some author activity: Quartermain, mclennan, Macdonald, Downs, Jirgens, Marlatt, Bowering + Wah,

Meredith Quatermain is in the Canadian Poet Series via Peripety and/or Tronies; rob mclennan is interviewed as part of Kyeren Regehr's The Poet Laureate Podcast; Dawn Macdonald has an essay up at Strange Pilgrims; Buck Downs has new work at The Arts Fuse; and Karl Jirgens has poems for Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering + Fred Wah over at public reverie.

some author activity: Tierney, mclennan, Wah, Shafer, Skrabalak, Scroggins + Farina,

Orchid Tierney has new work at The Journal; rob mclennan has a poem for Fred Wah up at public reveries; Emily Shafer has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Ryan Skrabalak answers the "12 or 20 questions" interview; Mark Scroggins has an essay up at "my small press writing day"; and Laura Farina is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey.

some author activity: Kemp, Wah, Bowering, Smith + Cohen,

Penn Kemp has poems for Fred Wah and George Bowering up at public reverie, and an awful lot of poetry/reading videos up at her YouTube channel; Steven Ross Smith is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Julia Cohen is interviewed via the Memoir Land Author Questionnaire; and don't forget to regularly check out the above/ground press substack, yes? there's lots of extra stuff on there,

report: Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase : Abel, Marlatt, Wah, mclennan, Carpenter, fitzpatrick, etc

In case you hadn't heard, above/ground press was well represented this past week at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, as part of the University of Alberta's Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase, held near the end of a full week when a slew of us prior writers-in-residence got to spend time together at the Banff Centre, up in them mountains (there was a full two days of snowfall, if you can imagine).

Hosted by Jordan Abel [who currently runs the w-i-r program], Jason Purcell and Julianna Wager [above, who organized the entire week as well], the event had opening remarks on a (very) brief history of the University of Alberta writer-in-residence program [remember when I conducted all those interviews for the fortieth, with every still-living uAlberta writer-in-residence I could find?] by Thomas Wharton, and readings by Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Marilyn Dumont, Makda Mulatu, rob mclennan, Joshua Whitehead, January Rogers, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, Jana Pruden, Kaitlyn Purcell and Hiromi Goto. There was a livestream that one can catch here, which unfortunately missed Wharton, picking up only mid-point through Marlatt's reading, but the full event was recorded, and should be up soon.

[J.R. Carpenter, above] With everyone reading roughly five minutes each, it truly was a remarkable event overall, including singing, staccato, lyric, chanting and prose, and even some tears. As you already know, the event was also a kind of launch for a handful of recent above/ground press titles specifically made for the event, by myself, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick and Derek Beaulieu (Director of the Literary Arts at Banff, but not actually reading, although in the audience), although Wah was the only one of the group that actually read from his new title (I mean, I didn't even do that, so I've no business throwing shade). There were a handful of copies of all of these titles on site for free distribution, both through the event specifically and across the whole week, with a mound of copies still available gratis through the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (just prod at Jordan Abel, if you are up that way), or just order direct from the press, of course. And did you hear I'm even back at the Banff Centre this November? I've already got a new slew of above/ground press publications in the works, just you wait.

[ryan fitzpatrick, above] It was good, also, to see various audience I hadn't been expecting (amid our packed house), including poet and former Tsunami Editions publisher Michael Barnholden, driving in from Edmonton with his wife, or poet Ryanne Kap, driving in from Calgary with a friend. Separately, Winnipeg poet Sharanpal Ruprai was actually at Banff as part of a playwriting retreat, and Vancouver poet Adèle Barclay was there as well, working a couple of weeks in one of the Leighton cabins, retreating. Edmonton writer Conor Kerr, who teaches at the University of Alberta, was also part of our group for most of the week. It still doesn't feel real, how good it all was.

Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase: mclennan, fitzpatrick, Wah, Marlatt, Carpenter, etc;

May 15, 2026 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Clvb 33, St. Julien Way, Banff, AB and online

REGISTER HERE;

The Writer-in-Residence program in the Department of English and Film Studies is delighted to invite you to attend our 50th anniversary Writer-in-Residence Alumni Showcase at the Banff Centre's Clvb 33. All are welcome to attend either in person or virtually.

