Reading: Tiziana La Melia, Judith Penner and Renee Rodin

the poets have always preceded

Tiziana La Melia is the author of The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect (Blank Cheque Press, 2015/2018). Exhibitions of her work include Garden Gossip, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2017-18); Ambivalent Pleasures, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016-17); Down to Write You This Poem Sat, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2016); The Pigeon Looks for Death in the Space Between the Needle and the Haystack, Unit 17, Vancouver (2018); Broom Emotion, galerie anne baurrault, Paris (2017); Domestic like a Pre-raphaelite brotherhood, Truth and Consequences, Geneva (2017); Stopping the Sun in its Course, Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2015). Her poetry and criticism has appeared in Art21, Public, Charcuterie, The Capilano Review and C Magazine.

As a UBC student in the 60s Judith Penner sat at Robert Duncan’s feet in the Tallman’s living room. She didn’t call herself a writer then, but left the country, worked for the ICA in London and wrote professionally in the U.K. and Canada until a film project did her in and she stopped. She sold books in Vancouver, taught yoga in several countries and became an editor, often for the VAG. After a long hiatus, her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in a number of art and literary publications. Her chapbook A Bed of Half Full: a landscape (Nomados Literary Publishers) came out in 2018.

Renee Rodin has lived her entire life on unceded Indigenous territory/land. She was born and raised in Montreal (Park Extension) by working class Jewish parents. She’s been living in Vancouver (Kitsilano) since the late 60s. Her books are Bread and Salt (Talon, 1996) and Subject To Change (Talon, 2010) and the chapbook Ready for Freddy (Nomados, 2005). She still hopes to find whatever it is she’s looking for in writing.