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2024, as a writer and an arts-administrator, felt like a between year—a year that will lead to new conversations, new growth, and new phases—a year that foreshadows more than it holds itself.
As Banff Centre’s Director of Literary Arts, I developed a slate of in-person and digital residencies which found homes across Banff Centre campus while renovations on Vinci Hall continue. Literary Arts residencies—all of which were scholarshipped at 100% of tuition and 50% of room/board—enabled international writers to work with exceptional faculty: January’s “Winter Writers” residency with Casey Plett and Waubgeshig Rice (and Alana Wilcox from Coach House Books); February’s “Late Winter” Online residency with Fawn Parker and Annick MacAskill; April’s “Form and Constraint” residency with Ian Williams and Daniel Levin Becker (and John Yao from Black Square Editions); June’s “Memoir” residency with Kyo McLear and Elamin Abdelmahmoud (and Jen Sook Fong Lee from ECW Press); August’s “Summer Writers” residency with Sina Queyras and A.E. Stallings (and Danielle Dutton from Dorothy, a Publishing Project); September’s “Early Career Writers of Fiction” residency with Kazim Ali and Kim Fu (and Norm Nehmetallah from Invisible Books); and November’s “Literary Journalism” residency with Charlie Foran and Ayelet Tsabari (and Micah Toub from The Globe and Mail).
Banff Centre‘s Literary Arts department has some amazing plans for 2025 with residencies focused on Environmental Journalism, Horror Writing, Science Fiction, Literary Journalism / Creative Non-fiction, Comics and Graphic Novels, Early Career Writers of YA and Children’s Books, and several open topic poetry/prose residencies … all responding to the needs of international writers. Lots of great news on the Banff Centre website. Literary Arts will not only be increasing the number of residencies offered, but also the number of spaces available for writers—all while maintaining scholarship levels and the mentor/writer ratio.
In 2024, in celebration of what would have been bpNichol’s 80th birthday, Coach House Books published Some Lines of Poetry from the Notebooks of bpNichol which I edited with my old friend Gregory Betts. Gregory and I have collaborated a lot over the years, and this project took several years and was an incredibly pleasure to work on. Nichol’s notebooks and ideas around poetry continue to thrill me. I encourage you to pick up a copy.
2024 is my final year as the Town of Banff’s Poet Laureate. It has been a real pleasure to host events, workshops and readings in our small mountain town for the last few years. I know that Heather Jean Jordan will be an exceptional Poet Laureate for 2025-2026.
I received the Chancellor’s Alumni Award from University of Roehampton … which is a frought recognition for sure as it comes just a few short years after Roehampton eradicated their Creative Writing department, laying off all my peers and abandoning an exceptional centre for UK-based creative writing. Another victim of massive cuts to post-secondary education in that country.
This year I spoke to students at Ontario College of Art and Design and Concordia University, hosted bookbinding workshops at the Banff Public Library, and performed at Banff’s Legion Hall and Toronto’s Supermarket. I exhibited my visual poetry as part of Con Creta & Son Ora (Paper View Books, Leiria, Portugal), the Banff Centre Staff Summer Showcase (Project Space, Glyde Hall, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, AB), Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé (Centre for Book Arts, New York, USA), and A Collection of Modified Bookmarks (Bower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol, Bristol, UK and Portico Library, Manchester, UK). I was also a juror for the 2024 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award.
It was a thrill to attend the 2024 London Small Publishers Fair, the 2024 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Calgary, and the AWP Conference in Kansas City … and to host Naomi Klein onstage at Banff Centre’s Jenny Belzberg Theatre in front of over 500 audience members.
I published in The Typescript, Westword, Synapse, The Rocky Mountain Outlook, Alberta Views, ToCall, Petrichor, and The Ampersand Review; and in the anthologies Extrins and Coup de Dés (Collection) Books and Ideas After Mallarmé.
There were also 8 different small press editions of my work published in 2024: Il Pleut (Edinburgh: Oo Press), Titelløs (fra Kern) (Copenhagen: Addenda), Seven Squares (Lieria: Paper View books), In memory of Bob Cobbing (Edinburgh: Essence Press), Il Pleut (London: Intergraphia), the 2nd edition of Future Poems (London: Poem Atlas) and two chapbooks from my own No Press: Information in Memoriam Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Nature or Habit.
I continue to place free PDFs of all of my work online—help yourself.
Through No Press I published 14 different editions of poetry and prose – including 5 issues of The Minute Review – with contributions by 50 different 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.
