Ascent Aspirations Magazine Print Anthology Six Fall 2008 Contributors

Becky Alexander is a Cambridge, Ontario writer. She is a long time member of the Cambridge Writers Collective, The Kentucky Poetry Society and Green River Writers of Kentucky. Her poetry and prose have won awards, and have been published in journals and anthologies nationally and internationally, such as Guideposts, The Amethyst Review, Canadian Writers Journal, Zygote, Voices Israel, and Ascent Aspirations Anthologies I-V. She is the editor and owner of Craigleigh Press , a small literary publishing company, in Cambridge, Ontario.

Basu, a photojournalist, producer, and writer is currently a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York with masters study at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University as part of the Fellowship program. Additional Fellowships include McCloy and Harvard University Fellowship where documentary work on the holocaust in Germany was completed. Basu has written for ABC Television, The Times Newspaper and Scholastic Magazines in New York. Basu has won first place in feature writing from the NABJ and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing.

Nancy V. Bennett is a freelance writer, poet and essayist. Her work has appeared in over 300 places such as The Llewellyn Witches Calendar, the Llewellyn Moon Sign Book, The Llewellyn Herbal Almanac, On Spec, Tesseracts, In Fine Form anthology and Prairie Journal.

Jennie Bliss is co-founder of the Reading Series and Open Mike at the Pleasant Street Tea Co. in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She is a member of the Concord Poetry Center and a featured reader at Monet’s Garden in Beverly, MA. She holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School. She lives in Gloucester with her husband and three children.

April Bulmer has published many books of poetry. She is interested in the sensual aspects of feminist spirituality and has three Masters degrees in creative writing and religious studies. She lives in Cambridge, Ontario.

DM Clarence was first recruited to write a weekly teen column for an Interior BC newspaper. For many years her writing was confined to professional newsletters, reports, and academic analysis. Though she has made her living at various endeavours, her quest to write creatively has endured. She currently works as a Registered Nurse, and serves her Gulf Island community as an on-call emergency responder and firefighter. The winter 2003 edition of the e-zine, Fireworks 111, published her poem “Ant Trap”. “Breathing Behind the Mask” won an honourable mention in the Victoria Writer’s Society annual poetry contest and was published in their spring 2007 issue of Island Writer magazine. In addition to a couple of short stories in progress, Dianne’s writing project is a novel about four RNs.

Cynthia P. Colby: Brought up in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Cynthia P. Colby spend 20 years in radio news and now runs her own multi-media promotion and marketing business in Kitchener, Ontario, partnered with her black cat, Misha. While she does voicing and corporate writing for a living, she is thrilled at having a chance to express her natural sensuality in her entries to this issue- her first attempts at writing erotica.

Jen Cooper is a biology researcher on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. She has been writing for as long as she remembers and considers herself a writer before a scientist although her job description tells otherwise. She finds eternity in the weight of words and so often describes the casualties of science in her poetry to keep organisms alive and to help digest the coldness of the discipline. The love of life in every form is the most common thread in Cooper’s poetry - an exception, of course, being her erotic pieces where the theme is more often longing or cheek.

Susan Cormier: Metis multimedia writer, Susan Cormier, has won or been shortlisted for such awards as CBC’s National Literary Award, Arc Magazine’s Poem of the Year, and the Federation of B.C. Writers’ Literary Writes. Her writing has appeared in publications including Blood and Aphorisms New Fiction, Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal, West Coast Line, Arc, and two provincial anthologies. Susan has been artist-in-attendance at the herland feminist film festival, a founding editor of Rain City Review magazine, and a Western Canada representative on the SlamAmerica national performance poetry tour. Current projects include “Three on the Tree”, a screenplay examining memory and identity.

DB Cox’s writing has appeared in Underground Voices, Sein Und Werden, Dogmatika, Thunder Sandwich, Dublin Quarterly, Aesthetica, Bonfire. He has three published chapbooks: Passing For Blue (Rank Stranger Press), Lowdown and Ordinary Sorrows (Pudding House Publications) and a poetry collection, Empty Frames.

Linda Diver resides in the Comox Valley and is the present winner of the Pacific Region Arts Council award for short fiction. She is completing the final draft to her first novel but admits that poetry is her passion. When she is not writing she reads avidly and her book reviews have been featured in the Island Word.

Margaret Doyle has written poetry all of her life but more recently started writing non-fiction, exploring the world of blog posting and expanding her skills by learning the stringent rules of APA editing. Margaret has been producing writing for business for over a decade and loves helping small business’ find their message. In her writing, she strives to find the truth beneath what is not being said. Margaret lives with a very talented artist who happens to be her son and her tiny cat, Cole.

