11 AUG Opening Night 6:30pm
CANADIAN PREMIERE SHE WHO HAS NO MASTER[s] feat DIANA KHOI NGUYEN & HOA NGUYEN with works on exhibit by the Collective.
She Who Has No Master(s)She Who Has No Master(s) is a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through a collaborative writing and art process SWHNM brings together the voices of women and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. Founded in 2015 by writer/artists Dao Strom and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, SWHNM has presented there multidisciplinary works at venues such as Black Mountain Institute, American Library in Paris, SF Asian Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, and published poems with Poetry, BOMB, AJAR Journal, and others. SWHNM has a fluid and evolving membership that to-date has included writers in the US, Canada, France, and Vietnam.
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. She earned a BA in English and Communication Studies from UCLA, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019) and debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018). Her forthcoming second collection of poems, Root Fractures will be published by Scribner in 2024.
Born in the Mekong Delta, Hoa Nguyen was raised and educated in the United States and has lived in Canada since 2011. Hoa is the author of several books including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. Her fifth book of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was named a finalist for a Kingsley Tufts Award, National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award.
12 AUG Launch | Reception 2-5pm
DEAN GARLICK DOMESTIC SUBLIME
As Edmund Burke described when comparing the sublime and the beautiful, “sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; … beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid and even massive.” The ability of these images to simultaneously embody both the sublime and the beautiful, and the state of awe that this can awaken, are for me the essence of the domestic sublime. – Dean Garlick
Dean Garlick is a photographer and fiction writer living in Montréal, Québec, Canada.
12 AUG Performance 7pm
OANA AVASILICHIOAEI IMPROBABLE THEATRES including conversation w/Fertile Fest Guest Curator KLARA DU PLESSIS
My art practice interweaves various areas, including poetry, translation, photographic and moving image, sound, and performance. I often explore various means of translating between these areas, bringing aspects of one area into another as a way of putting pressure on the very meaning, conventions, structures, and genres of these fields. Some ideas I engage with include language as trace and resistance, polyglot and polyphonic poetics, phonotopes (intermediary spaces between words, sound and image), and transformation. – Oana Avasilichioaei
13 AUG Performance 3pm
MARGARET CHRISTAKOS to begin in an arena unrecognized as a beginning
For the magical gathering of Fertile, Margaret Christakos (she/her) will be exploring solo and choral readings of texts from an ongoing compositional project to begin in an arena unrecognized as a beginning. This reading will move into various shapes and invite both guest readers and general audience members into vocal listening and sounding. A suite of hand drawing/digital collage-based imagery will be in visual conversation with the reading.
Margaret Christakos is a poet and imagemaker interested in the multiples of time, mutual caring, repetitions at the edges of surfeit, finding voices, and trying new forms of poesis. Examine other traces at margaretchristakos.com
14 AUG wQr [RE]Launch 6:30
wQr What Queer Reading SHOWCASE feat SUBHANYA SIVAJOTHY Singing Fish Notation Launch Host /Curated by wQr Poetry Editor LANNII LAYKE, author of Os
what I’m trying to say is / these waves are another kind of animal – Subhanya Sivajothy
Subhanya Sivajothy is a librarian and writer living in Tkaronto. She uses poetry to think about ecologies, archives, and resistance. She completed her MFA at University of Guelph. She has been published in Adi Magazine, The Ex-Puritan and Filling Station, and has been supported by the Canada Council of Arts.
Lannii Layke is a young, Black writer, editor, and interdisciplinary designer from Tkarón:to (Toronto). They attend to crafting memory and fine jewellery. They’re the author of Os [in French, os is bone] and the force behind KFB’s queer/BIPOC imprint, wQr [what Queer reading].
11-20 AUG Festival Gallery & Poetry Room OPEN DAILY 12-5
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15 AUG 1PM WORKSHOP/WALK
EXCLUSIVE TO FERTILE FESTIVAL PASSHOLDERS!
TANIS MACDONALD
The Truth about Bodies in Motion: mobile version
What are the pleasures and the problems of being a body in motion? Ideas of the natural world as idyllic come up against a wide range of bodily experience: how do we fit, chafe against, or transform these conventions? This event will combine a guided urban walk with a chance to notice not only what we see and hear, but also ways that our bodies in all their beauties and oddities can fundamentally inform our writing. Bring your breathing, grousing, observant bodies and walk with me! (90 minutes. Meet at Remote Gallery, 568 Richmond St W to embark at 1pm.)
