Residency Activities Winter 2022 | Margaret Christakos, Poet in Residence

How to Connect with Margaret Christakos

1. CONNECT WITH Margaret on Instagram @gcwriterinresidence. She'll be posting writing propositions, works in process, notices about upcoming workshop opportunities and research pathways as she works on several manuscript projects while in residence. 

 

2. REACH OUT to Margaret to arrange a consultation on your own writing in process in any genre. EMAIL her at margaret.christakos@ubc.ca.

 

3. CONSIDER taking part in an onsite collective writing initiative, tentatively called The Keeping Chairs. Watch for emails about possible meet-ups to scheme, design, install and overturn. 

 

4. JOIN US for the upcoming EVENT SERIES: DISTANCE AS A KEEPING (Jan 27, Feb 16, Mar 24)

 

Distance as a Keeping

Distance as a Keeping is a series of three public events presenting guest artists and writers who will perform and read from their work and then take part in a discussion of how they implement a poetics of polyvocality, spaciousness and mutual attention. 

Curated and Hosted by Margaret Christakos
Inaugural Meredith and Peter Quartermain Poet in Residence and 18th Writer in Residence at Green College

“In my own work I am intrigued by how art is a thing we make
from time itself, that proceeds from listening inside time and
composing our own interior polyvocality as well as improvising
social abundance with others, coaxing contours of presence
from absence.”
—MC

 

Event No.1  Thu Jan 27  5-6:30pm
MULTIPLYING INTIMACIES ACROSS A ROOM
Charlie Petch & Janice Jo Lee

Our first evening will be a full-fledged collaborative Zoom performance created for the College by Charlie Petch and Janice Jo Lee, two dynamic and inventive multimodal writer-artists who explore queer composition, gender justice, intimacy, dis/ability, play and replay, and who —living as roommates over the pandemic — will expand and unfold the concrete domestic space they inhabit into a theatre of poetry, song, humour, instruments, projections, and sound. This gathering will explore maximizing the performative and embodying potentials of Zoom. 

 

Event No. 2  Wed Feb 16  5-6:30pm
ASTONISHING STRUCTURES OF LONG TIME
R. Kolewe & Dianne Chisholm

Our second evening will set two very different writers alongside each other. R. Kolewe is a Toronto-based poet whose mammoth long poem The Absence of Zero derives its structure from quantum processes such as the Riemann curvature tensor in four dimensions, radioactive decay algorithms, TS Eliot, Durer, exploring spacetime and memory. Dianne Chisholm, whose feminist scholarship includes Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City and H.D.’s Freudian Poetics, has evolved an immersive photography practice in extreme environments in the Arctic Circle, investigating place-making powers and processes, combining writing and photography to place the reader at the intersection of exposure and perception. We’ll put together these two practices in a discussion about art as intricate, complex spaciousness that requires and repays the fierce momentum of ongoingness. 

 

Event No. 3  Thu Mar 24  5-6:30pm
INCANTATORY RE-COMPOSITION 
Sonnet L’Abbé & Nicole Raziya Fong

On our third evening, two poets will share a poetics of polyvocality and discuss tactics of decolonizing canonical lyric texts. In their collection Sonnet’s Shakespeare, Sonnet L’Abbé uses a mesmerizing process of hyper-overwriting onto Shakespeare’s texts to entirely re/claim for their own uses a radically present subjectivity. L’Abbé has also developed a practice as songwriter and musical performer, and will share some of her songs. The dramatis personae of Nicole Raziya Fong’s operatic OЯACULE includes “the painted woman, the grotesque heroine, the dissociated child…set in indecision”;  Fong’s libretto “interweaves lyric expressions of dreams, theatrical dialogue, songs, and the voices of both chorus and anti-chorus,” potentializing poetry as a stage-space of re-imagination. 

 

Bios

Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Petch was the 2017 Poet of Honour for SpeakNorth national festival, winner of the Golden Beret lifetime achievement in spoken word with The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it's a Queer Slam. Petch is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. They are launching Daughter of Geppetto, a multimedia/dance/music/performance poetry piece with Wind in the Leaves in April 2022, launched their full length poetry collection Why I Was Late with Brick Books which got a "Best of  2021" from The Walrus, and filmed their libretto Medusa’s Children with Opera QTO.  They have been featured on CBC's Q, at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and were long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2021. 

Janice Jo Lee, aka Sing Hey, is a folk-soul singer-songwriter, spoken word poet, actor and playwright of Korean ancestry from Kitchener, on Haldimand Tract treaty territory. On stage she creates looping landscapes with her voice, guitar, trumpet and Korean jangu drum. Lee is a hard femme, queer, radical, comedian, truth-teller and trickster. She is interested in using art to build flourishing communities based in justice and joy. Lee’s work explores gender justice, antiracism, friendship, community, ancestry and the Earth. In Ontario her theatrical work has been produced with Green Light Arts, MT Space, Theatre Passe Muraille, and fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre. Lee has worked as an educator for 8 years facilitating arts, anti-oppression and leadership workshops across Canada.

R. Kolewe was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto. Educated in physics and engineering at the University of Toronto, he pursued a successful career in the software industry for many years. He now lives in Toronto and writes full time. His work has appeared in various online and print magazines, and he has published three collections of poetry, Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Book*hug Press, 2021) as well as several chapbooks.

Dianne Chisholm practices a nomadic, land-based form of photography with an eye to cultivating what Inuit revere as Silatuniq: climate wisdom. She frames images with lyrical prose to draw out and reflect upon the immanent poetics of place-making/-unmaking, and to score the myriad undercurrents of inhabitable change. A Professor Emeritus of English literature, she lives in Edmonton and Canmore, Alberta, summers off-road, down-river and afoot in sub/Arctic Canada, and revisits East Greenland whenever possible. Find her photography at https://diannechisholm.space/ 

Sonnet L’Abbé writes in the intersections between word, race, species, song, gender and place. They are the Tkaronto-born, mixed-race Black, Indo-Caribbean and Québecois·echild of Ghislain (Jason) L’Abbé and Janet (Rayman) L’Abbé, and author of the poetry collections A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, Anima Canadensis, and Sonnet’s Shakespeare. Sonnet’s Shakespeare was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Award and the Raymond Souster Award, and Quill and Quire called it “the most audacious volume of poetry to appear in 2019,” naming it a Book of the Year. In 2021, L’Abbé played their first solo show as a singer-songwriter in The Port Theatre’s Discovery Series. They live on Snuneymuxw territory on Vancouver Island and teach Creative Writing and English at Vancouver Island University.  

Nicole Raziya Fong is a poet and painter living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada. Her work seeks to delimit and reconstruct immaterial ampules of psychic experience, coaxing the incorporeal into inhabiting a more muscular physique. She is the author of OЯACULE (Talonbooks, 2021), PEЯFACT (Talonbooks, 2019), the chapbooks 7 Series, Iterated by Colour (Hiding Press, 2021) and Fargone (Poetry Will Be Made By All, 2014), and has composed visual work for the collaborative chapbook Leguminosae Delusion Athletics with text by Andy Martrich (The Blasted Tree, 2022). Her writing has appeared in various publications including Social TextThe Capilano Review, filling station, the Volta and carte blanche, and has been translated into Swedish and French.