VOX HUMANA 
BOOK LAUNCHES & READINGS

Main-à-Dieu, Cape Breton
Friday August 24, 2012 - 7:00 p.m.
Poetry with a View 2012
Main-à-Dieu Coastal Discovery Centre
Poets:
Sean Howard Richard Marchand
E. Alex Pierce Stewart Donovan
 

LISTEN TO INTERVIEW WITH E ALEX PIERCE

WHAT'S HAPPENING...

Feeling into Words: Six Writing Workshops

Local writers - professional and otherwise - will again have the chance to work with poet, editor and manuscript doctor E Alex Pierce in a series of six Saturday writing workshops sponsored by the Shelburne County Arts Council (SCAC). 

SCAC Writer-in-Residence, Pierce will preside over "Feeling into Words: Six Writing Workshops" at the McKay Memorial Library in Shelburne beginning on Saturday April 1st from 11 AM to 1 PM, finishing on May 6^th, 2017. The first writer-in-residence workshop with Pierce occurred in 2013 under the aegis of The Canada Council for the Arts, and the program has been ongoing since, with individual mentoring and yearly readings of new material each December sponsored by SCAC. 

Over time, Pierce has established a group of committed writers who are working on long-term projects, everything from memoir, short stories, poetry, and young adult books to post card stories and a social justice narrative.  In fact, an anthology of work by Shelburne County writers will be published in the fall, edited by Pierce.

"Now is the time to offer the series of writing workshops," according to Pierce. The workshops will be open to new entrants as well as to returning writers. Pierce says that a mixed group in terms of experience is often the most successful: "Beginning writers bring new energy; experienced writers bring grit, wisdom, and compassion for the process." She will also offer sessions for individual writers when required.

E. Alex Pierce is the author of Vox Humana, published by Brick Books (2011). Her poem, “Medway River, Carousel,” won the Readers’ Choice Award in the Arc Poem of the Year Contest, 2013, and her creative non-fiction piece, "Sweetbriar" was a finalist in The Malahat Review's 2016 Open Season Awards, last November. She has published in Arc, The Fiddlehead, Contemporary Verse 2, The New Quarterly, The English Journal (USA), and The Literary Review of Canada.

Pierce taught creative writing for ten years as Assistant Professor at Cape Breton University, and is currently Senior Editor for Boularderie Island Press (BIP) for publisher Douglas Arthur Brown. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College, and has been a participant in the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre and in the Poetry Colloquium at Sage Hill, Sask. She has been working as a free-lance editor and mentor since 2010 at E. Alex Pierce Writing & Editing, a small business developed through Shelburne County CBDC. 

Practicing writers and those just dipping their toes into the literary arts are welcome to join this workshop. Admission to the six workshops is free for residents of the Western Counties Regional Library area (Shelburne, Yarmouth, and Digby). Donations to SCAC are welcome but not required. Spaces are limited. Interested writers should call the McKay Memorial Library and speak to one of the Library Clerks at 902-875-3615 to ask any questions or register writers in the program.

Pierce taught creative writing for ten years as Assistant Professor at Cape Breton University, and is currently Senior Editor for Boularderie Island Press (BIP) for publisher Douglas Arthur Brown. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College, and has been a participant in the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre and in the Poetry Colloquium at Sage Hill, Sask. She has been working as a free-lance editor and mentor since 2010 at E. Alex Pierce Writing & Editing, a small business developed through Shelburne County CBDC. 

Shelburne County Arts Council  board member Susan Hoover says, "SCAC is delighted to continue working with Alex Pierce as she assists in the development of writers from our area. If you are a practicing writer or would just like to see what you can do as a writer, you are welcome to join this workshop."

(Note: "Feeling into Words" is the title of Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney's 1974 talk on writing, from Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-78) 

WRITER IN RESIDENCE...

Since 2013, E. Alex Pierce has been the Shelburne County Arts Council (SCAC) writer-in-residence in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, originally funded also by the Canada Council for the Arts. SCAC has funded two extensions of the program, called the Shelburne County Writers Mentorship Program.

Pierce works individually with writers, offering one-on-one consultations and new participants are welcome.

At the conclusion of the mentorship period in early December, Alex will present an evening of readings by the participants and will read from her own work. 

The original Shelburne County Writer-in-Residence Program was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Nova Scotia’s Department of Community, Culture and Heritage, and the Municipality of the District of Shelburne Grants Program.

To participate in the current Mentorship Program, email Alex Pierce at: alex_pierce@cbu.ca.

See E Alex Pierce reading from Vox Humana

Listen to a South Coast Today interview with E Alex Pierce

See her web site HERE

"Taken together, these poems perform a universal voice—“the under-singing.” This is also the voice of the book’s narrator: it is her story, though its versions are legion." Jane Monroe - Malahat Review

"...interesting and allusive... invocation and a lament for what has gone and been lost." Heather Craig - Telegraph-Journal 

"... memories that transcend the personal to become universal... neither sentimental nor solemn, but retrospective and elegiac, lyrical and optimistic about the power of the human voice to communicate." - 
Margaret Patricia Eaton -Atlantic Books Today

"These poems teem with personal, historical, and mythical stories... a collection full of history and memory, and with the absences that produce them." Moberley Luger - Canadian Literature online 

"Whatever the subject, the real strength of Pierce’s work lies in the richness of its landscape which is forever opening out before us, transfigured by an inner music and wonder and light.” John Glenday

E. Alex Pierce lives in East Sable River, Nova Scotia where she is developing a centre for writers and artists. In her earlier life she taught voice, movement, and mask for the theatre, and created original collaborative works with visual artists and composers. 

For ten years she taught creative writing (playwriting & poetry) at Cape Breton University, and is currently Series Editor for the CBU Press publication, The Essential Cape Breton Library. 

She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College, and has been a participant in the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre. 

Her work has been in anthologized in Words Out There: Women Writers in Atlantic Canada (Roseway); Best Canadian Poetry 2008 (Tightrope); and in the recently published Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry (Cormorant). 

Her book, Vox Humana, has just been released from Brick Books. Pierce will be offering readings and workshops throughout Nova Scotia in 2011-2012.

Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on. 

E. Alex Pierce’s voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It’s not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.

Pump organ, stops labelled

vox, vox, vox - tremolo, bellows filling air.
 

Take this creature into your throat pipe. Gristle,

heft, and hide. Rasp, slide the whistle - the alder

cuts its throat to speak its sound.
                                                           - from “Vox animalia”

 “‘Poetry’, someone once wrote, ‘is the music of consciousness’, and Vox Humana is indeed a rich diapason rooted in the landscape of Nova Scotia’s Sable River. But the wonderful thing about the collection is its lightness and optimism – though its subject matter is often love and loss, it can be retrospective without being nostalgic, and elegiac without overbearing solemnity. Good poetry is always redemptive, and one leaves this collection refreshed, exhilarated and renewed.

“Its scope is wide: beautifully crafted family reminiscences; Bach and Beethoven; Raphael and Goltzius; Shakespeare; the Greek Myths and the fate of the Romanovs. But whatever the subject, the real strength of Pierce’s work lies in the richness of its landscape which is forever opening out before us, transfigured by an inner music and wonder and light.” – John Glenday

Vox Humana
New book of poetry by E Alex Pierce from Brick Books

• READ ABOUT VOX
• SEE BOOK LAUNCH DATES AND READINGS
• READ REVIEWS
• LISTEN TO INTERVIEW WITH E ALEX PIERCE

See Brick Books web site