Saturday, February 10, 2024
1–9 pm PST (4 pm–12 am EST)
Zoom Webinar
Tickets by Donation ($40 suggested)

The Capilano Review invites you to join us for our first annual virtual benefit. As Good As Rocks brings together 24 meteoric writers for an 8-hour journey of readings that is sure to delight, inspire, and leave you floored. From nap-hour to nightcap, readers will share poetry, prose, diary entries, monologues, and many other solid but no less elliptical insights into how this work of writing — any of it — finds its ground.

Join us for readings and presentations by: 

Jordan Abel  |  Andrea Actis  |  Hope Anderson  |  bill bissett  |  Clint Burnham  |  MICHAEL CHANG  |  Margaret Christakos  |  CAConrad  |  Junie Désil  |  Liz Howard  |  Kaie Kellough  |  Andrew Klobucar  |  Tiziana La Melia  |  Tanya Lukin Linklater  |  D.S. Marriott  |  Erín Moure  |  Alice Notley  |  Otoniya J. Okot Bitek  |  Judith Penner  |  Kaitlyn Purcell  |  Lisa Robertson  |  Christine Stewart  |  Divya Victor  |  Fred Wah  

With music by Matthew Cardinal, Ellis Sam, Thomas Weideman, and Fan Wu.

This event will be hosted by members of The Capilano Review’s Staff and Board.

Tickets to the event are sliding-scale, with a suggested donation of $40. Your ticket includes continuous access to the day-long virtual event, as well as automatic entry in numerous literary-themed raffles. Print subscriptions will also be available at a special discounted rate.

All proceeds from the event will go to support The Capilano Review’s triannual print magazine and year-round public programs. All donations over $25 will receive a charitable tax receipt. 

Program Schedule

Readers

Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited, Injun, and NISHGA. Abel’s most recent book, Empty Spaces, is available now from McClelland & Stewart and Yale University Press.

Andrea Actis lives in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her book, Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021), is an autoconceptual study of traumatic grief, anomalous experience, and whiteness. She teaches writing and literature at Capilano University and was Editor of The Capilano Review from 2015-2017. With Trevor Shikaze she operates the small press and research entity WAWI (What Are We In?).

Hope Anderson is a writer and editor based in Victoria, Canada. He is the author of the poetry collection Slips from Grace (Coach House Press, 1987), and, with David Phillips, a co-editor of the anthology of BC poets, The Body (Tatlow House, 1979). For twenty-one years, Anderson was the Director of Ancillary Services and co-editor of The Florida Memorial Academic Review at Florida Memorial University. Upon returning to Victoria in 2010, Anderson ran The Well—a community, art, and literary space on Fort Street. A selection of his poems can also be found in the collection Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia (Leaf Press, 2015).

bill bissett originalee lunarian left that planet oxygen running out in th first childrns shuttul 2 erth 300 years ago lunarian time bgan writing 10 operaysuns peritinitis preventid me from being dansr figur skatr feel th words theyr line s mooving thru space time sound dekon strukting convensyunal paradigms sens spelling pickshurs in th lettrs lettrs in th image breth latest book talonboooks its th sailors life / still in treetment meditaysyuns from gold mountain 2022 workin on now th book uv lost passwords 1 4 th 2025 dewing th maybe last proofing copee editing on it love dewing

Clint Burnham teaches at SFU and has two books coming out in 2024: The Goldberg Variations (poetry) from New Star, and The Old Man (fiction) from above/ground.

MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of many collections of poetry, including SYNTHETIC JUNGLE (Northwestern University Press, 2023) & EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS (GreenTower Press, 2024). They edit poetry at Fence.

Margaret Christakos is attached to this earth. She has published eleven collections of poetry, a novel, and an intergenre memoir. She perennially explores—as a poet, intermedia image-maker, sometimes event-builder, and creative writing mentor. Born and raised in Sudbury, she has lived in Toronto since 1987.

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books/UK Penguin, 2024). They received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by the artist Augusto Cascales. Visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.

Junie Désil is a poet. Born of immigrant (Haitian) parents on the Traditional Territories of the Kanien’kehá:ka in the island known as Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), raised in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg). Junie’s debut poetry collection Eat Salt | Gaze at the Ocean (Talonbooks, 2020) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Junie currently lives on the traditional territories of the Homalco, Tla’amin, and Klahoose where she is currently working on a forthcoming poetry collection.

Liz Howard is the author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent (McClelland & Stewart, 2015), winner of the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Letters in a Bruised Cosmos (McClelland & Stewart, 2021), shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. Born and Raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.

Kaie Kellough is a poet, sound performer, and fiction writer. His collection Magnetic Equator won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. Kaie has written plays for television and librettos for large ensembles.

Andrew Klobucar is an Associate Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he also serves as the Director of the Communication and Media Program. His research is dual-faceted, exploring the integration of digital programming and multimedia technologies within the literary arts and the enhancement of social media networking tools to produce new approaches to pedagogy in higher education. Klobucar’s forthcoming publication, an anthology of essays titled Narrative Play and Interactivity in the Art of Digital Storytelling, will be available in the Fall of 2024, published by Intellect Press, a UK imprint of the University of Chicago Press in the United States. His previous anthology, The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics (Vernon Press, 2021) explores the use of digital writing software for fiction, screenwriting, and poetry to build collective, online interactive writing practices.

Tiziana La Melia is an artist and author born in Palermo, Italy and raised on an orchard-garden in the Okanagan. In her writing and art practice Tiziana gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, iterative shapes, and symbols that move through layers of diasporic time.  Tiziana self-published the poetry album Kletic Kink in 2022 and has a new collection of poetry forthcoming with Talonbooks this spring.

Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performances, works for camera, installations, and writings cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, our structures of sustenance, and weather. Her first collection of poetry, Slow Scrape, was published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, Montréal with a second edition released by Talonbooks, Vancouver in 2022.

D.S. Marriott teaches philosophy at Emory University. His most recent books include: Letters from the Black Ark (Omnidawn, 2024) and Of Effacement (Stanford UP, 2023). 

Erín Moure is a poet-translator with 18 books of poetry, a book of essays, articles on translation, two memoirs; she is translator or co-translator of 26 books of poetry, including Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz Books, 2021) and Chantal Neveu’s you (Book*hug, 2024). Theophylline: a^{n a}-po^retic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (Anansi, 2023) is her latest book. https://erinmoure.mystrikingly.com

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California in the Mojave Desert. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the ’70s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the ’90s. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award. Notley may be most widely known for her epic poem The Descent of Alette. Recent books include The Speak Angel Series, Early Works, Telling the Truth As It Comes Up, and the forthcoming Being Reflected Upon.

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek is a poet. Her 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016) won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her second collection, A is for Acholi (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023), won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection, Song & Dread, is published by Talonbooks. Otoniya lives in Kingston, Ontario, on the land of the Haudesaunee and the Anishinaabe people.

Judith Penner started out as a poet, short story writer, journalist (Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories, The Observer Magazine UK), co-authored several non-fiction books, and wrote for the CBC and the NFB. After a long hiatus from writing, she became an editor, primarily of books on art. More recently, her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in catalogues (readymades, Smith Foundation), anthologies (Sustenance, Watch Your Head), and in literary magazines (Geist, Prism International, SubTerrain, The Capilano Review). In 2018 her chapbook of prose poems, A Bed of Half Full: a landscape, was published by Nomados Literary Publishers. Why is the World as Crunchy as a Diamond? (100 Operas of the Later Stage) is a work in progress.

Kaitlyn Purcell is Dëne Sųłı̨né́ (Smith’s Landing First Nation) and a PhD Candidate at the University of Calgary. Part of her dissertation, A Child Called Dream, was nominated for the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award, Unpublished Prose in English. ʔbédayine (Metatron, 2019) is her debut poetic novella.

Lisa Robertson‘s most recent book of poetry is Boat, from Coach House Books. Her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 2021, and has been translated to French (Le Quartanier, Montréal) and Swedish (OEI, Stockholm). She lives in France.

Christine Stewart lives on the territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ. Her ancestors are Northern Irish, Scottish, and English and she was born on the unceded territory of the Between the Lakes Treaty (No. 3). Select publications include The Odes (Nomados, 2016) and Treaty 6 Deixis (Talonbooks, 2018).

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat, 2021), winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is also the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug), Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

Fred Wah’s most recent project is Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations 1-170 (Talonbooks, 2020). Also recently, a collaboration with Rita Wong about the Columbia River, beholden: a poem as long as the river. High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, An Interactive Poem, is available online at www.highmuckamuck.ca. He lives in Vancouver and on Kootenay Lake.

Musicians

Matthew Cardinal is an amiskwaciy (Edmonton, AB)-based musician, sound artist, and photographer known for his work with Polaris Short List nominee group nêhiyawak. His music utilizes modular synthesizers, vintage analog equipment, electric pianos, and samplers to create cinematic and dreamlike soundscapes. Cardinal’s solo full-length album Asterisms was released in October 2020 on Arts & Crafts.

Ellis Sam is an artist and record producer on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Here he presents a new mix of completely improvised recordings by Kinda Green, a rotating ensemble of musicians featuring: Aiden Ayers, Gabi Dao, Scott Gailey, Jonathan Scherk, Yu Su, and Thomas Weideman. 

Thomas Weideman is a musician and writer living in Vancouver, the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. He is interested in bringing opposite or disparate sound sources and musical styles together, questioning habitual modes of perception of the sonic environment and of musical value.

Fan Wu is a poet, performer, and pedagogue who’s currently researching horizons of desire in Daoism and psychoanalysis. His most recent album of drone/poetry, touch the ten thousand things without dependency, was released through Second Spring in 2023.

Sponsors

Based in Vancouver, Catriona Jeffries is one of Canada’s pre-eminent spaces for contemporary art and is recognized internationally for its ongoing, rigorous contribution to contemporary art discourse. Established in 1994, the gallery represents artists of international prominence whose practices have emerged out of the renowned conceptual art histories of Vancouver. By maintaining dialogues with artists, writers, curators, museums and private collections, Catriona Jeffries continues to curate projects that contextualize the work of gallery artists within a historical trajectory, as well as with those of other artists working internationally through an expanded practice of exhibition making and research.

Coach House Books publishes literary fiction, lively poetry, and socially conscious nonfiction. Printed in Toronto since 1965.

Iron Dog Books is an Indigenous-owned bookshop dedicated to bringing great books to Səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territories (metro Vancouver). 

Massy Books is a Nêhiyaw-Métis woman-owned and operated independent bookstore, art gallery, and community space that operates on the territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, in Chinatown, Vancouver, BC.

New Star Books has been dissenting from East Vancouver and publishing experimental poetry, literary fiction, and socially-critical non-fiction since 1970.

The Paper Hound Bookshop sells new, used and rare books with a strong focus on literature, poetry and philosophy.

Vancouver Special is a retail store offering a carefully edited and hand picked selection of contemporary furniture, sofas, design objects, household accessories, and art and architecture books. Our aim is to promote the idea that good design can be accessible, affordable, of high quality and bring pleasure to daily life. We opened in 2008 in the heart of Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.