Beyond Witness: Poetry and the Living World

Kyeren Regehr in Conversation with Zoe Dickinson, Jess Housty, Elizabeth Philips, and Kim Trainor How do we belong to the living world without pretending we stand outside it? Four poets ask what comes after observation: attention, reciprocity, humour, grief, resistance, nourishment, and kinship. In Blue thinks itself within me, Kim Trainor turns to lichen, lyric form, and the Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek blockades to ask what poetry can do in a time of ecological crisis. Elizabeth Philips’s The Time of the Great Singing listens closely to rivers, birds, snow, parents, and loss, refusing to separate elegy from praise. Zoe Dickinson’s Staff Picks for Invertebrates brings together the Pacific Ocean, bookstore wit, and creaturely imagination in poems of daily relation. Jess Housty’s How to Nourish a Cannibal offers poems of land, body, ancestry, abundance, and living within sacred responsibility. Together, these books invite us beyond witness and into the difficult, beautiful practice of belonging. IMPORTANT DETAILS: 1.) Doors open at 7:00. Seating is not assigned. 2 .) For accessibility information please refer to the "accessibility" tab at victoriafestivalofauthors.ca. 3 .) There is no general parking at the theatre. Free parking is available on side streets (Moss Street, Linden Avenue, and Fort Street), as well as the Central Middle School parking lot on Fort Street. Please abide by parking signs; do not park where it is posted Residential Only, as you may be ticketed. Please give yourself plenty of time to find parking before your event. 4.) If you select to stream this event from home, the livestream link will be emailed the day before the event. 5.) Captioning is available for the livestream option. Contact VFA by September 30 for ASL interpretation or in-person captioning. 6.) If you are unwell, please stay home and enjoy the livestream.