Guest Author

On Thursday, November 15, 2012 from 2-4pm we will have a visit from poet Melanie Siebert. Melanie will read from her book, Deepwater Vee, and lead us in some writing prompts. Everyone is welcome!

Melanie Siebert completed an MFA at the University of Victoria with a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship. She has worked as a wilderness guide on northern rivers from Alaska to Baffin Island for more than ten years. The on-the-water research for her first collection of poetry was supported by the President’s Research Scholarship, the Petch Research Scholarship, the Humanities Interdisciplinary Fellowship, and an Ian H. Stewart Graduate Student Fellowship.

 

Melanie’s debut collection, Deepwater Vee, released by McClelland & Stewart in the spring of 2010 and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, travels many remote rivers, but also two of Canada’s most damaged waterways: the Athabasca, which runs through the heart of the Alberta tar sands, and the North Saskatchewan, the river Melanie grew up alongside, one stressed by dams and upgraders, sewage and pesticides. These rivers push the poems into a contemplation of loss and into the terrain of Alexander Mackenzie’s dreams, a busker’s broken-down street riffs and the dreamworld wanderings of a grandmother who returns to inhabit the earth.

 

Her writing has been broadcast on CBC and published in literary journals, including The Walrus, The Malahat Review, Event, Prairie Fire, and in Half in the Sun, an anthology of contemporary Mennonite writing. Melanie was awarded the Andy Farquharson Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching and was the Artist in Residence at the UVic Centre for the Study of Religion and Society.