In September, I was pleased to be asked to help celebrate Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press’ 45^th anniversary by participating in an online reading series.

My reading, filmed by Barbara Curry Mulcahy against a background of beautiful Slocan Lake, was posted in October on YouTube.

In the video, I read brief excerpts from my two books published by Turnstone.

Turnstone Press began in 1976, and in 1979 they published a chapbook, A Planet Mostly Sea, consisting of two long poems of mine. One, “Asphalt Hours, Asphalt Air,” rewrites T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as set in the industrial milieu of Windsor’s auto plants, based on my own factory experience, a stint as writer-in-residence at the University of Windsor 1975-76, and teaching across the river in Detroit the following year for Wayne State University. The other poem, “Long Beach Suite” is a response to camping beside the Pacific on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Then in 2007, Turnstone published A Vain Thing, which collects four novellas of mine on the theme of how vanity informs such issues as racism and xenophobia, and also intimate relationships and, er, some literary artists’ sense of themselves.

Reading with me is Calgary author Micheline Maylor. She is a former Calgary poet laureate, a Calgary Public Library author-in-residence, consulting editor-in-chief of FreeFall magazine, and acquisitions editor for Calgary’s Frontenac House Press’ Quartet poetry series. She reads from her latest collection, The Bad Wife, published by University of Alberta Press, 2021.