This year I’ve had the chance to collaborate with poets for the first time. Fiction writing is a solitary exercise; it’s been interesting and helpful to work on shared artistic terms.

So. Several things. Poet Ray Hsu and I will be performing at Heritage Vancouver’s fundraiser later this month. We’ll be doing “slideshow karaoke” — improvising language to accompany images. What makes a picture into a story? Ventriloquism? Event? (Ray and I collaborated earlier this year on a post for Lemon Hound.)

During the recent Vancouver Olympics Games, Elizabeth Bachinsky and I gathered several hundred erasure poems created by members of the public using Olympics news coverage and the censor’s black marker. Some poems will be in subTerrain‘s post-Olympics issue. I’ll also contribute an essay about the Olympics in Vancouver (spectacle, public space, collage). Recently, I contributed to a collaborative poetry project that’s the brainchild of Sachiko Murakami; looking forward to seeing that evolve and come to light.

Separately: an online collaborative poetry project I check into regularly is Rachel Zolf’s The Tolerance Project – A MFA. Poems are generated to explore the civility agenda intrinsic to the MFA workshop experience. Or that’s how I’d describe it. Read the Tolerance Project and decide for yourself. Especially if you did an em-fah.