Editor’s Notes

Happy New Year, Dear Readers.

We begin 2020 with baklava, marigolds, ravens, risk management and emergency response, all fitting poetic discourse for the start of a new year in the dystopian twenty-first century.

Perhaps one of your new year's resolutions was to take a writing workshop. Check out the Bywords.ca News under Workshops to see the offerings from the Ottawa Public Library and also the Bywords Guide to Creative Writing Programs in Ottawa, which includes workshops offered by local writers and academic institutions. If you want to get into a creative writing workshop at Carleton or the University of Ottawa in the fall, a workshop with a local writer would be a good way to prepare your portfolio.

You might also want to look at writers' retreats, which offer time away from the day-to-day, workshops with fellow writers and mentorship from an established writer. You can do a retreat in Ontario at Pelee Island or in Toronto or go further afield to Banff or Sage Hill, Saskatchewan. There are many options.

At the start of the year, there are many events to look forward to, including VERSeFest, Ottawa's annual poetry festival, which takes place in March, and the Ottawa International Writers Festival at the end of April. If you're going out of town, think of planning a trip to Montreal in April for Blue Metropolis, or go to Toronto to visit Canada's only poetry-only bookstore, Knife Fork Book. If you're going to be in Vancouver, plan to attend Growing Room, a feminist literary festival that celebrates diversity in the arts in March. Newfoundland has a fun festival of books, music, art, food and culture called Ochre Pit Cove that takes place in June.

If you'd prefer to stay inside and read for awhile, get a subscription to local chapbook publisher above/ground press, order books from Picton's Invisible Publishing run by former Bywords selection committee member, Leigh Nash. Or enjoy the audio poetry of Brick Books new Brickyard feature. And of course, come back to Bywords.ca to read a new issue of poetry every month, starting on the fifteenth.

However you spend your year, I hope it is filled with poetry.

Thanks to our selection committee this month:

Jesse Aubin
Robert Martin Evans
Margo Lapierre
Kemisha Newman
Ashley Prince
Jade Riordan
Carol A. Stephen
JC Sulzenko
Rob Thomas

If you have comments, suggestions, critiques or good conversation over a pot of tea to offer, please contact me at amanda@bywords.ca.

Amanda Earl
Managing Editor

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