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Today I’m on my way to Saskatchewan to participate in a Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium. Anticipating my departure, I recalled several poetry landmark moments in my life, leading up to this one. As a child I loved Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old Father William” so much I memorized it with no one telling me to…

“Spectacular!” “Inspiring!” Two words people used to describe my keynote speech at CANSCAIP’s Packaging Your Imagination conference last month. Pretty gratifying feedback! You missed it? Fear not! I’m going to post the whole speech here at “Turning the Pages.” “Sock Fluff” was my introduction to Loris Lesynski, back in the early 90s, before it was…

As promised during the first week of December – the second installment of my Packaging Your Imagination keynote . . . Matilda Martin and Edna Bauman, Mam and Lucinda and me – my first time quilting with the women. Noisy greetings as we settle in around the quilt frame, then silence as each begins. Only…

If you’ve missed Parts 1 & 2 of the keynote I delivered at Packaging Your Imagination last fall, you might want to go back to my earlier posts and start reading it from the beginning. If you’re ready for Part 3, read on! That’s an as yet untitled poem by Watchen Johnson Babalola, a Liberian…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… Up on Ipswich Road a girl my age, not a servant, boards with Doctor Griggs. Uncle Ingersoll says the girl’s so quiet you can hear snowflakes falling ‘pon her cheek. “Elizabeth,” I call when I pass her on the road…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… That was “After English Class” from Hey World, Here I Am! by Jean Little. In 1987, I had the welcome opportunity to travel with Jean in England, when the Canadian Children’s Book Centre organized an exchange of Canadian and British…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… My son is in the bathroom shaving the water runs. I hear the scrape across his upper lip, the rinse, the tap three times on the side of the sink which makes me wonder if this is some primordial or…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… I feel like the ground in winter, Hard, cold, dark, dead, unyielding. Then hope pokes through me Like a crocus. This poem by Jean Little called simply “Surprise” expresses how I feel when a story isn’t working. “I feel like…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… I hope everyone here knows how Grandpa took Joseph’s blanket and with his scissors and his needle turned Joseph’s worn out blanket into a wonderful . . . jacket. And how through the years it became a vest, a tie,…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… I would never write another poem if only I could show you in a few perfect lines what the touch of your fingers on my aging cheek means That’s “Poem for Sonia” from Hold the Rain in Your Hands: Poems…

This excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011 will make most sense to you if you’ve read Part 9 of “An Intimate Examination of Sock Fluff”… Bring me back something interesting, Gran whispers as I head off to the beach. If I could, I would bring you the plick…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… One of the greatest pleasures I know, while driving, is watching my odometer in anticipation of a symmetrical reading. I find beauty in numbers like 010 010 and 088 880. Even 135 351 is lovely, or 075 075. Sometimes I’ll…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… All the bits of sock fluff I’ve inspected so far have come from socks worn in the second half of my life. I’m now going to pull out a few bits of fluff from the first half of my life.…

Since the two Sock Fluff posts straddling this one address some of my reading pleasures when I was growing up, I thought it would be fun to post a photo of me taken during that period of my life. Here I am with my dad. I blogged about him in the month of his birthday…

The next excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… Here’s one more bit of ‘sock fluff’, from my youth. Feel free to join me if you know it. Don’t you just love the rhythm, the language, the passion, and the innuendo in Part 1 of “The Highwayman” by Alfred…

The last excerpt from my PYI keynote in a series that started in December 2011… I rather like it that the last installment of this ‘spectacular’ and ‘inspiring’ Packaging Your Imagination’ keynote is landing at the start of the new year. I hope it will inspire you in whatever your undertakings may be this year……

If you enjoyed any of the instalments of “An Intimate Examination of Sock Fluff” posted over the past 14 months and would like to read it in its entirety, you can find all the pieces of it by selecting Speeches in the Blog Categories or by entering Sock Fluff (or even just ‘fluff’) in the…

When I did the keynote address at CANSCAIP’s Packaging Your Imagination conference a few years ago, I included in my talk a number of poems that have been favourites at different times in my life. Here’s one that didn’t make it into “An Intimate Examination of Sock Fluff”. I think it came to mind recently…

Poetry is not a big part of my reading life, but that’s not to say it hasn’t been important – as evidenced in “An Intimate Examination of Sock Fluff”, a keynote I delivered at a conference a few years ago. In 2015 Brick Books celebrates 40 years of publishing poetry in Canada with what promises…