2018 was an incredible year:

It was a thrill to teach as a sessional instructor at the Alberta College of Art + Design (my students there recognized me with 2 teaching awards), Mount Royal University and Wordsworth Summer Camp. That said … In October I stepped away from sessional teaching to take up the position as Director, Literary Arts at Banff Centre — an amazing position. I’m thrilled to be part of the amazing team at Banff Centre and to be of service to artists and writers locally, nationally and internationally.

The culmination of several years’ work, I edited bpNichol’s Nights on Prose Mountain (Toronto: Coach House Books). Nights on Prose Mountain gathers all of bpNichol’s published fiction. While Nichol’s poetry is widely studied, researched and taught, his novels have remained out of print. From the Governor General’s Award-winning “The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid” through more obscure treasures like Extreme Positions, and including Still, For Jesus Lunatick, and Andy, Nights on Prose Mountain traces Nichol’s life in fiction.

Achill Island, Ireland’s redfoxpress published my latest volume of visual poems, Counter/Weight. Counter/Weight explores the crumbling edifice of letters through aging letraset-based visual poems and the crumbs of punctuation.

Leeds-Beckett University’s Alan Dunn and I released (drowned out by traffic noise): a, A Novel, a CD of ten audio responses to my a, A novel by international sound artists (MP3 here).

This year I have been lucky to have conducted readings and talks at University of North Carolina-Wilmington, University of Calgary, University of Ottawa, Leeds Beckett University, Trinity College – Cambridge and at public events in Banff, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Wilmington. Thank you so much to all of the organizers, hosts, colleagues, friends and audiences with whom I’ve shared these experiences.

I’ve been lucky to have work published in European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture; Alberta College of Art and Design Faculty Association Newsletter; NoD; ToCall; X-peri; Schreibheft and unarmed. I also contributed to 6 different anthologies. My work was featured as the front-cover artwork on Gerald Brun’s Interruptions: The fragmentary aesthetic in Modern Literature (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press) and Max Elibacher’s cassette electronic tape music. I provided the liner notes of Sam Andreyev’s incredible CD Music with no Edges (Austria: Kairos Music).

6 different small press editions of my work were published in 2018: Black Square #1 (Calgary: The Blasted Tree), L’echec de Perec (London: Ma Bibliotheque), Fragmentum (Burlington: Simulacrum), fine and coarse aggregate (California: poems-for-all), Tattered Sails (ottawa: above/ground) and isostatisk landhöjning (Malmö, Sweden: Timglaset). My kursiv #1-7 was published as part of Container‘s 2018 Look Book series. Full size render – a collaboration with Billy Mavreas – was published by Montreal’s Monastiraki; Reply – a collaboration with Petra Schulze-Wollgast – was privately published by Rostock’s Schulze-Wollgast. I continue to place free PDFs of my work online. My artistic work was included in gallery exhibitions in Germany, Halifax, Toronto and Edmonton.

Through No press I published 42 different editions of poetry and prose from international, national and local emerging and established writers. Each edition was meant to help spread the word of risk-taking international writing. Thank you for trusting me with your work.

For my entire tenure as Calgary’s Poet Laureate (2014-2016) I worked with Calgary Arts Development and with representatives from the City of Calgary to create an initiative through which we would name streets and alleys after prominent deceased Calgarian writers. Finally, after years of effort, one single name was accepted by The City of Calgary and Nellie McClung Avenue was unveiled.

None of this would have been possible without my incredible partner, Kristen, and my amazing daughter Maddie. My parents and in-laws have also been a steady voice of support and love; thank you.

In so many ways i only excel because of the strength and support of my community of friends and colleagues especially Greg Betts, Christian Bok, Kit Dobson, Kyle Flemmer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Helen Hajnoczky, Sina Queyras, Jordan Scott and so many others. Thank you.

And thank you to my students and colleagues who always encourage me to listen, to share, to push my practice and my pedagogy. You rock.