires
and pleasure seeking itself
locate themselves in the epicenter of the cosmos
evenly-spaced
concurrently irrational
highly complex downbeats complement
communicate collaborate pulsate
unorthodox fretting manifests quarter-note triplets
improvised riffs as they enter the shamanic trance dance
afro beats reverberate against the skin of their drum bellies
eyes closed the fingers of the drummers
mark time inside their bodies, heads and hips undulate in unison
gathering energies letting loose the cathartic unyoking of
regressive patterns plunging them into unfurling
desire and pleasure seeking itself
story weaving © Jonina Kirton
“Jacob Grimm reported the following superstition "if, while riding a horse overland, a man should come upon a woman spinning, then that is a very bad sign; he should turn around and take another way." “(Deutsche Mythologie 1835, v3.135)
i
every family has a historian (from the “distaff side” of the family)
she is one third story teller one third publicist one third archivist
shut in the tower her story will be another version of the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin
she must sit spin and with her distaff spindle turn straw truth into gold
ii
“weaving begins with spinning”
so here is a weaving of my own making
in my loom’s shuttle not all threads are golden
More wagon-goddess than miller’s daughter
my loom has severed heads for weights the shuttles stone arrows
crude warlike my warp viscera
I sing songs of carnage make linen from flax protect unborn children
iii
now a crone I wear my story – a seamless robe which includes
the authorized version
what I think I know
and what I would like to know
(threads I weave by day unravel by night)
My loom my voice my story told in this design of my own making
for I have made it to the centre of the labyrinth and out again….
I dream © Jonina Kirton in my story streets will travel noting the migration of birds their perfect unison flying as if one I will walk on the travelling street its movement will take me to where I need to go over water under telephone wires we will move as one pavement fluid black stretching horizon like flying carpet only l - o - n - g - e – r many will travel and some may want to get off, return to the streets of their childhood where mothers in kitchens bake cookies and fathers in easy chairs
smoke pipes read papers
I will buy a navy peacoat (the one I never had but wanted)
but not return to childhood
I dream of “ a room of my own”
where late nights lavender white lace converse
inhabit the sensuous
tension of between
mother - lover poet - wife
this thin veil © Jonina Kirton
when I woke you were gone
in my dreams you were there, feel of you
as familiar to me as if it was yesterday you
last put your cheek
on my cheek
this thin veil of reality - altered in sleep -
allows access to those gone on they beckon
hoping to remind us they are there
rest in peace (not to be assumed)
yet many times we say
they are in a better place now (as if we know)
many have visited me
I can tell you, they have regrets
they do worry about those left behind
- their message is always the same -
they did not know
how much they loved you
loved life on this side of the thin veil
Open Mic Featuring Candice James, Deborah Kelly, Gail van Kalsbeek Una Bruhns, Max Tell with Enrico Renz, Tina. Manolis, Margo Bates, Enrico Renz.
Our First Annual Christmas Open House
Check list
• Self – Directed Open Mic • Meet and Mingle • Munch on delicious goodies • Have fun! • Do it again next year!
RCLAS Christmas Party Thanks for coming out on a cold, snowy night.
We shared an enjoyable evening indeed. Cheers!
Happy New Year 2014 to all our RCLAS members, family and friends. We look forward to working with you in the coming year. We have some great things in store. We are excited to be on this journey together! 2014 needs to be seen! Best, JK
Ashok Bhargava honoured as a Poet Laureate in the Philippines
Ashok Bhargava is a Vancouver based award-winning multilingual poet, speaker and writer.
Recently he was bestowed with the title of Poet Laureate at Rockwell Centre in city of Makati,
Philippines by Axlepin Publishing.
Also, he was honoured with an International Ambassador Poet Award by Historical Pentasi B.
Forum in collaboration with the National Museum of the Philippines and the National Library of
the Philippines also. The award ceremony took place at Marble Hall in metro Manila. He will serve
as a Poet laureate and the international literary and cultural ambassador for a two-year term for
Axlepin and the World Friendship Poetry of Pentasi B Historical Forum.
Ashok has published 4 books of poetry. His poetry has been published in various literary magazines
and anthologies. He has been featured on CBC Radio (Sounds Like Canada and North By
Northwest) and Chanel M TV as well as Word On The Street, explorAsian, University of Fraser
Valley, New Caledonian College, Prince George, Emily Carr GVL and Chapter’s Under The
Cherry Tree.
