Thursday 30 October 2014

WordWorks Article - Gloria Barkley: Poet, Sculptor and Survivor





Katrin Horowitz interviews Wattle and Daub author Gloria Barkley about her book Water Window Mirror in the Fall 2014 issue of The Federation of British Columbia Writers' WordWorks magazine:

"The only thing that frightens Gloria Barkley anymore is spiders. So much so that her Coquitlam clay studio is equipped with a special trap to keep them from running over her feet. But this poet and sculptor uses her fear to create artistic spiders, because spiders as metaphor intrigue her: they show up both in her poems and as figures she fashions from clay...

"...after a medical journey that included far too many misdiagnoses, she discovered she was allergic to 95 different foods and food additives, ranging from wheat to caffeine, nitrates to sulphites. And much in the same way she transforms her fear of spiders into art (which she wryly names after food additives), she has turned her long narrative of frightening hallucinations, feelings of non-reality, anxiety, depression and something like the flu — together with the attempts to treat her symptoms — into an impressive book of poems, entitled Water Window Mirror..."


Side Effects (p.53)

Phantom spiders
crawl
along her skin

pause at pores

their legs tap
erratic
codes

she dare not

decipher.



Please click here for the full article.


Monday 6 October 2014

2014 Prix Aurora Award for Best Speculative Fiction Poem--Eileen Kernaghan!




Congratulations to Wattle and Daub Books author Eileen Kernaghan who this weekend won the 2014 Prix Aurora Award for Best Poem or Song in English for “Night Journey: West Coast”, published in Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast to Coast, EDGE (2013).

For more of her excellent speculative poetry, her collection Tales of the Holograph Woods: Speculative Poetry can be ordered here.