Smithers Writers Group reads at Smithers Art Gallery

As part of Smithers' Salmon Sympony events, a newly formed group of Bulkley Valley writers will be reading work to be placed on our interactive map on Wednesday, May 4 beginning at 7 pm. You're invited to join us for this event and then write your own material which we'll place on the map on Thursday, May 26. Or post your writing right here as a comment.

Five Rivers: under bridges

by Jill Wigmore 

1. Nechako

a fish spine crusted to shore

dried eggs sparkling

like lost things stuck to stone

the river trickles

slow       

the Nechako underfull

but imagine it teaming with current:

ripped willows crammed to shore

logs jammed against bridge uprights

and placid massive white sturgeon

languid on the river bottom

unruffled by the water at full bore

undammed

man oh man

I wanna see that one

2. Chilako

one bend available

bridged, seen at a whiz-pass

reeds at river’s edge

eddy river right          

despite the signs the kids park

and plunge

to the chicken-farm river mud

chilako chilako

a song at high speed                                                                           

the view in the rearview

makes you back up

3. Nation

big, slow, sloping water

sweeps the swimming hole

hopefully full of eatin’ fish

more likely fallen cars

from the Nation river bridge

4. Fraser (Fort George)

meet the clang and stink of the black train bridge

dripping the rain into the broad brown river

can trees be proud?

the cottonwoods aren’t quitters

they draw the river up their roots

reach high toward sky

travelers in metal cars untouched

by river life, rife and humming

down below

5. Stuart

two types of water

swirl together in a kindergarten picture of confluence

silt and summer

the sweat of one long lake

giving up to smaller water

pressured into flow

from cloud to this: brown

and bright green

("Five Bridges" was first published in home when it moves you (Creekstone Press 2005)

Poets join hands

This great webpage (http://enpipeline.org/) contains thousands of kilometres of wonderful poems - more than enough to stuff the proposed pipeline full of thoughts, concepts, emotions, and life more valuable than bitumen.

River Photos

This is the junction of the Babine and Skeena rivers.

You can speak through the map

Morgan Hite, Smithers writer and cartographer extraordinaire, has created an interactive map where you can post your stories about the places you know along the Enbridge proposed pipeline route. Follow the link and you'll find instructions - but it's likely easier if you just send me the story and its location and we can attach it to the map.

On the Line Movie

I've added a new link for those of you interested in following Frank Wolf and Todd McGowan as "bike, hike, raft and kayak the GPS track of the pipeline on a fact finding mission that takes a ground-level look at the pipeline from the perspective of the people who live along the proposed route." Check out the On the Line link.

Spurs to Writing - Anger and Love

Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
Malcolm X (1925 - 1965), Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

I have a right to my anger, and I don't want anybody telling me I shouldn't be, that it's not nice to be, and that something's wrong with me because I get angry.
Maxine Waters, in Brian Lanker, I Dream a World, 1989

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.
Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger, 1985

All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life.
Jean Goss