Welcome.
Jenna Butler was born in Norwich, England in 1980, but has spent the majority of her life on the prairies of western Canada. Her work has appeared in literary magazines, journals and anthologies around the world, and her poetry has garnered, among others, the James Patrick Folinsbee Prize, and has been produced by the CBC. She is the editor of more than twenty-five collections of poetry in Canada and Europe, and is the founding editor of Rubicon Press. More →
Updates
May 13, 2009
A roadtrip and some other poetic shenanigans...
The Edmonton Poetry Festival is over for another year. Mid-April saw the city welcome in several talented poets from across Canada, in addition to many of our local luminaries, for five days of events and readings. What a blast! As always, it’s amazing to have the chance to meet poets whose work one has read and admired.
The Poetry in the Schools program met with phenomenal success, due 100% to the dedicated guest poets and the teacher organizers at each of the four participating schools. Thirty guest poets, four schools, two days…wow! I can’t wait for next year, when a number of additional schools will be coming on board and the program will grow even bigger. As one of the students at Harry Ainlay High School said after Elizabeth Bachinsky’s reading, having the chance to talk with real writers and to see what poetry is all about is incredible. I can’t say enough good things about the Poetry in the Schools program. I support it with all my heart.
The Festival had a flying end for me as I headed out with a posse of poets for readings in Hinton and Jasper on the final day of the Fest. It was part of the League of Canadian Poets’ annual Western Swing fundraiser, organized by Alberta rep Dymphny Dronyk. Nine of us from across the West carpooled to the mountains for a day and a half of amazing poetry, great audiences, and the chance to get to know each other that only a jam-packed, fantastic roadtrip can give. I came away celebrating wonderful new friends and renewed ties with old friends, and I’m eagerly looking forward to whatever shenanigans we get up to on tour next year!
May means a lot of things. The winding down of lecture season and the PhD on hold for the summer. A move out to our farm in a week’s time to start the market garden on my own while my husband finishes his teaching year. In the silence of a month and a half’s solo time, I hope for quiet writing evenings out by the fire, listening to the coyotes in the distance.
All good things to you for a beautiful summer.
— Jenna
March 28, 2009
Breaking green
It’s that time of year when you scarcely dare to hope for spring; when your mind is firmly convinced that any stray thought of green will jinx April for certain. And yet, you catch yourself thinking, there are Canada geese on the still-frozen river. Poplars in the valley turning a barely-perceptible green. Spring can’t be that far away…
I’m back in Edmonton from an amazing trip to England, where things were explosively green and all the daffodils were blooming (sensory overload for one whose plane had to be towed out to the runway at Edmonton’s International Airport by a snowplow!). The trip, focused on a meeting with my PhD supervisor and the delivery of a lecture at a northern university, reminded me of just how strongly one can be anchored in different countries simultaneously, and how privileged I feel to be able to call two places home.
Spring is bringing a great deal (if not green, quite yet). Edmonton’s annual Poetry Festival is on the horizon, for which I’m blissfully coordinating a mammoth crew of talented Canadian poets in the Poetry in the Schools Program. The four schools involved, from elementary to high school, are eagerly awaiting their literary guests. It’s truly amazing to see the kids being able to share in the poets’ love for what they do, and on such a tremendous scale. Big kudos to the staff involved in the program at each of the four schools; without their enthusiasm and determination, none of this would be possible!
Spring also brings with it reading tours to Hinton and Jasper as part of the League’s annual Western Swing, several college and university guest lectures on small press publishing, and caps off with a four-day-long visit to Grande Prairie as a panel presenter for the Iskoteo Arts Festival, in conjunction with the awards ceremony for The Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards. As always, I am tremendously grateful to those who have organized the events, and I am so excited to be taking part!
In the meantime, our living room is full of seedlings, patiently waiting out the snow so they can be driven out to the acreage and tucked into the summer market garden beds. The sight of that new green growth gives me a little boost of added patience. After all, if the geese are back, spring’s gotta be just around the corner…right?
— Jenna
February 13, 2009
On the cusp of spring...
I hadn’t realized until this year just how strongly my creative processes are tied to the light coming back into the days. In the past, teaching seven to five, essentially dark to dark in the winter, I’d never noticed the light creeping back after the solstice…simply turned around one day and it was midsummer, and school was out.
