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Join Mark Abley, Harold Hoefle, Kayla Geitzler and Margo Wheaton for a special Zoom Midwinter group reading. Margo Wheaton is co-hosting this event with The Attic Owl.
This event is taking place on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87320054007
Margo Wheaton is the author of The Unlit Path Behind the House, which won the Fred Kerner Book Award from the Canadian Authors Association. She was born in New Brunswick and lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Harold Hoefle teaches English and Creative Writing at John Abbott College. He lives in Montreal.
Radiant, grieving, and intensely musical, Rags of Night in Our Mouths is an exploration of human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability. In the opening suite, Wheaton draws upon her family’s deep roots in the Tantramar Marsh area and constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty as she writes her own version of Maritime gothic. Employing a variation of the ghazal, a historically Persian form popularized in Canada by the late New Brunswick-based poet John Thompson, she surveys the ruins of her working-class childhood home, a thriving place now ravaged by generational alcoholism and despair. Directed at first toward an absent beloved - a convention of the ghazal tradition - the focus moves in the second suite to the teeming, non-human world of an endangered saltmarsh on a wild shore of the Northumberland Strait bordering Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. In the book’s closing suite, Wheaton honours a landscape slated to be destroyed and pays homage to “the broken-hearted, the bereaved” who walk the ragged shoreline, struggling to make sense of losses and death.
In the tradition of songwriters like Gordon Lightfoot and Gord Downie and poets such as Al Purdy, Karen Solie, and David O'Meara, The Night Chorus presents so-called "obscure" lives, where dark and playful humour collides with historic and mythic characters including Ovid and Dante, Odysseus and Desdemona. Using lyric poetry and the ghazal, the prose poem and the elegy, The Night Chorus brims with images as sharp as wild geese scrawling letters against an evening sky and as humble as "pots of plum dumplings and still-warm soup."