Alison Eastley lives in Tasmania, Australia with her two teenage sons, one elitist cat, a placid mastiff pup, insomnia and strange wakeful dreams. Previous work has been published in Mannequin Envy, Wicked Alice, Identity Theory, Cordite Poetry Review, Double Dare Press and many fine literary journals.

Emerging: In the icy darkness of winter past Emerging began to swell, then burst. She became a vessel for irrepressible words which surfaced, bubbling out of her in a steady stream. “Writing, both allegorical and sensual, is a release, a way of surrendering and responding to this mysterious, enrapturing adventure we call life.”

Michael Estabrook: Over the years Michael Estabrook has published a few chapbooks and appeared in some terrific poetry magazines, but you are only as good as your next poem and like a surfer looking for that perfect wave, he is a poet prowling for that perfect poem. Right now he is looking for that perfect poem in his wife, who just happens to be the most beautiful woman he has ever known. If he finds it anywhere he’ll find it in her.

Susan Fenner (nee Crowe) is a former dancer, choreographer and teacher of dance and drama. She analyzes her dreams, co-pilots their Cessna with her husband, and volunteers with Grannies à Gogo in Vernon, BC. In her retirement she is studying writing, has published several magazine articles, a play in South Africa, and most recently a story in The Danforth Review.

Peggy Fletcher, Sarnia, Ontario, has written poetry for many years, and her work has appeared in literary journals such as Mobius, Room of One’s Own, Antigonish Review and others, as well as in book form. She is married with five grown daughters, and she also paints and dabbles in photography.

Grant Flint has been published in Poetry, Poetry New York, The Monterey Poetry Review, and other print and online publications. He gives talks on how to do the personal ads, and has completed a series of seven sensual novels.

Keith Garebian of Mississauga, Ontario is the author of three books of poetry, Reservoir of Ancestors, Frida: Paint Me As A Volcano, and Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems and a poetry chapbook, Samson’s Hair and Other Satiric Fantasies.

Edward Gates was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, April 23, 1950. He has an MA(history) from the University of New Brunswick and a BED from Saint Thomas University. He taught school in northern Saskatchewan for three years. He is a blueberry farmer, karate instructor and poet living in Belleisle Creek, NB, with his wife Dorina Gates and their three children. He has won several writing competitions, including the Alfred G Bailey Prize, Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick Poetry Prize and Poet’s Corner Award. He has had over one hundred and fifty poems published in anthologies and in over thirty-five journals in Canada, the United States and Britain.

Kim Goldberg is an amateur dragon wrangler and professional daydreamer. Her latest book, Ride Backwards on Dragon (Leaf Press, 2007), was a Finalist for the Lampert Memorial Award for poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Geist, Prism International, Event, filling Station, The Arabesques Review and elsewhere. She is the creator of The Dude Chronicles and other book art under her imprint of Pig Squash Press in Nanaimo, BC. Visit: Pig Squash Press.

Katherine L. Gordon lives to write in a secluded river valley in Ontario. She has two full collections, many chapbooks, and is an award-winning poet whose work has been published in many languages. Her latest book Myth Weavers, a collection of Canadian myths and legends, Serengeti Press, was released in April, National Poetry Month, 2007. She is the resident columnist for Ancient Heart Magazine, England. Katherine believes that poetry is the link uniting all cultures. Her newest book, Translating Shadows, was released by Craigleigh Press in May, 2008.

Craig Grant was born on a pool table in Val Marie, Saskatchewan in mid-June of 1955, making him a Gemini, the sign of prevaricators, thieves and late night talk show hosts. As well as, of course, writers. It wasn’t until he went to Nepal in 1978 and studied the Akashik Records in a remote ashram belonging to the Black Hat Society, an enclave of time-travelers, that he realized, in the twenty-third hour of a past-life regression experience inside a salt-water flotation tank, that his mother, a one-time prostitute, had been a guinea pig in some nefarious drug experiments dreamed up by the CIA, at the University of Regina, when she was pregnant with him, in the first trimester. This epiphany, plus being hit by lightning at age 12, plus eleven other near-death experiences, had a profound impact upon his psyche. He began having psychic dreams. He began travelling around the country on the psychic fair circuit, with a laptop loaded with astrological software, a Salvador Dali tarot deck, three astral dice and a sign that said, simply, “the psychic detective”.

