Crow Reads Podcast Rayanne Haines

In this episode of Crow Reads, Rayanne Haines speaks to poet, scholar, and translator Leilei Chen about her 2023 poetry collection, I Have Forsaken Heaven & Earth, But Never Forsaken You (Frontenac House). They discuss Chen’s history as a writer, translator and scholar, the act of betrayal in translation, the unknowingness and ambiguity of translation, publishing and editorial work, and the hopes for the future of translation in Canadian Publishing.

In this episode of Crow Reads, Rayanne speaks to author Astrid Blodgett about her 2023 short story collection, This is How we Disappear, (UofA Press). The collection explores the consequences of grief and denial and single moments that change perceptions, lives, and attachments forever. Crisp prose and unexpected plot twists move relatable characters through vivid outdoor settings and interior depths. Haines and Blodgett speak about storytelling techniques including ambiguity and expectation, the impact of writing setting and place, consciously focusing on creating relatable characters without deliberately considering empathy vs sympathy and writing retreats and their impact on creativity.

 

 

 

In this month’s podcast Rayanne Haines speaks with playwright and poet, Natalie Meisner about her book, It Begins in Salt, a masterful collection of poems that wander the halls of an ocean blue-collar life while rummaging the heart spaces of growing up, and evolves into mothering, labours, and loves. This is a poetry book for poets evidenced in the staccato of line details, the rhythms that echo the maritime waves, and the sounds shaped and formed by a studied writer.

Among more, they talk about craft and obedience, how performance shapes writing, the choice to write as participant, Queer identity and finding safe spaces in discovery, and the grounding if mother labour.

In this month’s podcast Shima Robinson AKA Dwennimmen speaks to us, among other things, about finding your place in the poetry community, supporting the community while advocating for artist payment, self-publishing and self-creation, and finding the intent of the poem through performance.








Amiskwaciwâskahikan
(Edmonton - Treaty 6) born poet and spoken word artist Shima Robinson embodies, with every poem, the ancient meaning of her chosen pen name. Dwennimmen is the name of an ancient African Adinkra symbol, which means strength, humility, learning and wisdom. It is no surprise, then, that this veteran of the Alberta poetry community uses a searing intellect and dynamic precision-of-language to create poetry which ushers her readers and
listeners toward greater understanding and poignant reflection. For Dwennimmen, poetry has long been a compass, a salve, an anchor and guiding light. She uses the potential and force of poetry to uncover the full range of her cerebral, linguistic and spiritual fortitude. This is why her every poem and performance
testifies to an emerging power and wisdom, an authentic, deeply human potency which she hopes to pass on to listeners and poetry-lovers around the world.

For Ali Bryan, writing is an act of imagination performed as daily ritual. For this Calgary based author, character and plot speak as one device, and she rebels against labels that diminish the value of her writing and use of humour as a tool towards story development. This award-winning author writes family the way we live family, with no judgments or pre-conceived notions of what the characters will do in the moment. In our conversation we discuss character development both from re-visiting characters like in her new novel Coq, and the understanding of character as plot. We talk about the long-term profession of writing the value of the publishing relationship, and how one manifests success in a non-linear career.

In this episode, Rayanne speaks with Margaret Macpherson about her new book, Tracking the Caribou Queen: Memoir of a Settler Girlhood. The conversation looks at the ways the memoir touches on the racism deeply embedded in the North in the 60's and 70's and her understanding of it as a child and now in self-reflecting as an adult. Macpherson discuss, with a frankness, stepping outside of her fragility, to speak as a white women, who was clear about her culpability. We discuss the framing of the memoir, the authors fear of taking up space, the violence within the book, and in her words, how "the book is about white privilege. It's about entitlement. And it's about the dawning of the child's understanding of those things as she grows.”