NEWS FLASH Travels with Athóma is now also available as an audiobook. Check out Audible.ca or AudibookStore.com to get yourself a copy. I narrated the book with the technical assitance of Kristina Verruyt. Lots more about the book below
Travels with Athóma published by Aeolus House with editor Allan Briesmaster is now available. Click on the link above to see a flyer about the book. It is a fictional memoire in verse and here are two of the cover blurbs to spark your curiosity about the book.
Daniel G. Scott tells an almost mythic tale of a wise old woman and a curious boy, set in another time, another place, far away – or is it?
As Scott says in his Afterword, “The mind is a marvellous melting pot,” and shows it with breath-taking close-ups of the natural world, not looking at, from outside, but from within. Did you ever wonder what a robin sees and hears? How a tree feels? Know rock as your ancestor? “Seeing things with different eyes,” indeed!
Here is a poem, an essay, an entire voyage that shows how even a child can learn to ask, “How do we humans / not know / how alive, sentient / it all is?” Kate Braid, author of Elemental and Hammer & Nail.
and:
In this deeply remarkable, luminous and lucent long poem, Daniel Scott pulls from the netherworld the encounter between a boy and Athoma, a sibyl, ethereal as light, who instructs him in the uses of herbs and teaches him to shift his spirit into a tree, an eagle, a crow, a stone. “It all started with trees,” says the boy; “I knew how alive/ the world was/ and how I was/ in the world...the immensity...” This book will take you to places you will want to visit again and again and again. Pamela Porter Winner of the 2022 National Capital Writing Contest – short story Governor General Award winner for The Crazy Man 2005
The book is available through Russell Books in Victoria BC.
Ongoing News
I wrote a poem for a project in support of Afghani women and it has been published in French in an anthology NULLE PRISON N' ENFERMERA TON POEME published by Oxybia Publishing in France . There was a international reading from the anthology on a Paris based Zoom launch with readers from all ovr the world. Great fun and quite moving to hear poem in multiple languages. My poem is untitled and here is the English version:
untitled
in the desert heat there are creatures whose inner breath has ossified their world filled with stones & guns
but they go on living a cruel hardness powerful in their purity their energies jagged severe
for they fear breath & those who breathe whose softness overwhelms them whose ways of knowing threaten them
so they labour to stifle breath in others strive to reproduce hardness, make others stone & cold as they are
Palnet Earth Poetry's fabulous Poets Caravan is wrapped up and available via the Planet Earth Poetry website and YouTube channel or directly at www.shorturl.at/hAEJ7 I was fortunate to produce a number of these videos as well as be filmed in one. Worth a good look with over 50 Vancouver Island poets featured.
I have had a number of individual poems in books, chapbooks over the last several years and one poem Childhood Tongue recently (July 2022) posted on the LCP's Poetry Pause. You can hear it read by Jason E Coombs on the Eh Poetry Podcast
In The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling! A Collection of Pandemic Poems Editor Sheila Martindale (Goldfinch Press) - 2020 Pass Over Gaia gets back or the pangolin's revenge
In Wild Swings La Romtia poets - 2020 Editor Linda Crosfield (Nose in Book Publishing) Come Out, Come Out between, between
In Old Bones & Battered Book Ends Curated by Ian Cognito & Pat Smekal (Repartee Press) - 2020 the way memories die In a queue
In Island Writer Magazine (Vol 19, Issue 2,Winter 2021) without you
In Even So, I Sing poems from Honeymoon Bay Editor Lorna Crozier (Nose in Book Publishing) - 2022 A Knock on the Door is Never Convenient
And casting backwards in time I have left here a trail through Covid times.
From 2020 It is Covid-19 era and life is unsettled and poetry can respond. Be safe. Be smart and write your responses. I am writing, editing and trying to stay fit walking, gardening and savouring the less pressured pace. I do miss gathering to hear p0ets and am trying to adjust to on-line meetings and events.
