spring 2014
Table of Contents
Return to Home PageNo Small Effort Joseph Dorazio
The Day The Rain Stopped
Jane Mellor
An Interview with a Caribou Richard Kelly Kemick
Ariadne: the untangler
Fiona Mitchell
I Invent a Character Before Lunch
Steve Klepetar
Lost and Found Things I Noticed . . . Ricky Garni
In the South Chilcotins
The Shell
Rob Taylor
The Ford Takes Us to Wreck Beach
Melissa Sawatsky
Poem for Jeff
Poetry Shortage
Kayla Czaga
The Last Year of His Life Barbara Brooks
We Are At Our Best
When the Rain Ceases Falling on Hanover
Richard-Yves Sitoski
Author Biographies
Author Biographies
Yuka Aoki is a Japanese born and raised artist based in Vancouver, BC. She earned a B.A. in art management at Musashino Art University and a B.D. in communication design at Emily Carr University.
Barbara Brooks, author of "The Catbird Sang" and "A Shell to Return to the Sea" chapbooks, is a member of Poet Fools. Her work has been accepted in Chagrin River Review, The Foundling Review, Blue Lake Review, Granny Smith Magazine, Third Wednesday, Shadow Road Quarterly, Indigo Mosaic and on line at Southern Women’s Review, Poetry Quarterly, Big River Poetry among others. She currently lives in North Carolina with her dog.
Chloe N. Clark is a MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment. Her work has appeared such places as Rosebud, Fogged Clarity, Menacing Hedge, and more. She is fairly obsessed with ghost scholarship, has written a poem about Supernatural, and bakes ridiculously awesome cakes. For more of that brilliance, follow her @PintsNCupcakes
JCCortens is a teacher & poet who lives & writes between the mountains & the sea. He is currently working on his first collection of poetry.
Kayla Czaga's poems have appeared in The Walrus, ARC, The Malahat Review, CV2, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2012, and qwerty. Her first book of poems is forthcoming this fall with Nightwood Editions.
Joseph Dorazio is a prize-winning poet and author of three volumes of poetry. His latest collection, AS IS, earned an Editors Choice Award at iUniverse.com. Mr. Dorazio lives in Wayne, Pennsylvania.
Ricky Garni is a writer and graphic designer living in North Carolina. His work is widely available on the web, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on five occasions. His books include My Favorite Fifteen Presidents, Maybe Wavy, 2% Butterscotch and Shadow Box Chocolate Cake. His latest collection, Hey, is dedicated to the memory of Faye Hunter.
Richard Kelly Kemick is currently completing an MA at the University of New Brunswick, and has been published in The Feathertale Review, The Fiddlehead, Foothill Poetry, Prairie Fire, and Vallum among several other magazines. Richard has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry, won first place in Grain’s 2013 Short Grain poetry contest, and is a recipient of an Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant.
Steve Klepetar's work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Three collections appeared in 2013: Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications); Blue Season (with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing); and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press). His e-chapbook, Return of the Bride of Frankenstein, is forthcoming from Kind of a Hurricane Press.
Matea Kulic is a writer and literacy tutor living in Vancouver. She has been published in local literary magazines including RicePaper, Emerge and The Liar and is currently at work on a chapbook with Invisible City Press. She studied under the mentorship of Jen Currin at Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio. Between work and writing, she makes time for swimming.
Jane Mellor is a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writers Studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was host and organizer of TWS Reading Series, a monthly literary event for notable and emerging writers. Her work has been published in Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, emerge, TWS website, The Toronto Quarterly, Leaf Press, Poetry Nook Magazine, Contemporary Horizon Magazine and Contemporary Horizon Anthology in Bucharest. Her poetry was also long listed in SFU’s 1st Book Competition and Delicate Availability, her first book of poetry and prose, was later published by Friesen Press. Currently, a second book of poetry is circulating publishers. The Day the Rain Stopped was recently long listed in the National Poetry Competition (UK) out of 12,081 poems from 77 countries.
Fiona Mitchell is a poet from Ottawa and has just completed her MFA in Creative Writing, concentrating in poetry, at the University of Victoria. She has been published in Bywords, where she is now on the selection committee, Durable Goods, and will have work in the Spring 2014 issue of The Capilano Review. Having a BA in Greek and Roman Studies, she strives to integrate classical themes and concepts into contemporary pieces.
Carolyn Nakagawa is a poet and playwright currently studying English literature at the University of British Columbia. Her poetry has been published in Echolocation's 2014 chapbook The Maze, and is also forthcoming in QWERTY.
Melissa Sawatsky is a writer, editor, and library assistant currently living in Smithers, BC. Her work has appeared in Northword, Branch Magazine, OCW Magazine, The Found Poetry Review, Quills and Rhubarb, among others. Her poetry also appeared in The Enpipe Line, an anthology of poetry written in resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline proposal. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of British Columbia.
d.n. simmers is an online editor with Fine Lines. He is currently in Prairie Journal, The Storyteller, Red River Review, Poetry Pacific, Iconoclast, Nerve Cowboy, poetrymag.com (on line). He was in April issue of Poetry Salzburg. He is in Royal City Poets (3) a newly launched anthology and was in a Bulgarian Anthology in the summer with five other Vancouver poets and six San Francisco poets in english, rumanian and spanish. He was in the 125 anniversary issue of Vancouver put out by subterrain. He was in Van Gogh's Ear, Paris France.
Richard-Yves Sitoski is a spoken word poet who has published fiction in Grimm Magazine and verse in blue skies poetry, Eclectica Magazine and Northern Terminus: The African Canadian History Journal. Originally from Ottawa, he is currently at work on a book-length cycle of poems on the history of his adopted community of Owen Sound, Ontario. In his spare time he paints and makes disturbing sounds on various stringed instruments.
In addition to the UK, the United States, Austria and India, Kevin Spenst's poetry has appeared in over a dozen Canadian literary publications such as Freefall, Prairie Fire, CV2, Dandelion, filling Station, qwerty, and Poetry is Dead. His work has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and his manuscript Ignite has come in as a finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. In 2011, he won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry. In 2014 he is doing a 100-venue reading tour across Canada with his chapbooks Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press, 2013), Retractable (the serif of nottingham, 2013), Happy Hollow and the Surrey Suite (self-published, 2012) and What the Frag Meant (100 tetes press, 2014). In the Spring of 2014, he will have a collection of beer-coaster sonnets out with JackPine press; a full collection of poetry is forthcoming with Anvil Press in 2015.
Rob Taylor lives in Vancouver with his wife, Marta. He is the author of the poetry collection The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011) and the chapbooks Smoothing the Holy Surfaces and Lyric (Alfred Gustav Press). His poems have appeared most recently in The Fiddlehead, Geist and Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest. Rob is the co-founder of One Ghana, One Voice, Ghana’s first online poetry magazine, and is the incoming poetry editor at PRISM international.