A Big Thank You to Poet Wendy Morton
Wendy spoke at our April meeting sharing her experience and wisdom as a working poet and about “6 impossible things before breakfast”. Her talk was recorded but has not been processed. Hopefully, some of it will be available on our website at a later date.
Wendy said she never knew where poetry was going to take her but knew there was another adventure down the road. “You have to jump right in – you can’t wait for the world to discover you, you have to let the world know you exist.”
As a self described “poetry evangelist”, Wendy is constantly writing poetry. She often writes poems for people she meets and also creates poems from photographs. Her belief that “a poem is the shortest distance between two hearts” has led her in many directions and resulted in many friendships. Reading her poetry you can see and feel these connections to people, to the landscape and to history.
As well as writing poetry, Wendy teaches and mentors. The “Elder Project” is one special project and very dear to her. Since 2010 she has been working in various schools with mostly First Nations students. She teaches the students how to write poetry and mentors their listening and interviewing skills. She then has them use their skills to interview their Elders and create a poem from the experience. Some of the work has been gathered together in small books. Read more about the Elder Project.
You can read some of Wendy’s poetry in our upcoming anthology, due out in May, where she has joined us as a guest writer.
More about Wendy:
You can read about Wendy and read a few of her poems here.
A Times Colonist article about her Elder Project