NXNW Interview

I was very fortunate recently to be interviewed (along with my colleague and friend Dr. Patricia Gabriel) by Sheryl MacKay for CBC's North by Northwest.

The interview focused on a research project we have been working on for the last three years, which looks at if and how poetry can be used to enhance physician empathy around the diagnosis and treatment of depression.

You can stream the interview here (Patricia and my part starts at 15:50).

Thanks to Sheryl for giving us this platform, and to everyone involved in the project for making it happen.

Surrey Poet Laureate Call for Applications - Due June 30th!

Surrey is looking to hire their first Poet Laureate. Hurrah! The deadline is June 30, and all the details can be found on the poster below (click to enlarge), or if you click RIGHT HERE.

I want a 10% finder's fee if you get the gig... Good luck!

July Dead Poets Lineup Announced!

The next Dead Poets Reading Series event will take place at the Vancouver Public Library's Central Branch, Alice MacKay room, on July 12th, 2015, from 3-5 PM.

The lineup:

ee cummings (1894-1962), read by DN Simmers
Lauris Edmond (1924 - 2000), read by Christine Hayvice
John Keats (1795 - 1821), read by Matthew Henley
Robert Lowell (1917 - 1977), read by Christopher Levenson
PK Page (1916 - 2010), read by Ruth Daniell

Attendance is free. For more info, visit our website.

I hope to see you there!

what a teeming fragment of minutiae, and yet crucial minutiae

Time made wastrels of us all, did it not, with its gaunt cheeks and its tombly reverberations and its admonishing glances with bony fingers. Bony fingers pointed as if in admonishment, as if to say, "I admonish you to recall your own eventual nascent death, which being on its way is forthcoming. Forthcoming, mortal coil, and don't think its ghastly pall won't settle on your furrowed brow, pronto, once I select your fated number from my very dusty book with the selfsame bony finger with which I'm pointing at you now, you vanity of vanities, you luster, you shirker of duties as you shuffle after your worldly pleasured centers."

That was some good stuff, if only he could remember it through the rest of his stroll and the coming storm, to scrawl in a passionate hand in his yellow pad. He thought with longing ardor of his blank yellow pad, he thought. He thought with longing ardor of his blank yellow pad on which, this selfsame day, his fame would be wrought, no, on which, this selfsame day, the first meager scrawlings which would presage his nascent burgeoning fame would be wrought, or rather writ, and someday someone would dig up his yellow pad and virtually cry eureka when they realized what a teeming fragment of minutiae, and yet crucial minutiae, had been found, and wouldn't all kinds of literary women in short black jackets want to meet him then!

In the future he must always remember to bring his pad everywhere.

- George Saunders, from his short story "The Falls". You can read the whole thing here.