KAGAWONG—Some of life’s events come at you like a thunderbolt out of the blue. It’s nothing short of awesome when that bolt is charged with positive energy. So it was that when Manitoulin poet (and 4elements Living Arts co-founder) Sophie Edwards saw the 2024 Quill & Quire Fall preview of short fiction, graphic novels and poetry she admits to finding herself “gobsmacked.”
Quill and Quire for the uninitiated is the magazine of the Canadian book trade and is published in paper form 10 times a year (every month except for the joint January-February and July-August editions). The publication includes author profiles, news about upcoming books and developments in the Canadian industry and reviews of new adult and children’s titles. The magazine reviews around 400 new titles each year, offering the most comprehensive look at Canadian-authored books in the country.
Simply put, the ‘Quill and Quire’ list presents “the titles we are most excited about this fall” and Ms. Edwards’ book of innovative poetry is on the must-read fall list finding herself among the likes of Margaret Atwood and Marilyn Dumont. Best of all, Ms. Edwards didn’t have to do anything other than create her work—publishers did all the rest to ensure she was considered for the list.
“I was floored,” said Ms. Edwards about when she discovered she made such a prestigious cut.
“Poet Sophie Anne Edwards spent several years on the Kagawong River on Ontario’s Manitoulin Island, learning how to listen to its flora, fauna, weather and water,” reads the citation from Quill & Quire. “She installed a series of alphabets made of wood and paper and documented how the resulting poems shifted over time, whether within a few seconds or over a few months.”
The result is an innovative tome that pushes the boundaries of ‘poetry’ into relatively new territory, combining nature and literature into a kind of performance art in which the Kagawong River played a leading role.
Ms. Edwards notes that she had hardly picked herself up from the floor after being picked up by publisher Talonbooks when she found herself knocked back down again by the Quill & Quire reveal. “That by itself was a very big deal for me,” she said.
In retrospect, Ms. Edwards makes no bones, the two to three years working on the piece was worth it.
And it was a work that require far more effort than simply placing letters in a river and documenting the changes. Due to its mixed-media approach, there were a lot of back and forth discussions with the publisher that would otherwise have seemed a little out of place when it comes to a book of poetry. Those interactions had more to do with the chronology of the work than directly to its content, according to Ms. Edwards. “I spent a lot of time organizing the flow,” she said of her work of “visual poetry.”
There was also the challenge of dealing with the Indigenous aspect of the Kagawong River’s history, something that Ms. Edwards, who is herself non-Indigenous went to great effort to ensure she proceeded in a “good way.”
“I wanted to capture the river as a living thing,” said Ms. Edwards.
The end result was a very untraditional poetry book—a book of visual poetry as Ms. Edwards styles it—something “not intimidating” for people who do not know poetry.
Ms. Edwards’ book, ‘Conversations with the Kagawong River’ will soon be available at The Expositor office in Little Current.