My current situation: I retired from the University of Victoria July 1 2016. In January 2016 I became Artistic Director of the Planet Earth Poetry reading series in Victoria BC after shadowing outgoing AD Yvonne Blomer from mid-August. It is an honour to have been entrusted with this role. We have completed, our 24th season of Friday night having shifted to online readings. Season 25 is functioning online. Hillside Coffee and Tea has closed so we will be venue hunting when public gatherings are again possible. Planet Earth Poetry is heading into a year of celebration - 25 years is worth making a fuss about and we have planned a Poets Caravan (with funding from the CRD), which was initially planned as an series of readings is now shifting to an online format as well. We live in hope we will gather face-to-face again but in the meantime we are finding alternatives - a digital open mike, Zoom sessions for readings and workshops, a Pandemic Poetry Contest and book to follow in late fall. Readings again online - visit the PEP website to see what is happening.
Spring 2021 update: A lot has changed - except Covid has not gone away. I stepped down as AD at Planet Earth Poetry at the end of December 2020 and the work has been taken over by a new co-AD team Leanne Boschman and Zoe Dickinson. This is lie a second retirement for me, except for the Poets Caravan. I have continued to assist with the filming of local poets reading their work at sites of their choosing. We are adding videos on an on-going basis. You can see our project and the wonderful Vancouver Island poets at the site listed below. PEP is grateful to our sponsors for funding of the Poets Caravan: The CRD Arts and Culture Support Services, The City of Victoria, The BC Arts Council and the Province of BC and in the next season (26) additional support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
My own life is quite different these days. I attend poetry readings and only am involved in organizing readings for Voicing Suicide. We have had readings in Victoria, Vancouver, Kelowna and Oakville Ontario with more to come – all online of course.
I continue to write and send out poems and manuscripts. Our landscaped front garden takes a portion of my time and like everyone else we are coping with the challenges of limited contact, stay-at-home restrictions and a different pace of life.
My new chapbook [klee-shays] undone, volume one (Nose in Book Publishing) is out and we launched it at PEP in September. It takes clichés and rethinks their possibilities. You can order a copy from me or from the publsiher. https://lindacrosfield.com/nibpublishing/klee-shays-undone-volume-1-daniel-g-scott/ $10 + $3 for postage in Canada Voicing Suicide: An anthology of suicide poems that I edited with an afterword by Dr. Katrina Jaworski (Ekstasis Editions) has now also been released. Over 60 poets from around the world are included. We had a launch via Planet Earth Poetry October 22nd. You can hear the reading at https://youtu.be/9tJpPz-wSeoand you can order the book from me ($24.95 plus postage) or form the publisher Ekstasis Editions http://www.ekstasiseditions.com
As part of John Barton, City of Victoria Poet Laureate's new work series you can hear several local writers reading a few minutes of our work. Listen to John Gould, Kathryn Mockler, Kyeren Regehr, and Daniel G. Scott read from their new books of poetry and prose:
In Kelowna,late February, I took part in a podcast with the Inspired Word Café on Voicing Suicide The link is https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-inspired-word-caf%C3%A9/id1531259537
My publications: black onion was published by Goldfinch Press and launched in December, 2012. A few prints copies are still available directly from me. Please contact me via email. [email protected] or [email protected]
The Girls' Dairy Project: Writing ourselves into being by Shannon McFerran and Daniel G. Scott is now available via the University of Victoria Bookstore print-on-demand service: http://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/journals.php
and is also be available electronically via: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/4482
terrains, published by Ekstasis Editions in 2014, is available from the publisher or me. This book is about inner and outer landscapes and journeys in them.
In 2015 I released a limited edition chapbook interrupted (Goldfinch Press) that is dedicated to Doreen Visser Kwak and explores two cancer journeys, mine and hers. It is also available from me.
Ekstasis Editions released gnarled love (2016). This collection of peoms is about love in all its complexity, challenges and beauty touching on friendships, lovers, families and life long relationships.
In 2016 I also published a chapbook entitled Street Signs (Goldfinch Press). It isa departure for me and a little more lighthearted fun inspired by a moment of reading a street sign while cycling and thinking that sign was a comment on life.
In 2018 Random Excess (Ekstasis Editions) came out. It is, as the title suggest a collection of a range of poems, includes two short memoire pieces and touches on many themes.
In December 2019 Aftertime (Ekstasis Editions) was released. The book explores one of my long standing interests - time and was written in response to retirement, aging and facing mortality. Available from the publisher or me.
