Catherine Owen’s 13 Lovers

With the slow bleed of so many Edmonton poets/artists to the West Coast, it is rare and most welcome when a Vancouverite of Catherine Owen’s talent and infectious level of community engagement (and fondness for the vino) blows into town to put down roots. I am not sure that was her plan when she and [...]

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Jason Christie, Like Wolves

Shortly after Jason Christie headlined at the September 2006 Olive, i-ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract) went viral. That a poetry manuscript had been picked up by one of Canada’s pre-eminent sci-fi publishers signalled i-ROBOT was something distinct in Canadian literature.
Two years later, i-ROBOT continues to challenge us as readers and writers to think about what is possible in [...]

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Three Olive alumni win at the WGA 2008 Alberta Literary Awards

June 7—A gala at the Royal Alberta Museum after the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s day-long AGM and mini-conference celebrated some outstanding achievements by Alberta writers working across many genres, three of whom have been Olive Series feature poets.

Myrna Kostash received the Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement; she read for The Olive in September, 2003.
Tim [...]

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Olga Costopoulos x2

Olga Costopoulos has read for The Olive two times now—once in February of 2006 and once back in March of 2002. When she is not teaching English literature or Creative Writing at the University of Alberta (or looking after her garden; or introducing students and friends to authentic Greek cuisine; or terrorizing the high seas [...]

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I delicate myself to the Forest of Disappearances

Forest of Disappearances
Shawna Lemay
Shawna Lemay’s Forest of Disappearances was only the second chapbook I’d put together for the Olive Reading Series. I remember fumbling around with substandard page-layout programs and going back and forth to our printer to come up with a finished format that looked good and could be printed with minimal hassle. (The [...]

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E.D. Blodgett’s The Language that Is Theirs

Governor General’s Literary Award winner and Edmonton’s Poet Laureate, E.D. Blodgett, treated us to an evening of unforgetable poetry on April 8, 2008. He read selections old and new. And while copies of some of his Apostrophes, An Ark of Koans, and Elegy were available for sale, he has generously consented to having his Olive [...]

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