Tap Creativity, 7 pm, June 20 2023 https://www.tapcreativity.org/events/book-launch-with-shane-neilson-and-shannon-arntfield — a cool doctor/medicine/lyric-centric event with Dr. Shannon Arntfield, OB-GYN and poet
Thursday May 11 7 pm 315 Roncesvalles Ave, Toronto ON
Image of 4 books superimposed on a soft color background with type explaining launch location and date/time already provided above.
Image of book The Suspect We with text describing contents as follows: In The Suspect We, Roxanna Bennett and Shane Neilson collaborate to make a documentary poetics concerning pandemic conditions for the mad, neurodivergent, and disabled. Written while the world huddled indoors, The Suspect We is the product of a poetic friendship as well as a reaction to it.
Throughout, Bennett and Neilson query CanLit politics and care deficiencies as mutually dependent while also taking care of one another through their own work and its address.
Last weekend I attended the Imagination Writers’ Festival at the beautiful Morrin Centre in Quebec City. It had been a longstanding dream to have my work interpreted musically — and it came true on April 16! Depicted are the movements performed by the Orchestre Symphonique du Quebéc & prose description that was juxtaposed to “Deep Religious Faith,” a poem that first appeared in The Walrus and that later was collected in You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations with Goose Lane Editions. Plus a picture of the wonderful trio.
This spring is a busy one for me, and due to the fates, TWO books have been delivered, though the gestation has been long. The Suspect We, a beastly-sized book published with Palimpsest, was written over 2020 in correspondence and collaboration with Roxanna Bennett. We cared for one another in poetry as we reflected on the lack of care in Canlit as related to its enforced conformity of normativity. I do think it’s the first disability-informed correspondence-based collaboration in Canada. I must shout out Jim Johnstone’s editorial care with this one; he wrestled the book into its current form. If you’re interested, order here.
Saving from Great Plains has been worked on since 2012. The memoir concerns my madness and autism as it impacts family life, experience that soon exists with the co-incident serious illnesses of my children whom receive what I deem as inadequate care in the socialized medical system. We survive despite that system and discover little oases of self-care along the way. Order here to read about intergenerational disability.
Out from Great Plains in less than a month! Click here to pre-order.
Dates past:
London at TAP Creativity March 24 2022
Toronto at Knife:Fork:Book March 27 2022
FORTHCOMING:
Kingston April 13 2022 7 PM Novel Idea POSTPONED FOR SUMMER
Montreal April 19 2022 6:30 PM LE RESERVOIR, 2nd Floor 9 Av. Duluty E.
Fredericton April 20 2022 6:30 PM Gallery on Queen
Petitcodiac Public Library April 21 2022 time 12 noon
Moncton Attic Owl Series April 21 2022 C’est La Vie Cafe 6 PM
Halifax Eve of Poetry Series April 22 2022 Halifax Public Library 7:30 PM
In December, my friend Jim Johnstone published For the Living, a chapbook concerning . . . living persons! You can order it here.
(1) Cross-Pollinations appearance on Feb 23, 2022 (C-P is a really cool poetry-world interface that is a collaboration between the Health, Arts, and Research Centre out of UNBC and the League of Canadian Poets.) Click here to view.
(2) Interview w/ Colleen Kitts of the CBC in New Brunswick on March 22, click here.
Hi there! I have a few unique book promotional things to tell you about for You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations, my newest baby due out from Goose Lane Editions in like a month or so!!!
1. Cross-Pollinations, League of Canadian Poets, reading w/ S.K. Hughes: Feb 23 2022, 6 pm ET, register here.
In this event, I’m doing something I don’t think has been done before. S.K. Hughes reads poems that are structured around their developmental stage of medical training, and I’m reading from an unpublished lyric essay that critiques the use of poetry in medical spaces from the perspective of practitioner and disabled bodymind, also from the perspective of developmental stage. It’ll be weird! What I’m reading is more poetry than essay. Do register on the link provided below! There’s lots here for both poets and medical types. And if you haven’t already, and might be so inclined, please do consider preordering You May Not Take.
I’m anticipating this event very much, for I’ve never been able to critique medicine to its face with poetry before, using twenty five years of a poetry practice to inform this argument: hey, medicine, you’ve got it all wrong. But it’s okay. Just let poetry be itself and everything will be okay.
2. “Articulating the Body: Ekphrasis in the Maude Abbott Medical Museum” is a McGill-based in-person event I’m running in conjunction with the Poetry Matters team. March 10 2022, 5-7 pm. Sign up here. Tell all your friends in Montreal!
3. March 24 2022, 8-10 pm EST. I’m participating at AWP as part of the “Rad Reading Series” thanks to Swallow::tale, Newfound, and ANMLY. Sign up using code on the sheet. My first big boy pants AWP reading, yay!
4. EAST COAST TOUR in late April! Details tba. IN PERSON
Shane Neilson 