Launching...Anne DeGrace, Susan Andrews Grace, Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, and a poem of mine in a chapbook

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'Tis the season of the book launch.

A couple of weeks ago Anne DeGrace launched her second novel, Wind Tails, at the Nelson Library. I wasn't able to make the reading, but I did manage to slip in before it began and buy a couple of copies of the book. Read it in about two days, completely engrossed in the lives of the people who inhabit the story. Set in 1977, at a diner that could easily be the one where Ted and I go for lunch sometimes, just outside of Castlegar, the story takes place over the course of a day as various characters—and characters they are—come and go.

Here, Susan Andrews Grace reads from her fourth poetry collection, Love and Tribal Baseball, at Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson last Friday. Love and Tribal Baseball is a homage to baseball and family. Susan says whenever her family gets together the reunion always involves a game of baseball.



"The healer knows healing, and that it does not preclude death" she writes in the prologue. This was fresh in my mind and I thought of it this afternoon while at the funeral of Lynne Shalom, who was in my Nelson writing group and who leaves behind so many family members and friends, and, like Vi Plotnikoff who died almost a year ago, an unfinished novel. There's getting to be quite the writer's group in the Great Beyond...Trish Janz, Vi, now Lynne, and this is just from my small circle.

Last week I was in Victoria to help launch Starting With Bread, a collection of poems from Patrick Lane's Glenairely retreat last March published by that producer of fine chapbooks, Leaf Press.



Here I am receiving my books and examining the cover. Beside me is Ursula Vaira, of Leaf Press, and poet, Mary Ann Moore.



Patrick talked about the retreats and the poetry that gets written at them, and introduced the two chapbooks being launched that night, the other one, Sparrows On Snow, from poets in last November's group.



Five of the fifteen poets in Starting With Bread were there and read from the book.

Edmonton poet, Diane Buchanan, began our set.



Mary Ann Moore



Rhonda Ganz



Pat Smekal (Pat frequently reads at Nanaimo's WordStorm, hence the link)



Me



It was so good to see my fellow scribes and to hear their poems again as well as those of the poets who read from Sparrows On Snow. And it was also good to see old Kootenay friends, Judy Smith and Roger Cristofoli, at the reading.

Next reading event will be this coming Friday, November 23, Oxygen Art Centre, 7:30 PM, when Eileen Delehanty Pearkes launches her memoir of her mother and Alzheimer's disease, The Glass Seed. I see, while locating links, that the Montreal Gazette gives The Glass Seed a nice review! AND, she talks about the book on U-Tube. Way to go, Eileen!

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