The first Poetry Open Mic night of 2025 on Thursday, Jan. 9 features Adelia MacWilliam, who Salt Spring Islanders may remember from a Raised by the Sea art, tea and poetry event she put on with her cousin Briony Penn in November of 2022.
According to a Salt Spring Public Library media release, “When Adelia did her poetry thesis at the University of Victoria, she discovered that if you cast the mythic imagination across a piece of land that has always been part of your life, everything will out. What she encountered amidst the remnants of a stunning wilderness — a savage history, with its culturally sanctioned amnesia — changed her view of her home forever.”
The complexities of being part of a settler culture struggling to create a home in a world that is simultaneously gutting are explored in her Details of the Passage chapbook and poems from her current manuscript called Films the Dead Are Showing.
MacWilliam’s work can be found in various publications, including Drift, Poems and Poets from the Comox Valley, (The Poem Factory), Sweet Water, Poems for the Watersheds and, most recently, ‘Counterflow’, a digital magazine from Nanaimo’s WordStorm.
MacWilliam is also one of the three co-editors of Cascadian Zen Volume One and Two (Watershed Press), an anthology that brings together non-fiction, poetry and translations that explore expressions of Zen within the Cascadia bioregion.
Sign-up for the open mic starts at 6:45 p.m., with one poem allowed per reader and three minutes max. The evening begins at 7 p.m. with the featured poet taking the mic at about 7:30 p.m.