by Susan McCaslin This essay about poetry is written by Wood Lake’s author Susan McCaslin. Readers may also be interested in our latest poetry bundle:https://www.woodlakebooks.com/search/results/inventory/Books/Book-Bundles/Poetry-Bundle. Perfumeries of Words: My Memorization Practice[i] Since retiring from teaching English and Creative Writing at a community college in 2007, I’ve developed a fairly regular practice of memorizing poems while walking […]

 by Susan McCaslin This short essay written by Wood Lake author Susan McCaslin first appeared in Dialogue Magazine: “Haunting the Stacks” in the column “Resonance” in Dialogue, Winter 2017, p. 41.   http://www.dialogue2.ca/susan-mccaslin-haunting-the-stacks.html Many writers I most love were avid readers as children or became so at some point in their lives. For me as a […]

 by Susan McCaslin This short essay written by Wood Lake author Susan McCaslin first appeared in Dialogue Magazine: “Femmes Fatales & the Female Muse: John Keats and the Feminine,” in Dialogue, Nanaimo, BC, Winter 2016-17, Vol. 30, No. 2, 5-6.   http://tinyurl.com/dialogueV30-N2 I first discovered the poetry of the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in […]

  Each week, we bring you interesting stories from around the web. Here’s what caught our eye this week! ELECTION Trump Confounds The Pros, Connects With Just The Right Voters When American voters must choose a new president, reaction tends to rule. Given a choice between continuity and contrast, we favor contrast — even when […]

 by Susan McCaslin “What is this Joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?” from Come into animal presence, Denise Levertov (Poems: 1960-1967) On Dec. 27, 2015 our five-year old mini-Australian shepherd Penny was brutally and instantly killed by a truck before my husband’s and my eyes. The incident was an accident, […]

 by Susan McCaslin This posting originally appeared on the Cascadia Poetry Festival’s website. “You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will be as one.” – John Lennon from “Imagine” The Cascadia Poetry Festival in Nanaimo, British Columbia (April 30-May 3, 2015) […]

 by Susan McCaslin This posting originally appeared on the blog of Inanna Publications at http://www.inanna.ca. The word “religion” can generate more hostility than the other words embedded in the title of this piece, and perhaps rightly so. People mistrustful of religion examine history and notice how many of the major religions have been and continue […]

 by Susan McCaslin This posting originally appeared on The Vancouver Sun’s website at http://www.vancouversun.com. There has been much recent public debate about whether provincial law societies should recognize proposed law degrees issued by Trinity Western University, a private evangelical institution in Langley.The issue revolves around what I see asTWU’s clearly discriminatory “community covenant,” which students […]

by Susan McCaslin Some serious teacher bashing is going on in British Columbia right now. Shelly Fralic, a journalist for the Vancouver Sun, recently exploited her personal issue of teachers parking their vehicles on a public street in front of her house as a means of arousing hatred against teachers for their “sense of entitlement.”¹ […]

by Susan McCaslin I have in my head an image of people gathered around a table to dine and converse about the state of the world. Plato’s Symposium (or The Banquet), is a classical Greek dialogue depicting philosophers gathered to discuss the nature of love. The big paradigm in the west for a small group […]