Honoured to be the featured poet for the New Zealand Poetry Society's online (social media) Member Monday feature on January 13, 2025. My thanks to Kim Martins for the invitation!
Debbie
lives in Manitoba, Canada. She has made her home in rural and urban communities
in each of the four western Canadian provinces, from the prairies to the ocean.
Poetry of place features in much of her haiku and tanka. Debbie’s daily
creative practice is a form of meditation and healing, helping to mitigate the
effects of chronic illness, and connecting her more closely to the world, to
others, and to herself.
Debbie’s
third-floor writing room looks out onto a gorgeous row of lindens, fragrant in
summer, and frosted in winter. Their branches are often filled with chickadees
and finches, punctuating the days with song.
Debbie
loves:
.
playing guitar, singing, songwriting
.
wind & waves, fog & frost, sunsets & aurora
.
camping, birdwatching, gardening
.
making haiga using watercolours, inks, acrylics
.
collage, paper crafts, miniatures
.
visiting with her sisters
.
Scrabble with her husband
Debbie’s
camera is her constant companion. She has been making photographs for decades,
whilst exploring the wilds with her husband and their dogs in a 1978 lime-green
VW campervan named “Ludwig”. Her photography exhibition, “The Poetry of Light”,
explores the subtle and flamboyant nuances of light, reflection, and
refraction. Now that Debbie’s vision is compromised, she often uses intentional
camera movement and diffusion techniques to create dreamlike images.
At
the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Debbie invited 50 emerging and established
short-form poets to collaborate on an online haiga project for healing. She
enjoys creating haiga galleries and films for The Haiku Foundation, and
recently contributed an essay discussing colour and the ways in which it
impacts her work.
Debbie’s
full-length haiku collection, “Random Blue Sparks”, winner of the 2020 Snapshot
Press Book Award, has just been released:
dead orchard
the random blue sparks
of woolly aphids
3rd
Place, Irish Haiku Society Int’l Contest, 2018
.JPEG)