Penelope Hagan-Braun grew up in a northern Ontario gold-mining town. She studied Political Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, then moved west and fell in love with the ocean. Now, she’s a youth worker and freelance writer/artist living in Victoria with her husband and two children. She still carries the underground in her bones. Check out her website at Lone Peep.

Shelley Haggard was born and raised in Fort St. John, BC; and has resided in the south (Nanaimo, Abbotsford and Mission) for twenty years. She began writing at an early age, using books and writing as an escape. She had a poem “If” published by The Poetry Institute of Canada in a 1995 anthology named Reflections by Midnight. In 2002 she attended a poetry.com and ISP convention in Los Angeles in November 2002 and won second prize for her poem “Depressionville Hotel”. She has had a poem, “Bamboo Speak” published by Trevor Corolon of the University College of the Fraser Valley, in a project called: Down in the Valley: An Anthology of Writing From the Fraser Valley. She won the spring poetry contest in the 2005 issue of the rag: a progressive women’s magazine with circulation from Vancouver to Agassiz with her poem “Better Than”. Recently she has had poems featured on the Autumn Brook Gallery website and a poem accepted by the e-magazine Descending Darkness. She has several poems in the anthology Poetic Spirits of the Valley-25 Years of the MSA Poets Potpourri Society. She has video poems online at You Tube and you can also read more of her work at Poets Potpourri Society. Shelley’s other interests include photography and water-colour painting. She works as a renovator and house painter.

Lea Harper is a recipient of The LaPointe Prize for poetry, double-winner of The People’s Political Poem contest, shortlisted for the international Being at Work Poetry Challenge and runner-up in the Surrey International Writers Conference Contest. She is the author of two collections of poems, All That Saves Us (Black Moss Press, 1998), Shadow Crossing (Black Moss Press, 2000) and a chapbook, Unclaimed Baggage (Littlefishcart Press, 2005). Ms. Harper’s poems have been widely published in literary journals in Canada, U.S. and the UK. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and The Canada Council for both music and poetry. Her songs have received a Juno nomination and won a Canadian Reggae Award. She lives on a lake in the Haliburton Highlands, north of Toronto where she is the Arts & Entertainment feature writer for the Highlands Communicator.

Jill Meriel Harrington-Fox’s poetry has been published in more than 30 anthologies and periodicals and has won prizes and honourable mentions. She works for the Region of Waterloo and lives in Cambridge where she has been an active member of the Cambridge Writers Collective for many years. Her first poetry chapbook Where the Tide Changes was launched by Serengeti Press, 2006.

Edel Orieta Koh was born in 1973 in San Francisco. She completed studies in psychology and cello performance in Boston, Helsinki (Finland), and Munich (Germany). Her cycle of poems and short stories, the luci.a variations will be released in January 2009. Edel lives as a poet and classical cellist in Berlin.

Caitlin Krause studied English and Interdisciplinary Arts at Duke University and graduated last year from the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Her poetry has recently appeared in Commonthought Magazine, The Homestead Review and the 2008 Her Mark datebook.

Eileen Egerton Lampard was born in England, spent many years in Saskatchewan and now lives in Hamilton, Ontario. She enjoys writing poetry and short stories. Recently her poems have been published in Hammered Out.

Linda Larson recently published her first collection of poems Washing the Stones (Ibbetson Press). Larson has been writing and publishing poetry since graduating from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins Univrsisty in 1970 and has worked as a journalist and editor for decades.

Linda A. Lavid is a writer from Buffalo, NY. She has published four books: Rented Rooms: A Collection of Short Fiction; Paloma: A Novel; Thirst: A Collection of Short Fiction; and Composition: A Fiction Writer’s Guide for the 21st Century. Please visit her Web Site.

John B. Lee’s work has been published internationally in over 500 publications. The latest of his fifty published titles are: But Where Were the Horses of Evening, Serengeti Press, 2007; Left Hand Horses: meditations on influence and the imagination, Black Moss Press, 2007; and The Place That We Keep After Leaving, Black Moss Press, 2008. He has received over sixty prestigious awards for his work including the CBC Literary Award, two-time winner of the People’s Poetry Award, and the inaugural Souwesto Award. In 2005 he was named Poet Laureate of Brantford in perpetuity.

