Okanagan College and the Mackie Lake House are hosting a free poetry reading by the Mackie house’s latest writer-in-residence.
Saskatchewan writer Brenda Schmidt arrived at the Coldstream heritage site this week and will be reading from her works at Vernon’s Gallery Vertigo Monday.
During her two-week stay, Schmidt will be working on a manuscript that crosses the genres of poetry and creative non-fiction. The result will be published by the college’s Kalamalka Press in 2012.
A visual artist, as well as a writer, Schmidt lives in Creighton, a small mining town on the Canadian Shield in Northern Saskatchewan.
The author of three poetry collections, A Haunting Sun, More Than Three Feet of Ice and Cantos From Wolverine Creek, her work has been published, performed, shown and broadcast across Canada.
While living in the north, she has worked as a freelance reporter and photographer for small circulation newspapers, written a birding column, and volunteered in a recycling centre.
A naturalist, birdwatcher and active blogger, Schmidt also specializes in the fine art of road trips.
Praised by such contemporaries as Lorna Crozier, Schmidt has emerged as a distinctive voice, necessary and appropriate for the conscience of our time.
“Every once in a while a poet comes along whom you suddenly know you’ve been waiting for. Clear-eyed, original, imaginative. Brenda Schmidt is such a poet. She makes a familiar landscape unfamiliar in a most disarming way,” said Crozier.
Bill Robertson of Saskatoon’s Star Phoenix called Cantos From Wolverine Creek: “terse, fiercely unsentimental observations of life as many people live it.”
Readers can get a sneak peak of Schmidt’s writings on her blog, Alone on the Boreal Stage, at birdschmidt.blogspot.com.
Monday’s public reading at Gallery Vertigo, 3001 -31st St., downtown Vernon (upstairs), starts at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.
