I am pleased to announce that Alfred Gustav Press will publish a chapbook of my poems about the summer 2024 wildfire evacuations in the Slocan Valley. The chapbook, called Evacuation Route, will appear in July 2026.

I had participated indirectly in the evacuations, hosting an evacuee—writing friends of mine—from each of the two villages ordered abandoned, Slocan and Silverton. I wrote one poem, “Fire Talk” (which appeared in the June 2025 issue of The Literary Review of Canada) in the fall of 2024, and thought I had said all I had to say on the subject. But new poems on aspects of the evacuation’s effects on the people of the valley continued to show up. In the end, I had 12 poems on this topic I like. Evacuation Route will include nine of these.

North Vancouver’s Alfred Gustav Press is a subscription-based chapbook publisher, under the direction of the Governor-General’s Literary Award-winning poet David Zieroth. In December 2020, they published my chapbook, The House Dreaming in the Snow. That publication consisted of nine poems, of which six were included in my 2024 collection from Frontenac House, How Can You Live Here?.