Kevin Spenst

Kevin Spenst recently completed a 100-date reading tour of Canada.We’re excited he managed to dip back into town to read with us!

Kevin’s poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, Rhubarb Magazine, Capilano Review, dANDelion, filling Station, Poetry is Dead, Moonshot Magazine, The Maynard, illiterature, The Enpipe Line, V6A and Ditch Poetry. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and his manuscript, Ignite, has come in as a finalist for the Alfred G. Baily Prize. In 2011, he won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry for a suite of poems from Ignite. After an inspiring summer at the Sage Hill Writing Retreat in 2012, he published his first chapbook of poetry: Happy Hollow and the Surrey Suite. In the fall of 2013, a chapbook of poems, Pray Goodbye, will be published through The Alfred Gustav Press, and another chapbook, Retractable, will be coming out through the serif of nottingham. He was also a founding member of Thursdays Editing Collective!
http://kevinspenst.com/

Kevin sent us his seed text in a sealed envelope that we opened together. Then we wrote back.

 

Kevin’s Postal Code Reading took place at The Paper Hound Bookstore on Tuesday, May 13, 2014, 12:30-1:30pm. Here’s the poster Madeleine Thien made for the event.

He read the letter he wrote us – which included an imagined correspondence between a bank teller and the thief attempting to simultaneously woo and rob her. Thursdays Writing Collective members read their responses to Kevin’s letter – some answering back directly and others taking up where the story left off. I regret I didn’t get photos of the readers, who included Cindy, Jan, Erol, Roger, Ghia, Patrick and Anne.

Audience members were invited to write letters of their own on paper money and “send” them by tucking them into the cracks of the back wall at The Paper Hound. You are welcome to continue the process by reading or responding to the messages!

We had some snacks:

And the shop displayed our books beautifully! We sold a bunch.