Now, gifted with time to write, I realize just how much the return of the light in a northern winter spurs me creatively. There’s something about the added minutes and hours, sunset pushing back from four pm. to five and six, that feels like the earth stretching a little. Joints uncrimping. A bloom coming back to the surface of things, the way new poplar bark greens up in April.
I find myself with four poetry collections on the go, high-wiring from one to the next whenever I need a change of scenery. Two are historical in nature; one very lyrical; the last, experimental sound/performance poetry. A novel’s also added itself to my days (for someone with a short attention span, this is a big deal!). I read novels voraciously, and have a high regard for those who write them and who can marshall their thoughts in such detail over great distances. Novels don’t tend to stay with me, which is why this one, bound and determined as it is to be written, is such a surprise. I call it my runaway train. We’ll see if it gets where it so desperately seems to want to go, or if it derails somewhere along the way…
— Jenna
January 9, 2009
Into the new
It’s interesting to watch the calm grey each morning cycle more quickly toward the light since the solstice in December. And just like that, the poetry year, too, seems to be picking up steam…
I feel very fortunate to be busy in a number of ways as the year begins to stretch out: readings, tours, a bit of lecturing, and planning the Poetry in the Schools program for this year’s Edmonton Poetry Festival. A lengthy trip to the UK is in the works for early spring. All of this, too, is underwritten by the eager anticipation of spending the late spring and all of the summer on our acreage, writing and tending the market garden.
A good start to the year, this: the promises of green things, time, and poetry whenever there is a spare moment.
— Jenna
November 3, 2008
Losing the light...
On into the short, cool days of November. I’m always slightly ambivalent about the turning back of the clocks; perhaps it’s because the light rises so late anyway in the mornings, and the lengthy dusk now seems to careen in headlong at 4pm, but the gains never quite seem to outweigh the losses, somehow.
October was a hectic month in terms of literary events around the city. The Olive Reading Series, for which I sit on the board, is again in full, glorious swing; October’s featured reader was Erin Knight, author of The Sweet Fuels. It’s a spectacular, multi-lingual first collection, made even better by having heard Erin herself read several of the poems to a packed house. November will welcome in Angela Rawlings, author of Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, reading some intriguing new work that I cannot wait to hear spoken aloud!
October’s been a bit of a heady time, too, for writing. A collection that I’ve been working on for the past two years, a series of prairie/landscape poems, wrapped itself up (I never seem to have much say in the matter!) mid-month. I am always in slight awe of those prolific poets who turn out collections a dozen a minute, doughnuts at the morning bakery. Mine tend to linger; poems come in fat droves & then leave again, inexplicably, for months. I’ve always said that the collections write themselves, and my (somewhat) patient waiting for the poems to decide to resume themselves is an odd act of faith.
So now descends the thin, bereft feeling that follows a collection launching itself out into the world. Having lived with those poems for so long, I miss their familiar voices, and yet the momentum is building to begin anew, to pick up the dropped threads of several other manuscripts.
And so the breath & then the return to furious rush.
— Jenna
September 30, 2008
The calm after the storm...
What a month! I am so proud to live in this province; the number of cultural events occurring in September alone across Alberta has been outstanding. Arts are an indispensable part of the good life — it’s great to see so many folks standing up for that.
I feel very fortunate to have been a participant in several events around the province, including two in my hometown: the third annual Edmonton Poetry Festival and the Kaleido Family Arts Festival. Each was very unique — a different audience, different variety of activities, etc. — and yet each did a fantastic job of showcasing the immense amount of talent we have resident here in Edmonton.
I was also very privileged to be asked to take part in the Peace Country’s First Annual Small Press Fair as editor of Rubicon Press, and as a reader at literary events in both Grande Prairie and Dawson Creek, B.C. It was a stunning time of year for a roadtrip, with all the autumn colours flying their flags at height, as well as a wonderful chance to meet and spend time with other poets, novelists, and editors I have only ever met online. There’s nothing quite like a good face-to-face chat over a glass of wine.
September’s nearly behind, so it’s time to settle back down to work: three poetry collections on the go, plus a novel and a stage play…not to mention all the upcoming chapbooks to design and promote from Rubicon Press. And o, the hustle and bustle of grant-writing season! Just like summer, the days before a grant deadline seem to melt into nothingness before my stressed-out eyes.
At least the sun is warm and the elms are bright, the birdfeeder riotous with songbirds on their way outta here. I can’t complain…life is good.
— Jenna