He had won Poet Ambassador and Lifetime Achievement Awards. Recently he was honoured by
University of British Columbia & GF Trust with a Humanitarian award.
Ashok is the founder of Writers International Network Canada also known as WIN.
Its motto is Discover, Recognize and Inspire.
As a Poet Laureate, Bhargava is to promote poetry as a vehicle of global peace, harmony and
understanding. As an ambassador for the literary arts, he will incorporates poetry into a range of
informal local and international literary activities. You may contact him by
email: [email protected]
COLLEEN CROSS WORKSHOP
High Stakes - Crafting Suspenseful Stories
Tuesday January 28, 2014 6:30pm – 8:30Pm
New Westminster Public Library
716 – 6th Avenue, New Westminster
Pre-register [email protected]
High Stakes - Crafting Suspenseful Stories High stakes and compelling characters hook readers. In this workshop you will learn how to embed tension into every chapter, scene, and sentence. Whether your story is a mystery, romance or science fiction, these techniques will help you keep the stakes high and the pages turning. Colleen Cross is the author of the Katerina Carter Fraud Thriller Series, which includes Exit Strategy and Game Theory. She is currently at work on the third book in the series. Her non-fiction book, Anatomy of a Ponzi: Scams Past and Present, will be released in January 2014. Colleen is also an accountant and an avid traveler. Both of these influence her writing. You can find out more about her books at http://www.colleencross.com/
JANUARY 2014 @ POETIC JUSTICE HAPPY NEW YEAR!
View Calendar and Bios at www.poeticjustice.ca
HERITAGE GRILL, BACK ROOM 3-5 pm Sunday Afternoons—three features and open mic
447 Columbia St, New Westminster, near the Columbia Skytrain Station
CO-FOUNDER & BOOKING MANAGER—Franci Louann [email protected] Website & Facebook Manager, Photographer—Janet Kvammen [email protected]
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/poeticjusticenewwest/
January 5 Sunday 3-5pm
Poetic Justice Featuring Sylvia Taylor/ Kathleen Katon Tonnesen
Host: Deborah Kelly
January 12 Sunday 3-5pm
Poetic Justice Featuring Ashok Bhargava/ Greg Frankson/Bernice Lever/Jude Neale
Host: Alan Hill
January 19 Sunday 3-5pm
Poetic Justice Featuring Fran Bourassa/ Joan Boxall/ Timothy Shay
Host: Dennis E. Bolen
January 26 Sunday 3-5pm
Poetic Justice Featuring Featuring Alan Hill/Jonina Kirton /Garry Ward
Host: Sho Wiley
WEDNESDAY
JANUARY 22, 2014
FEEDBACK & NEWSLETTER SUBMISSIONS
Drop us a line - Janet Kvammen: RCLAS Director/ Newsletter Editor & Design
[email protected] Deborah Kelly
[email protected] Open Call for Submissions - RCLAS Members Only Poems & Stories & Songs are welcome for submission to future issues of Wordplay at work. Themes include Winter, Love and Haiku for the months of February/March. Submissions do not have to fit theme.
To RCLAS Members: Please send us your latest news, feedback on our newsletter and any ideas/suggestions that you may have for us If you would like to do write a feature, review or article for the newsletter send me your ideas – Janet Kvammen
SUBMITTING TO RCLAS
Please send RCLAS your LITERARY EVENTS/BOOK LAUNCHES/CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS/CONTESTS
Submit your literary events/readings/workshops/performances/book launches/call for submissions/contests and we will share them via our newsletter, events listings Facebook and website. Please Submit to RCLAS Director & Events Coordinator, Jennifer Ryan at [email protected] Include all information typed within the body of the email (NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE). Please write up your announcement in the simple format listed below: Title: Date: Time: Location: Contact Person: Email: Website: Description: Sticking to this format will allow us to copy and paste which will help ensure no errors are made in your listing. Please send your announcement as early as possible to give us adequate time to post.
January 2014 Wordplay at work ISSN 2291-4269
RCLAS – Royal City Literary Arts Society Box #5 - 720 – Sixth Street,
New Westminster, BC V3L 3C5
For further information: Phone – 778-714-1772 Email – [email protected]
• Arts Council of New Westminster • Wayne Wright • Chuck Puchmayr • The Heritage Grill • Poetic Justice • Poetry In The Park • Saddlestone International • Silver Bow Publishing
Drop me a line Janet Kvammen, RCLAS Director/ Newsletter Editor & Design