Barbara Lefcourt was born in Brooklyn, New York. She holds degrees from Barnard College, Columbia University and Yeshiva University. She migrated to Kitchener-Waterloo in 1963. She started writing poetry as she neared retirement from teaching Adult Literacy and Basic Skills. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, chapbooks and journals, which include Hammered Out, Tower Poetry and the AguaTerra, Borderlines and Spring 2008 Editions of Ascent Aspirations Magazine. Barb is a member of The Cambridge Writers’ Collective and The Ontario Poetry Society.

Cynthia Lelos: After living in England for 5 years, Cynthia Lelos is currently living in Italy, writing, and teaching English and writing to non-native speakers. She continues as always to write poetry and short fiction. She is working on a compilation of short stories about Portuguese immigrants to the US in the 1950s/1960s. She has won numerous awards for both poetry and short fiction.

Bernice Lever, of Bowen Island, BC enjoys reading and reciting poetry. Her 8th book of poems, was Never a Straight Line, Black Moss, 2007. She is active in many writing associations, publishes internationally and does freelance editing. Colour of Words

Ellaraine Lockie writes poetry, essays and children’s stories. She has received poetry residencies at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA, her eleventh Pushcart Prize nomination, the 2008 Writecorner Press Poetry Prize, the 2008 Skysaje Poetry Prize, the 2007 Elizabeth R. Curry Prize and finalist status for the 2007 Joy Harjo Poetry Award and the Creekwalker Poetry Prize. Recently released publications are Mod Gods and Luggage Straps, a poetry/art broadside from BrickBat Revue and her fifth chapbook, Blue Ribbons at the County Fair, a collection of first-place contest winning poems from PWJ Publishing.

Kate Marshall Flaherty has been caught committing Random Acts of Poetry in Ontario this year, and her first book of poetry is entitled Tilted Equilibrium by Hidden Brook Press (2006). Her next book, entitled Hobbledehoy will be launched by Lyrical Myrical Press March 2008. She has won several awards including Word Magazine, THIS Magazine, and was shortlisted for the Descant’s Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem and Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. She teaches yoga, leads teen retreats, is a founding member of the Children’s Peace Theatre, has three spirited children and a husband who recognizes poetry as her life-line.

Linda Martin: Born in Wales, Linda Martin immigrated to Canada in 1965. After raising her family, she completed an M.A. in English at UVic. Currently she works as publicist for the Heritage Group of Publishing Companies. When she is not writing media releases and pitching publicity angles, she writes poetry, believing it to be a way of dealing with life’s chaos. Her poems have appeared in Poems from the Basement, The Invention of Birds, Crabs, String to Bow, Quills, Panty Lines, and People’s Poetry Letter. She lives on a small hobby farm in Nanaimo where she also loves to paint.

Rosemary McCallum is a retired high school Mathematics teacher. She holds a glider pilot’s license. Rosemary and her husband brought up three daughters on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario. The family sails, skis cross country and soars, anything without a motor.

Susan McCaslin is a poet and retired English professor, the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Lifting the Stone (Seraphim Editions, 2007). She has edited two anthologies on sacred poetry, A Matter of Spirit and Poetry and Spiritual Practice, is on the editorial board of Event: the Douglas College Review, and is a poetry editor for The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Susan lives in Fort Langley, British Columbia with her husband, and has a daughter in university. She is currently working on a new poetry cycle called Demeter Goes Skydiving and developing workshops and a book on the mystics and the poetics of mystical experience.

Tara McDaniel currently works at a rare books and manuscripts archive specializing in Western Americana. It is here, among the dusty books and between the “stragglings-in” of researchers, that she writes her poetry. Her previous work has appeared in Words-Myth and Bellowing Ark, and is forthcoming in Womb Poetry.

Michael Meagher, 26 years old and born in Ottawa, has spent the last few years in British Columbia. He usually spends eight months of the year landscaping and for the remaining months travels, writes, and occasionally works. His poetry has appeared in a few literary journals.

Judith Millar has over 100 published short stories, essays, poems and song lyrics to her credit. She’s won many awards for her creative writing. She especially enjoys writing and giving readings of her humorous works. A former corporate communications manager, she moved to Nanaimo, BC from Kitchener, Ontario in 2007.

Mary Ann Moore lives in Nanaimo, B.C. where she teaches a life writing course at Vancouver Island University and facilitates circles that integrate writing, dance, visual art, singing and improv. Mary Ann created her own business, Flying Mermaids Writing Circles & Retreats, in 1997 and since that time has encouraged many to begin and sustain a writing practice. Her poetry has been produced on CD, When My Heart is Open, and published in chapbooks edited by Patrick Lane, in a variety of anthologies, periodicals and literary journals. Her personal essays, fiction, columns and book reviews have been published in Prairie Fire, Vitality Magazine, Ascent Magazine, Monday Magazine, The Vancouver Sun and others. She is currently working on a collection of poetry as well as a work of non-fiction, Writing Home, that blends memoir, poetry and writing guide.