Tanis MacDonald (she/they) is the author of seven books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Straggle: Adventures in Walking while Female (Wolsak and Wynn 2002) and Mobile: poems (BookHug 2019). Straggle received an Honourable Mention for the Betsy Warland Between Genres Award. Originally from the prairies, Tanis lives on Haldimand Treaty land near the Grand/Willow River and is currently working on her next poetry book, Tall, Grass, Girl.
NOTE: Further registration is required. Limited to Fertile Passholders at this Festival price.
16 AUG 7:30 LAUNCH OFFSITE Friends of the festival:
17 AUG Workshop 1-4pm
text | image | collage works in poetry w/Kate Sutherland & Jennifer LoveGrove
EXCLUSIVE TO FERTILE FESTIVAL PASSHOLDERS!
Join writers and collage artists Kate Sutherland (Nuptials, Beasts of the Sea) and Jennifer LoveGrove (The Tinder Sonnets) in a hands-on, generative workshop exploring connections between poetry and collage. We’ll explore the creative processes that lead to each in an informal, prompt-driven, hands-on environment. Make collages in response to poems. Collage poems out of text. Make collages on top of text. Integrate words into visuals. Materials and tools will be provided, but if you’ve already collected images or bits of text you’d like to work with, by all means bring them!
NOTE: Further registration is required. Limited to 10 Fertile Passholders at this Festival price.
18 AUG Performance 7pm
KIRBY B E H O L D
Written/adapted for the stage by Kirby from their Palimpsest Press book Poetry is Queer
w/opener JOSEPH DONATO Toothache
Kirby’s work includes Behold (2023), a stage adaption of Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021) What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020) This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019) She’s Having a Doris Day (KFB, 2017) Their column, “The First Time” can be found at Send My Love To Anyone. They are the publisher, purveyor of fine poetry at knife | fork | book poetryisqueer.com
Joseph Donato is super cool & popular. He is Editor-in-Chief of Block Party Magazine & Press and Overlord of Horror Pop Mag. Joseph has won 3 Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize, and 6 Olympic gold medals for real. He looks a little like Jesus and enjoys Tic Tacs, Nebraska, and Weezer. Woo hoo!
19 AUG Open House All Day & into the night
KFB SHOWCASE featuring new works by MICHAEL FLATT WILL MANNING KATE SUTHERLAND & Special Guests from KFB PRESS
2-4pm Launch | Reception KATE SUTHERLAND NUPTIALS with JENNIFER LOVEGROVE reading new work from her ongoing project, The Tinder Sonnets
7pm Launch WILL MANNING JOAN WOULD SAY MICHAEL FLATT I CAN FOCUS IF I TRY
Preorder KFB Fertile Fest 23 Bundle at knifeforkbook.shop
20 AUG FESTIVAL FINALE | LAUNCH 3PM
ERÍN MOURE THEOPHYLLINE A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) LAUNCH w/Special Guest T. LIEM
Knife fork book thanks House of anansi & COACH HOUSE BOOKS
ERíN MOURE thanks League of Canadian Poets and Canada Council
Fertile 23 Guest Curators Klara du Plessis & Hoa Nguyen
Klara du Plessis is a poet, scholar, and literary curator. Her debut poetry collection, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and her critical writing received Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Critic’s Desk Award. Her book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh, was adapted and produced as a mono-opera film with composer Jimmie LeBlanc. A book of essays, I’mpossible collab, and a collaborative poetry collection, G, composed with Khashayar Mohammadi in English, Afrikaans, and Persian, are both forthcoming Fall 2023. Klara develops an ongoing series of experimental and dialogic literary events called Deep Curation, an approach which posits the poetry reading as artform. Klara holds a PhD in English Literature from Concordia University.
Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry including Red Juice, Violet Energy Ingots, and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. She is a member of She Who Has No Masters, a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries. Hoa lives in Tkaronto where she serves as a Visiting Practitioner for the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University. In 2019, her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature.
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