Saturday 17 September 2016

Gloria Barkley: Finalist, Whistler Independent Book Award


Gloria Barkley in the short film, "Food Additives, Hallucinations, & Darn Good Poetry"

Congratulations to Wattle and Daub author Gloria Barkley, finalist in the poetry category of the Whistler Independent Book Awards 2016 for Water Window Mirror. You deserve it, Gloria! Good luck in October.

WHISTLER INDEPENDENT BOOK AWARDS

Recognizing excellence in Canadian independent publishing.


The Finalists were announced on 18 July. Winners will be announced at the Whistler Independent Book Awards,
13-16 October.




POETRY FINALISTS

Barkley, Gloria – Water Window Mirror
Sobat, Gail Sidonie – How the Light Is Spent
Woodland, Alan – Out of the Mist

Follow this link to order Water Window Mirror by Gloria Barkley.

Thursday 8 January 2015

Our Authors



Authors Eileen Kernaghan and Casey Wolf attended VCon, the local speculative fiction convention, in October.
Addena Sumter-Freitag has decamped from Vancouver BC to London Ontario, and is spending her winters in Jamaica.
Author Tom Coughlan died of cancer 6 July  2010. He had been engaged in the final edits of his book, Tommy’s War. “Everyone around me was going through hell, and I was having the time of my life!”
Thanks, Tom, for being a brilliant, funny, precious man.

Gloria Barkley is hard at work on a third book of poetry and of course, more clay sculptures.

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.




Tuesday 29 October 2013

Water, Window, Mirror -- A Happy Launch Despite a Few Cracked Ribs




A good time was had by all at Gloria Barkley's launch of her new book, Water, Window, Mirroron Saturday at the Arts Council of New Westminster. Gloria herself was a little pained by her tumble down a flight of stairs only a few days before, but as the photos will tell you she was in her element, nevertheless.

Thanks to all who attended, and to everyone who pulled together to bring Gloria's work to fruition. And thank you, Gloria, for Water, Window, Mirror, and for your grace and goodwill!

Local author and longtime supporter of BC writers, Eileen Kernaghan introduced Gloria with the following address:


How does a poet describe a state in which her senses can’t be trusted, when everything she sees and hears may be unreal?”


That was how I started a blurb for the back of Gloria’s book. But the much larger question is:  in that fractured, hallucinatory state, how could anyone carry on a normal life – and do it for twenty years?

I’ve known Gloria for a very long time.  I heard and marvelled at her story when she first came to the Kyle writing group. It was an extraordinary story of survival – there’ve been  many stories of survival shared in our writing group, but Gloria’s had to be the strangest.

For two decades she raised a family, ran a household, gained an art degree, led a richly creative life  – and was never sure if she, her children, or anything in the world around her could be trusted to be real. 

She told us of the hair-raising adventures in altered reality that could come not from a drug trip, but from eating a hot dog. She told us of the mystery that eluded doctors for all those years, and how the mystery was finally solved.

We said, “Gloria, you have to write about this. You need to publish it. People need to know.” And because she is a poet, Gloria decided to tell her story in poetry.  And it’s poetry that faithfully reflects those twenty years of a bizarre, fragmented existence.

If you need further evidence of Gloria’s extraordinary talent for survival, a couple of weeks ago she tumbled down twenty-one steps of a tiled staircase. And here she is today.





Sunday 13 October 2013

Book Launch: Water Window Mirror by Gloria Barkley



Wattle and Daub Books proudly announces a new collection of poetry by Tri-City Author and Sculptor

Gloria Barkley
Water Window Mirror

Book launch and art display at the Arts Council of New Westminster*
Queens Park, New Westminster, BC 
Saturday, 26 October 2013
1-3 PM


How does a poet describe a state in which her senses can’t be trusted, when everything she sees and hears may be unreal? In these spare, unsettling poems, moving seamlessly between terror and unexpected beauty, Gloria Barkley draws us into that fractured, hallucinatory world. Line by line in stark, fragmented imagery she strips the experience to the bone.
                                                                      —Eileen Kernaghan
                                                                      Tales from the Holograph Woods


Water Window Mirror has been a delight to produce. Gloria Barkley is a talented, good-humoured, wise woman whose writing it is a privilege to bring to the world.