There will be readings from Thomas Wharton, Fred Wah, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, JR Carpenter, rob mclennan, Daphne Marlatt, Jana Pruden, Hiromi Goto, and Marilyn Dumont.

new from above/ground press: Shanzai, by Fred Wah

Shanzai
Fred Wah
$6

CALL OF DUTY
            (sub for Fleetwood Mac “Dreamin”)


Is this the Dream?
Mm…
Mm…
Now here we go again
I say I want my freedom
So what’s the fuss to keep me down?
It wasn’t right I had to pay
my way you know it.
But listen carefully
to the sounds of my loneliness,
like the boat that brought me here
In the sadness of remembering what I’d left,
and what I dream for, and what I’d left
and what I dream for.

This shallow life is not what I was dreaming
Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming
Other dreams will come and they will go
If the mountain turns to gold
I’ll know, I’ll know.

Now here I go again, my trans Pacific vision
American as railroad pie
It’s not just me
who looks for freedom in a dream, that
liberating dream I’ll have to buy.

Days of loneliness
Empty dreaming drives me mad
In the sadness of remembering what I had,
and what I lost, and what I had,
ooh what I dream for.

This shallow life is not what I was dreaming
Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming
Other dreams they will come and they will go
If the mountain turns to gold, I’ll know.


Oh yes, I’ll know.


ABOUT:

On Labour Day weekend in 1988 I became the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta. My wife, Pauline Butling and I, had arrived in Edmonton from South Slocan in southeastern B.C. I had a sore back which prevented me from joining Pauline and our friend Pamela Banting on a hike that weekend, just before the school term started. Earlier that summer, I had been teaching with bpNichol at a workshop in Red Deer and bp had encouraged me to try my hand at the 3-day novel writing contest put on annually by Arsenal Pulp Press. While Pauline and Pamela went off hiking, I stayed home and decided to try writing a 3-day novel. I managed about 60 pages of anecdotal biotext. On Tuesday morning at school when Rudy Wiebe asked me what I’d done for the weekend I told him I had written a novel. I had never felt very comfortable writing prose (which was really the reason bp had urged me to try this contest; his novel Still had won it in 1983) and the results of my marathon writing weekend reflected this. I put that effort aside, though I pecked at it a little. A few years later my colleague and editor Aritha Van Herk helped me shape the manuscript into a book of short fiction, Diamond Grill. 

Over the past twenty years the discourse generated for me by writing Diamond Grill extended into other writing. A major project for me was a collaboration titled High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese (https://highmuckamuck.ca/), a multimedia project involving video, music, oral history, performance, and text.

The text for this chapbook, Shanzai, is some of my writing salvaged from that project. Suitably, for this 50th Anniversary of the U of A’s Writer-in-Residence program, it was seeded during my residency of 1988-89.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2026
produced in part for activity at Banff Centre, May 11-18, 2026, as part of the 50th anniversary of the University of Alberta Writer-in-Residence program
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan and lives in Vancouver and the West Kootenays. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a former Parliamentary Poet Laureate. His writing includes Diamond Grill, a biofiction about growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café, Sentenced to Light, collaborations with visual artists, is a door, a series of poems about hybridity. More recent books are beholden: a poem as long as the river with Rita Wong and Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Houbolt, MacEachern, Inniss, mclennan, Jirgens + Beaulieu,

Kyla Houbolt has a new poem up at The Pi Review, as does Jessi MacEachern; Scott Inniss is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; rob mclennan is interviewed by Jamie Tennant over at his podcast; and Karl Jirgens offers an homage to Aritha van Herk, Fred Wah and Derek Beaulieu as part of acknowledging thirty years of filling Station magazine via The Typescript.

A (Vancouver) Reading in Memory of Bob Hogg : February 12, 2023

above/ground press (today!) at word on the street: toronto,

During our recent move I unearthed an absolute ton of above/ground press "poem" broadsheets, and decided they should be distributed! If you make your way to The League of Canadian Poets booth at this year's WOTS today in Toronto, be sure to pick one up! I've sent along copies of numerous broadsheets from over the past decade or so, including poems by Steven Heighton, Stuart Ross, Max Middle, Shawna McCabe, Fred Wah, Gregory Betts, Sarah Mangold, Nathaniel G. Moore, A.J. Levin, Kristina Drake, William Hawkins, Nathanael, Karen Clavelle, Peter Norman, Gwendolyn Guth and Gary Barwin, among others. Go pick up copies! And don't forget, 2014 subscriptions are now available!

North of Intention: Stewart, Quartermain, Betts, L'Abbe, echoff + others,

Various Canadian authors (and above/ground press authors) participate in North of Intention over at Jacket2, including Christine Stewart and Meredith Quartermain on Fred Wah, Gregory Betts on M. NorbeSe Philip, Sonnet L'Abbe on Stephen Collis, kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Jake Kennedy (collaboratively) on Jordan Scott, all curated by Sarah Dowling.