I guess this is my last post on the WH blog! Working on this summer program has been such a great experience. Here’s the short version of the list of people I’d like to thank for all the help and inspiration throughout the spring and summer. THANKS TO:

Nancy Holmes! Poet & project overseer, professor & mentor.  Lori Mairs, for the advice & groundedness & all the behind-the-scenes work.  Karen Donaldson Shepherd, virtuoso Woodhaven soundscape artist.  Megan Hunter, for assistance with the earliest Woodshed Readings & for the hand-painted signs.  Emily MacMillen for the photo & video documentation.  Marlene Creates for her inspirational early residency & community eco-art workshops.  Jeannette Angel, for the initial idea of the old woodshed itself as a performance space.  Sharon Thesen for pointing out the verb “to woodshed” i.e. to do a retreat or a residency, in order to work on one’s art, music, or writing.

Thank you to all of the many readers & listeners in the summer 2014 Woodshed Reading series! May this become an ongoing tradition.

Thank you to all of the visiting artists, scholars, teachers, musicians, performers, & volunteers who have made the woods & streambeds of Woodhaven hum like a tuning fork. May this energy keep flowing!

Thank you to the woods & streambeds of Woodhaven.

(Who took this picture?)

August 27: the Woodshed Readings season finale. A full house! A hot summer evening heavy with words & leaves about to change their colours.

Kelly Shepherd, Laisha Rosnau

Darian Soulsamurai Saunders

Michael V. Smith & Matt Rader

Friday August 22. The Woodshed Readings were proud to host Edmonton poet and visual artist Laurie MacFayden, who gave a reading from her second collection, Kissing Keeps Us Afloat. The book doesn’t officially launch until September, so we were fortunate enough to have a sneak preview. See Laurie’s website for more information, and for images of her paintings and photography.

“Swinging and searing verses, meditative narratives, honky-tonk tunes and catalogues of favoured things (including what lovers bring — or leave behind), all merge to make Kissing Keeps Us Afloat a book for tongues and lips to sing. MacFayden knows painting and music, and she loves words and women. The result is art without limit, craft without regret, and poetry that faces trauma and embraces the erotic. MacFayden’s poetry is both red-hot and cool-blue, white lies and film noir, memory and truth. In the supposed mundane, she shows us, transcendence awaits.” – George Elliott Clarke

Musical guest Karen Donaldson Shepherd, who has served as the unofficial — but absolutely fantastic, and very much appreciated — “Woodhaven house band” throughout the summer, played sets on the gayageum (a traditional Korean stringed instrument), guitar and vocals, and fiddle.

A big thank you to Laurie, and Karen, and everyone who made the trip out to Woodhaven to enjoy this evening with us.

August 16 at the Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre. A small but enthusiastic group joined us for Daniella’s “Wild Plants: Healing and Nourishment” workshop.

(Current events.)

We’re so fortunate to have had another visit from Daniella, whose deep knowledge and passion about the natural world — and plant life in particular — is impressive and infectious.

Asking the right kinds of questions. Don’t worry about coming up with an answer too quickly.  Elusiveness is not a bad thing: at one point in the morning we followed in the tracks of a mother deer and fawn, who kept flitting out of sight on the winding trail . . .

Getting grounded . . . sitting still and listening . . .

Food and medicine, without irrigation systems or waiting rooms!

Environmental educator Daniella Roze’s “Living Wild in the Stone Age” slideshow presentation. August 15 at the Environmental Education Centre for the Okanagan (EECO), Mission Creek Park.

Here is the page that describes Daniella’s talk at Woodhaven in June, with more images from the slideshow.

Paleolithic technology meets present-day scholarship . . .

“It is not necessary to ‘go back’ in time to be the kind of creature you are. The genes from the past have come forward to us. I am asking that people change not their genes but their society, in order to harmonize with the inheritance they already have.” Paul Shepard, The Only World We’ve Got

“All around us, aspects of the modern world – diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology – have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell.” Paul Shepard, The Others

Wednesday, August 13, 2014: an evening set awhirl and abuzz with inspiring words and images and insect nocturnes. And with musical guest Natalie Ingram on acoustic guitar, we had ourselves a one-night Woodhaven arts festival! Not the first, and hopefully not the last.

It was just by the luck of the crickets’ draw that poets Nancy Holmes and Natalie Rice (not pictured) read in the first half of the evening, and Brianna Ferguson and Megan Hunter read in the second; based on tone and subject matter these were perfect pairings.

Salmon, rivers, and blossoming-goddess trees, wasps and musical mosquitoes and osteopoetics;* inebriation, customer-service employment, and the embodied memories of childhood; love and languages, sex and earth and walking pilgrimage. All on a hot August evening, with William Carlos Williams plums to eat. A night for poets!

(Photographs by Karen Donaldson Shepherd)

* “poetry about bones”; neologism credit Cassandre Campeau-Bouthillier

This summer UBC’s Okanagan campus offered the Intensive Summer Indigenous Program, designed to provide students cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses that enhance their understanding of Indigenous artistic and theoretical practices.  For more information see the Art + Reconciliation / Indigenous Activist Art website.

The Summer Intensive finale was a tipi made of light and smoke at the Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre – orchestrated by Cheryl L’Hirondelle – which was a truly incredible sight. It was a powerful experience to stand under the poles, which were beams of light in the night sky, in a fragrant cloud of sage smoke. I feel blessed that I was able to see this, and participate in it. Thank you Cheryl!

Thank you also to Sherry Farrell Racette, one of the Summer Intensive participants, who provided this writing (and an excerpt from facebook) about her time spent at Woodhaven:

My residency at Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre took place from June 23 – July 2, 2014.

When I looked at the blooms on the Mock Orange, the words that came to mind were “Have you ever seen such urgency?” With their petals drawn right back, pistil and stamen thrust forward, and their beautiful fragrance, they could induce one to feel the ache of longing.

Shortly before being invited for the Woodhaven residency, I heard my friend, Lorna Tureski, read from her novel Mud Bay, in which she describes one character’s connection to the land – and that the character’s body might actually be the land. I knew immediately that I needed to respond to Lorna’s writing with my drawings.

My own work has primarily been about connection to land, so it was a perfect fit.

Young Horsetail plant near the creek.

The opportunity to spend some time at Woodhaven was ideal. I was able to combine my own land/connection work, my response to images in Lorna’s novel, and my response to my immediate surroundings in the Woodhaven Regional Park.

The drawings themselves are still in progress and not ready to be photographed, but other images that are just as important to me are the photographs that I took as I spent time in quiet solitude, observing the land. They are a record of the time spent drinking in the place with my senses and practicing stillness.

Sometimes the things that I observed caused me to respond, not so much to the marvel of their nature, as to odd events that that they stirred in the recesses of memory.

The Woodhaven residency was a respite from daily life, providing me with the opportunity to slow down and allow art-making to be my priority, and more importantly it was the opportunity to respond to a place and allow it to influence my work. It also provided the space to work on a larger scale, which is much appreciated!

In one of my pieces, I embedded text under the layers of drawing. The text was written using the same material that I was drawing with: grease pencil. The content of the text was my personal response to specific things that I was seeing on the site.

Here are a few of the many photos that I took during my time at Woodhaven.

Looking up.

 Looking down.

(Words and images by Joanne Salé)