All Write in Sin City

In a special summertime "minisode" of All Write in Sin City, we connect with our friend and poet Kevin Spenst to find out what can happen on a no-holds-barred poetic romp across Canada. When he visited Windsor, he performed at the City of Windsor's birthday celebrations with our Poets Laureate, at the Art Windsor-Essex Gallery, and at Biblioasis bookstore. He was recorded live by Kim Conklin and interviewed by Irene Moore Davis. Kim Conklin and Sarah Jarvis did the editing (Kim did most of the editing - sj).
Kevin Spenst, a Pushcart Poetry nominee, is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse (all with Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), Upend (Frog Hollow Press) and a holm with the Alfred Gustav Press coming out at the end of 2022. In 2019, he was writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa House. His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications including Event, the Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, the Rusty Toque, Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds. He co-organizes the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes a chapbook column in subTerrain magazine, is an occasional co-host with RC Weslowski on Wax Poetic on Co-op Radio, teaches Creative Writing at Vancouver Community College and is the 2022 Poetry Mentor at SFU’s Writers Studio. He lives in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory.
https://kevinspenst.com/about/

Dr. Heidi L.M. Jacobs was born and raised in Edmonton. A graduate of the University of Alberta, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Western University, she is currently a librarian at the University of Windsor as well as an award-winning writer and documentary producer. Her previous books include the novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest Press, 2019), which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020, and 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (with Dale Jacobs, Biblioasis, 2021). She is one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. Her new book, published by Biblioasis, is 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year.
https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/jacobs-heidi-lm/

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer of weird stories and climate change fiction. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Interzone. She won the Sunburst award for short fiction in 2020 for “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest" and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021 for “An Important Failure.” NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. Her latest novel, ARBOREALITY, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. She lives in Windsor.
https://www.stelliform.press/index.php/product/arboreality-by-rebecca-campbell/

Featuring Brittni Brinn:
Brittni Brinn writes science fiction. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing from UWindsor. Her interests include rocks kicked up by the ocean, books from friends, and comfortable sweaters. She lives in a tower and sometimes a cottage with her husband and two cats in Nova Scotia. Her latest book is Where Long Shadows End, third in her series, The Patch Project.
https://brittniinink.wordpress.com/

Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator. He is the author of half a dozen books, and has written opinion pieces and essays for The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus, and many others. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children. On Writing and Failure is his latest book, and it is the latest in a series of essays call the Field Notes published by Biblioasis.
http://www.stephenmarche.com/
https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/marche-stephen/

Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in Longreads, Guernica, and The Walrus, and elsewhere, and her first book was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario. Her new book, Ordinary Wonder Tales, published by Biblioasis, explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine, and reveals the magic in the everyday. “Wonder tales” is the Irish term for fairy tales.
http://emilyurquhart.ca/
https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/non-fiction/memoir/ordinary-wonder-tales/

Blair Austin was born in Michigan. A former prison librarian, he is a graduate
 of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan where he won Hopwood awards for Fiction and Essay. He lives in Massachusetts. Dioramas is his first novel. It won the Dzanc Prize for Fiction in 2021.
https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/dioramas
In a city far in the future, in a society that has come through a great upheaval, retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. urban wolves in the light of an apartment building. A line of mosquitoes in uniforms and regalia, honored as heroes of the last great war.

Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world—the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass.

After a phone call in the middle of the night, Wiggins sets out to visit the Diorama of the Town: an entire, dioramic world, hundreds of miles across, where people are objects of curiosity, taxidermied and posed. All his life, Wiggins has longed to see it. But in the Town, he comes face to face with the diorama’s contradictions. Its legacy of political violence. Its manipulation by those with power and money. And its paper-thin promise of immortality.

In this hybrid novel—part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative—Blair Austin brings us nose to the glass with our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost.