For twenty-two years, Gloria lived with allergy-induced hallucinations, with all the fear, uncertainty, and confusion they produced. Tables came to life, her own children seemed unreal, and yet she carried on, living life with her trademark humour and grace.

She raised three children, cared for husband and home, obtained a degree in art, and, luckily for us, discovered and developed her talent for writing.

These beautifully sculpted poems take us along with Gloria through apparent mental illness through to a new, food additive- and hallucination-free life.

Join us at the Arts Council of New Westminster gallery for the launch of Gloria’s new book. A number of her additive-inspired sculptures will be in attendance.

Look for Gloria's full art show this spring at the Arts Council gallery.

Mom of Mulch

Table whispers
pause
admire my ambience
perfume.

Eyes
caress curves
 laughing leaves
buckled bark

earth.

  
Bio

Born in 1926, Gloria Barkley spent her early years on her family's fruit and vegetable farm near Penticton, BC. She attended Vancouver School of Art, now Emily Carr University of Art and Design, from 1964 to 1968, and subsequently studied creative writing in various west coast colleges and universities.

Her poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Event and Canadian Bookman. Her chapbook Stemwinder, featuring poetry, art, and anecdotes celebrating life in the mining town of Hedley, BC in the late 1930s, was published in 1995 by Wet Sickle Press.

Today, Gloria hand-builds clay spiders in her Coquitlam, BC studio. Each spider is named after a food additive.


Advance Praise for Water Window Mirror

These poems disturb and delight with their synesthetic surprise; quietly remind that the writing of a well-crafted little poem requires a long, arduous journey. Imagists’ poetry and Neruda’s Book of Questions come to mind. Thought provoking and invigorating, Barkley moves beyond arresting metaphor to visceral conflation. The sheer physicality, brutality, ironic beauty of Barkley’s language is her own.
                                      —Betsy Warland
                                       Breathing the Page – Reading the Act of Writing

As a person who supports many individuals with mental health issues, I very much appreciate how well Gloria is able to describe her breaks with reality. Her struggles and subsequent solution show there can be many reasons for mental disorder...Her life has a lot to teach us. She’s an inspiration.
                                      —Marja Bergen
                          and founder, Living Room faith-based mood disorder support


 Water Window Mirror
Poems by Gloria Barkley
$12.95       
ISBN 978-0-9810658-4-7

Published by
Wattle and Daub Books
West Vancouver, BC
4890 The Dale, West Vancouver, B.C., Canada V7W 1K3


*The Arts Council Gallery is located in Queen’s Park, annexed to the Centennial Lodge.
Entrance at 1st Street and 3rd Avenue or McBride Boulevard at 6th Avenue. (604) 525-3244


Friday 19 April 2013

What's Happening at Wattle and Daub Books



Quietly Pleased

For some while Wattle and Daub Books has been in deep stasis. Our titles have continued to be available, but other books we were in the process of creating have for various reasons come to naught, leading us to break from the project for a while.

We are pleased to have a new book in process, one written with simplicity and humour which tells a story of personal drama with relevance for us all.

Water Window Mirror by Gloria Barkley is the poetic rendering of a decades-long struggle with madness derived from allergies to food and food-additives. In a world where nothing could be counted on to be real, where even inanimate objects had minds of their own, Gloria raised three children, sought for and discovered her own creativity, and healed herself, with key helpers along the way.

METAMORPHOSIS


three ears become two
two bodiesone
for sure.
She handsprings
short way home.



Water Window Mirror
by Gloria Barkley
$11.95
978-0-9810658-4-7
Available October 2013
from Wattle and Daub Books
http://www.gloriabarkley.ca/ 





May all your reading bring you joy. 
— Susan Pinkus, Publisher