Kim Fahner & Frances Boyle: In Conversation

Openwork and Limestone is a finely-wrought and potent new poetry collection from one of Canada’s most compelling poets. In Frances Boyle’s powerful vision, the rituals of contemporary women are seen through the lens of Celtic warrior queens, and goddesses. The natural and created worlds – as they run, as Boyle says, “through the funnel / of my palms” – are a constant source of awe and woman’s strength. A reverie that allows in the brutality of history and prehistory, as well as the joys. “The unconscious / swimming upward. What won’t stay buried rises / through rocks, rough-ridden and rusty.” Boyle’s Openwork and Limestone turns inward and outward at the same time, telling our multifarious collective human story so that it feels like our own intimate family history.

Emptying the Ocean is a poetic journey based on the ancient Irish immram tales—the soul voyages taken by a woman who moves mystically through the four elements and the spirited Otherworld. Water, earth, air, and fire are woven through with imagination, inspiration, and spirit. The voice of the selkie bookends the collection, and the character of the sailor finds himself caught up in her wake. Rooted firmly in Irish myth and lore, with references to strong female figures who shapeshift and move between dimensions, there are Atlantic echoes of both Ireland and Newfoundland at work in these poems.

This can be attended in person here at TAP, and can also be attended virtually.

Registration for the virtual talk can be found here: https://westernuniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_blu8jTtFSyeMkyX5F_QXSg?fbclid=IwAR1hOOkn_GhdNeCxBVEwJNOu0AXHBKdWsVjkZygtL8UYmfbO9Ekh-eyrTiE#/registration

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Kim Fahner

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. She has published two chapbooks, You Must Imagine the Cold Here (Scrivener, 1997) and Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023), as well as five full books of poetry, including: braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001), The Narcoleptic Madonna (Penumbra Press, 2012), Some Other Sky (Black Moss Press, 2017), These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019), and Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). Kim is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a full member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She was Poet Laureate for the City of Greater Sudbury from 2016-18. In March 2021, Kim's poem, "Beekeeping," won first place in the League of Canadian Poets' National Broadsheet Competition. She has written poetry book reviews that have been published in Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry Magazine, Herizons, The Fiddlehead, & periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Kim is also an editor for Consilience, an online journal that explores the spaces where the sciences and arts meet. Poetically, and philosophically, her areas of interest include eco poetry and ekphrastic poetry.

Frances Boyle

Frances Boyle is a writer of fiction and poetry living in Ottawa, Ontario on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people. She was raised on the Canadian prairies, mostly in Regina on Treaty 4 territory, the traditional territory of the Cree and Saulteaux, Assiniboine and Métis. She went to university in Regina, and in Montreal and Toronto before moving to Vancouver for a number of years. She has been making stories since before I could hold a pen. She's written most of her life, with pauses or minimal output during years of raising a family and working in the legal field. Since being able to devote more time to her craft, her short stories and poems have been published in literary magazines throughout Canada and in the United States, and in anthologies with themes as varied as the films of Alfred Hitchcock, mothers and daughters, form poetry, and sexual assault. Her most recent book is Openwork and Limestone, her third poetry collection, published by Frontenac House in October 2022. Seeking Shade, her collection of short stories from The Porcupine's Quill was published in August 2020. Her first poetry collection, Light-carved Passages was published by Buschek Books in 2014, and her second, This White Nest, by Quattro Books in 2019. Her novella, Tower, with Fish Gotta Swim Editions came out in June, 2018.

About Wordsfest

Words is celebrating their tenth anniversary in November 2023, featuring a hybrid program of onsite and online events. The theme this year is "Crisis, Creativity & Care." More info at wordsfest.ca