Celebrating Beast Body Epic, A 10-Year Milestone

VERSeFest 2024

I’m excited. I will be reading at VERSeFest, Ottawa’s annual poetry festival on Friday, March 22 at 8pm at Happy Goat Cafe on Laurel. I will read from Beast Body Epic in person in Ottawa.

Back in 2014, a decade ago, I had the great honour of being inducted into VERSeOttawa’s Hall of Honour and my co-honoree was the amazing Danielle K. L. Grégoire, who has become a great friend. Dear friend and fellow poetesse Sandra Ridley introduced me. I was so choked up, i wasn’t sure i would be able to read. I read for something like twenty minutes from a draft of this book, still at its early stages in 2014. Now I have the chance to read from it again ten years later.

I began Beast Body Epic in 2013 after struggling to write about my health crisis in poem format for five years and finally being able to. First (January 2010 to February 2011, I wrote a blog, Firebirds and Phoenix. Here’s the first entry from January 8, 2010. I was grateful that I wrote this blog to help me process what I was feeling and document what recovery was like. The journal was very helpful to me in writing Beast Body Epic. Every time I read from the book, I feel a combination of intense gratitude that I’m still here, tears and remembered fear for how fucking close I came. In my tag line for the book, i wrote: “Beast Body Epic is for anyone who’s circled the drain or knows someone who has. The book is about having the shit kicked out of you & surviving.”

If you’re there, at the reading, expect a lot of intensity from me that night on stage. I promise I won’t get too weepy. Heh.

I’m fortunate to be reading with fellow Ottawa poets, D.S. Stymeist, IAN MARTIN & Mary Lee Bragg, and the event will be hosted by dear friend and poet I admire greatly, Stephen Brockwell.

The four-day festival is going to be a lot of fun, with lots of socializing with poets I don’t see too often these days. I think it’s going to be a great experience. If you are in Ottawa, and fancy a treat of poetry from local poets, and poets from Montreal and Toronto, I hope you’ll pop in and partake of poetry.

Since 2000, I have had the great fortune of being part of the Ottawa literary community. This festival, begun in 2011 with a collective of reading series organizers, has been a delightful result of this great community. This year, the festival’s artistic director is the seemingly tireless dynamo publisher, writer and dear friend, rob mclennan. The board of directors includes Allison Armstrong, Frances Boyle, Stephen Brockwell, Éric Charlebois, David Currie, Zishad Lak. I am ever so grateful to them for ensuring the festival continued this year and for putting together a feast of poetry over four days. VERSeFest is taking place at four different local pubs and cafes. See you there! I’ll probably be wearing the same outfit I always wear these days for readings these days. See below.

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