None of this would have been possible without my incredible partner, Kristen, and our amazing kid Maddie (and our angry cat Alice and now our all-over-everything puppy Lou). My parents and mother-in-law are also steady voices 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 Gary Barwin, Gregory & Lisa Betts, Christian Bok, Kit Dobson & Aubrey Hanson, Helen Hajnoczky, Nasser Hussain & Kaley Kramer, Aaron Tucker & Julia Polyck-O’Neill, rob mclennan, Astra Papachristodoulou, and so many others. Thank you.
Here’s to 2025.
At the close of every year, for over a decade, I have taken a moment to reflect upon the year’s publications. Like in previous years, my “most engaging books” list reflects what I found most fascinating / useful / generative in terms of form & content from the books I read in 2024.
Seek out these volumes; every one will reward the search (your local, independent, bookstore can help; an excellent choice as many continue to struggle). This is the cream of the crop for 2024, seriously … each of these titles will blow your mind:
Alikavazovik, Jakuta. (Daniel Levin Becker, trans.) Like A Sky Inside.
Bernstein, Charles. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies.
Bertram, Lillian Yvonne. A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content.
Bertram, Lillian Yvonne and Nick Montfort, eds. Output: Computer Generated Poetry, 1953-2023.
Betts, Gregory. Bardcode.
de Campos, Haroldo. (Odile Cisneros, trans.) Galaxias.
Ely, Steve. Eely.
Fitterman, Robert. Creve Coeur.
Pritchard, N.H. The Mundus.
Ross, Stuart. The Sky is a Sky in the Sky.
Solt, Mary Ellen. The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt.
I’m honoured to have received the Chancellor’s Alumni Award 2024 from University of Roehampton, the only graduate to date in Creative Writing to have received this award. I completed my PhD at Roehampton in 2014 and worked with exceptional colleagues to whom I will always owe a huge debt of gratitude.
I am proud to have received this award as it speaks to the quality of education I received at Roehampton, the value of that degree, the support I received from the PhD supervisors and committee, and the colleagues that I have made across the UK.
That said, I will probably also be the only recipient of this award from Creative Writing at Roehampton.
Roehampton University instituted mass lay-offs and the elimination of a number of humanities-based programs including classics, anthropology, photography, creative writing. Those shameful lay-offs, which included the destruction of the department of creative writing, has meant job losses for many exceptional peers and colleagues – folks who were vital to the UK poetry and prose communities, who demonstrated mentorship and teaching of the highest level, who were publishing consistently, and who were instrumental in my own career. Many were given untenable options for the continuance of their careers, and have found themselves in tenuous positions since.
University education in the UK is in crisis, but we can not look to resolve that crisis by cutting in the arts and humanities.
We are better than that.
The Minute Review #14 is now available for order!
This issue features visual poetry by Kate Siklosi, Sacha Archer, Greg Thomas; textual poetry by Stephen Collis, Steven Ross Smith, and Douglas Messerli; and prose reviews and reflections by Charlotte Jung, Derek Beaulieu, Vik Shirley, Philip Terry, Dani Spinosa, and rob mclennan.
Copies are available for $5 (including postage), please paypal derek@housepress.ca with your postal address to order…
AND all previous issues of THE MINUTE REVIEW remain available for order at $5 as well…
A few photos from the London Small Publishers Fair, October 2024 — what a fabulous event!
i’m proud to have launched 3 new editions at the 2024 London Small Publishers Fair :
IL PLEUT from Intergraphia Books
IN MEMORY OF BOB COBBING from Essence Press
and SEVEN SQUARES from Paper View Books …
order your copies today and support these fabulous small presses in their efforts to publish weirdo poetry…
I’m proud to announce that Julie Johnstone’s Edinburgh-based press, ESSENCE PRESS, has just published my visual poem suite “In Memory of Bob Cobbing” as a limited edition. Copies are now available for order — Essence press always makes beautiful, subtle editions and i’m sure they will go quickly…
NEW BOOK DAY! my copies of SOME LINES OF POETRY FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF BPNICHOL, which I co-edited with Gregory Betts, arrived in the mail today! I’m so proud of this book – order your copy from Coach House Books!
New from No Press:
“the great silence of the poetic line.” by rob mclennan
A mournful reflection on poetry, aging, and melancholy … produced in a limited edition of 50 copies; each copy features japanese paper covers, black flyleaves and hand-sewn binding.
Copies are only $5CDN each including postage (paypal derek@housepress.ca to order)
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