Mark A. Murphy was born in 1969 in England. He studied Philosophy as an under-graduate and poetry as a post-graduate. In 1996 he published a small collection of poems, Tin Cat Alley (Spout Publications). He is presently looking for a publisher for his new manuscript, Night-watch Man and Muse. Most recently, his poems have been featured in Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Scotland, The Paris Atlantic Journal (France), The Istanbul Literature Review (Turkey), The Invisible Fire Journal (US), The Tampa Review (US), Transitions Magazine (Canada), LiNQ (Australia), Iota (UK), The Stinging Fly (Eire) and on the deaddrunkdublin website (Eire).

Annebelle Murray, born in England and raised in Quebec, lives and writes in Uxbridge, Ontario. A graduate of Queen’s University, with career flourishes in music and design, she is now a nutrition/wellness professional and the mother of two much-loved sons. Annabelle was long-listed once in a UK poetry contest. She has been published a number of times and won a few poetry prizes. She received a fine blue mug from the CBC for reading her stuff on the radio. She gets noticed in her home-town mostly because she writes sexy stuff, and can change out of her running shorts and snap on a garter belt and stockings faster than you can say the words ‘poetry reading’ … no phone booths required.

Jude Neale was brought up on Vancouver Island and is a trained Mezzo-Soprano and poet. She says, “My poems are like snapshots appearing on the page. They give a brief but intense look at love, sex, relationships, nature and desire. I prefer to keep my poems short to better capture the moments and images that are constantly filtering through my brain. With the belief that in brevity lies power, I like to start with a larger version of a poem and whittle it down to its essential self.”

Shane Neilson is a writer from New Brunswick. He published Exterminate My Heart, his first collection of poetry, with Frog Hollow Press in 2008.

Debbie Okun Hill Debbie Okun Hill is an executive member of The Ontario Poetry Society (TOPS) and a former public relations specialist with Fanshawe College, Lakehead University, and The Winnipeg Art Gallery. This summer, as the recipient of the 2007 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, she launched her first poetry chapbook Swaddled in Comet Dust: A Collection of Award-winning Poems (Beret Days Press). A full-time gardener of words, she also enjoys promoting other poets/writers by co-hosting a monthly Spoken Word event in southwestern Ontario.

Diane Attwell Palfrey Diane Attwell Palfrey was born in Toronto and has lived in Cambridge for the past nineteen years. She is a poet and prose writer. Diane is a member of the Cambridge Writers Collective and has poetry published by the Waterloo-Wellington CAA, Serengeti Press, Craigleigh Press, Hammered Out, The Ontario Poetry Society, Cruickston Charitable Research Reserve/RARE, and Ascent Aspirations Magazine.

Emily Paskevics is a second-year student at the University of Toronto, wavering between a History Specialist, and an English Specialist, or an exhilarating combination of both. Previously, she has been published in Young Voices and the AguaTerra 2007 issue for Ascent Aspirations Magazine.

Elizabeth Rhett Woods has published four novels, The Yellow Volkswagen, The Amateur, Double Entry Death, and Beyond the Pale, and five books of poetry, most recently, 1970: A Novel Poem (Ekstasis Editions; 2007), For more information and excerpts of her work, visit her Web Site.

Gerard Rochford is a widely published poet living in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is a featured poet on the American website Poets Against War. His latest collection is The Holy Family and Other Poems (Koo Press), a meditation on belief and disbelief. A founder member of Dead Good Poets, he convenes monthly poetry readings in Aberdeen. Gerard’s poem “My Father’s Hand” was selected by the writer, Janice Galloway, as one of the Best 20 Poems of 2006 for the Scottish Poetry Library. He has been a guest reader for Planet Earth Poetry at the Black Stilt, Victoria, B.C. where he has read many times. He is a psychotherapist by trade and has many children and grandchildren.

Cindy Shantz has had a relationship with almost every genre and even some one-night stands. Recently she became smitten with poetry, spoken word and storytelling. Her previous loves, which no doubt she will return to, are personal essays and dramatic monologues. Cindy’s essays have been published in several newspapers including The Globe and Mail. She lived in Switzerland for nine years where her writing was published in English newspapers and in an anthology, Ticking Along Free. Back in Canada in 2004, she wrote and produced her first play, Cat Tales:“What’s in a Name”.