Ben Van Dongen: Born in Windsor, Ben spent many years thinking about writing and becoming an author without doing any of the actual work. Eventually, he figured he should give it a try, and after more time being bad at writing, he managed to write some books he’s proud of. Snow from a Distant Sky is Book Five in his science fiction series, The Synthetic Albatross. Currently the book is available at Biblioasis, or you can order it online.
https://benwltp.wordpress.com/
https://biblioasisbookshop.com/item/2yThqHuKelrII0-XD9yJ0Q

Jade Wallace is a writer from the Niagara fruit belt, currently living just south of the Detroit River and just north of Lake Erie. Wallace’s writing has won the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize and Coastal Shelf’s Funny & Poignant Poetry Contest, placed third in the Ken Belford Poetry Contest, been a finalist for the Wergle Flomp Humour Poetry Prize, and been nominated for The Journey Prize. They are the author of several solo and collaborative chapbooks, the reviews editor for CAROUSEL Magazine, and the co-founder of MA|DE, a collaborative writing entity. Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is their first book.
https://jadewallace.ca/
https://guernicaeditions.com/collections/vendors?q=Jade%20Wallace

Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She was educated at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and the Catholic University of Leuven prior to earning PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands. She now lives in the United States and teaches at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her work has been widely translated and has won multiple awards. Unigwe’s previous publications include the poetry collections Tear Drops and Born in Nigeria, novels The Phoenix, On Black Sisters’ Street, Night Dancer, and The Black Messiah, and the short story collection Better Never than Late, along with numerous other short stories, essays, and works of journalism. She has been widely anthologized and has published works in the New York Times, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the UK Guardian, Wasafiri, and Transition. She teaches at Georgia College, in Milledgeville, Georgia. Chika Unigwe’s highly anticipated new novel, The Middle Daughter, will be released by Dzanc Books in April 2023.
https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/the-middle-daughter

Trigger Warning: Stephanie Heit speaks and writes courageously and frankly about her own mental health issues and treatments, which included ECT shock therapy.

Stephanie Heit is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space. She is a psych system/shock survivor, bipolar, a mad activist, Zoeglossia Fellow, and a member of Olimpias, a disability performance collective. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on Three Fires Confederacy territory and is the author of the poetry collection The Color She Gave Gravity. Her new book, Psych Murders, is a collection of experimental writing. It takes readers inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of mental health care.
https://stephanie-heit.com/books-psych-murders/

Our colleague Irene Moore Davis could not join Kim and Sarah for this episode recording. 

Kate Hargreaves is the author of the poetry collection, Leak, as well as Jammer Star, a roller derby novel for young readers, and Talking Derby, a book of prose vignettes. She holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, where she received the Governor General's Gold Medal in Graduate Studies. Her work has appeared in literary journals across Canada, the US, and the UK. As a book designer for numerous Canadian presses, Hargreaves has received honours from the Alcuin Society for Excellence in Book Design, the CBC Bookie Awards, and the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. She grew up in Amherstburg, Ontario, and lives and works in Windsor. Her latest poetry collection, published by Book*hug Press in October 2022, is Tend.
https://bookhugpress.ca/shop/author/kate-hargreaves/tend-by-kate-hargreaves/

The City of Windsor, through the Poet Laureate & Storytellers Program, is gearing up for the upcoming launch of the fifth book in the City’s South Shore Collections series, In the Middle Space. The South Shore Collection books help capture, preserve and share Windsor’s stories with the community – one of the primary goals of the program.

The book is being published by Windsor’s Black Moss Press, in partnership with the City of Windsor and the University of Windsor’s Editing & Publishing Practicum program. Additional support for the publication comes from the Canada Council for the Arts and Museum Windsor.

Thirteen well-known local authors are featured in the collection. They are: Barry Brodie, Carlinda D’Alimonte, Irene Moore Davis, Peter Hrastovec, Maya Jessop, Dorothy Mahoney, Christopher Lawrence Menard, Mary Ann Mulhern, Rawand Mustafa, André Narbonne, Vanessa Shields, Laurie Smith and Teajai Travis.

You can find the book at https://blackmosspress.com/product/in-the-middle-space/