by Edith Cody-Rice
Last Thursday evening, April 11, Almonte Readers and Writers hosted an enthusiastic audience of poetry lovers at Equator Coffee in celebration of National Poetry Month. In a warm and cosy atmosphere, award winning Ottawa based poets Conyer Clayton and Jean Van Loon presented readings from their recently published works. Jean Van Loon’s latest book Nuclear Family, won the 2023 Ottawa Book Award and Conyer Clayton’s But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves won the Archibald Lampman Award in 2022.
Moderated by Jessie Carson, Almonte resident and Readers and Writers co-founder, Conyer and Jean discussed how looking inward and exploring personal history provides inspiration for their work. They explained how distancing painful personal events in poetry allowed them to both connect with their experiences and soften painful memories. Jean who,in Nuclear Family, wrote poems inspired by her father’s suicide, said that when she advised her brothers of her work, she was anxious about their reaction. They told her they were happy she had written down the experience and it opened up relationships that had suffered under the weight of this tragic event. She did say, though, that she presents this particular work as purely a work of fiction.
Conyer spoke about her Kentucky childhood, relating her experience writing about her mother’s passing, how she and her sisters were close, and how her father read her work in recent years.
The poets fielded questions from an engaged audience about their work and how they were movivated to begin writing poetry. The conversation was laced with interesting tales and funny anecdotes.
This is the second in the Delve series presented by Almonte Readers and Writers. Delve presents writers in close conversation with the audience. The evening, which was a pay-what- you-can event, felt intimate and quite special to those attending.
The evening was presented with the community support of Equator Coffee, in partnership with Mill Street Books, and funded in part by the Municipality of Mississippi Mills
Almonte Readers and Writers is available here
The publications of Jean Van Loon and Conyer Clayton are available from Mill Street Books.
Full disclosure: Edith Cody-Rice is a director of Almonte Readers and Writers