Claire Sherwood was born in England but grew up in Holland, Germany and various cities across Canada in rented furnished apartments. She now lives in Montreal where she owns a house full of furniture and sits at her desk writing poetry and letters to her far-flung friends.

Johnmichael Simon was born in England in 1938 and raised in South Africa from the age of ten. He has been living in Israel almost continuously since 1955. He currently lives in the village of Metulla, Israel on the border of Lebanon, with fellow poet and artist Helen Bar-Lev, their cats and a dog. John writes poetry every day; some of it wins prizes and honorable mentions in anthologies in Israel and abroad. He is a member of the board of ‘Voices’ the Israeli English speaking poetry group and has published several illustrated books of poetry including Silly Wishes, a book of children’s verse and Cyclamens and Swords and Other Poems About the Land of Israel (Ibbetson Press, Boston, Mass., USA) in collaboration with Helen. John has been guest poet at readings in England, the US and Canada and contributes to numerous Internet publications and print Anthologies. He is member of the Voices Israel Anthology editorial board and also a member of the Canadian Poetry Association and the Canadian Federation of Poets.

Geoffrey Smagacz is eking out a living in rural upstate New York. His writing has appeared in The Times Newsweekly, Candelabrum, and The Midwest Book Review.

Patricia Smekal: After spending half her life in Australia, Patricia Smekal returned with her husband to her native west coast, settled on Vancouver Island, retired and resumed a love-affair with words. She has since attended summer sessions at the Victoria School of Writing, participated in master classes conducted by poet Patrick Lane, and facilitated poetry courses for Malaspina Elder College. Pat strongly believes poetry is most powerful when read aloud, and is a frequent reader at WordStorm, a monthly spoken-word event in Nanaimo. Her work has been published in various anthologies and magazines, including Island Writer, Arborealis, Tower Poetry, A World of Words, and Ascent Aspirations Anthologies One, Two and Four.

Kathleen Szoke is writer and poet living in Burlington, Ontario.

Lynn Tait lives in Sarnia, Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in four Ascent Aspirations anthologies, Quills, Carousel, Windsor Review and Contemporary Verse 2. She was co-editor and illustrator/ photographer for the 2008 TOPS anthology Sounding the Seconds and her photo won first prize in the 2008 Toward the Light:Journal of Reflective Work & Image photography contest.

Mildred Tremblay lives in Nanaimo, BC. Her latest book of poetry The Thing About Dying is available from Oolichan Books. She is the recipient of many awards, amongst them The Arc National Poetry Award, and The League of Canadian Poets Award. Recently she placed first and second in the Victoria Erotica Festival Poetry contest.

Beatrice van de Vis, dreamer, aesthete, dilettante, poet, was born in Buenos Aires of Dutch, Spanish and Berber descent and now lives in London with her husband. Her poems have been published in Blithe Spirit, the Journal of the British Haiku Society.

Wendy Visser is a Cambridge writer whose recent publications include three Ascent Aspirations anthologies, Tower Poetry, Vol. 56 No. 2, Winter 2007 and Vol. 57 No. 1, Summer 2008, Feast of Equinox, published by Katherine Gordon for the Valley Poets, 2007, The Poem-A-Day contest sponsored by Cambridge Libraries and Cambridge Centre for the Arts, 2008 and haiku by two, a chapbook by Wendy Visser and Becky Alexander, Craigleigh Press, 2008. One of Wendy’s poems placed second in a Craigleigh Press sponsored contest. Her book, Riding A Wooden Horse, recently won the Waterloo Regional Arts Council best book award and in 2008, Wendy was the recipient of A Bernice Adams Award in the category of Communication and Literary Arts. She is the president of the Cambridge Writers Collective and a member of The Valley Poets, Tower Poetry Society and T.O.P.S.

Cristina Watson is a teacher and aspiring poet who lives a mere sixteen blocks from the Pacific Ocean. She loves to take walks down by the water and strolls in the urban forest. She has enjoyed seeing a few of her poems in local publications.

S. J. White is a retired photographer. He has written non-fiction all his life and more recently, poetry and short stories. He is published in anthologies and literary magazines. He lives in Brantford, Ontario, with his wife.

Sean Wiebe is an assistant professor of language and literacy at the University of Prince Edward Island. His papers and poetry appear in a variety of journals and book chapters in the areas of the arts, teacher education and curriculum studies. Web Site