Poet Laureate Podcast: Inaugural Community Episode (2025)

Featuring: Lorne Daniel, Jeremy Loveday, Zoe Dickinson & Tracy Wai de Boer

Recorded live in the Garden Studio at Haus of Owl Creation Lab, this episode celebrates community, poetic resilience, and the power of shared voice. Four poets with new or forthcoming collections join Kyeren Regehr to read and reflect on the craft of poetry and the lives behind the words. We open with Lorne Daniel’s quietly rousing invocation of the ocean as a metaphor for enduring care, followed by Jeremy Loveday’s fierce and vulnerable meditation on masculinity, protection, and the tensions of public vulnerability. Zoe Dickinson brings a bookstore dreamscape alive with wit, longing, and ecological reverence, and Tracy Wai de Boer closes with graceful insight and imagistic precision, threading language through memory and the body.

Together, these poets offer a chorus of perspectives—on vulnerability, humour, grief, embodiment, and the shifting boundary between art and daily life. With three debut collections and a fifth from a seasoned poet, their combined experience spans decades of literary engagement: from managing bookstores to mentoring youth, from editing anthologies to animating public space through poetry and visual art.

Lorne Daniel was one of the first poets to emerge from the Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s and published four collections. He also co-edited the seminal poetry journal Canada Goose and the anthology series Ride Off Any Horizon. As a freelance writer, Lorne contributed reviews, op-eds and features for dozens of newspapers and magazines across Canada. What is Broken Binds Us is Lorne's newest and fifth collection.

Jeremy Loveday is an award-winning poet, spoken word artist, and community builder. As co-founder and former Artistic Director of Victorious Voices, Jeremy has helped hundreds of young poets find their first stage. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Best Canadian Poetry 2023. Jeremy was the 2020 winner of the Zaccheus Jackson Nyce Memorial Award. After more than two decades of performing poetry, Maybe the Starling is his first full-length collection.

Zoe Dickinson's poetry is rooted in British Columbia’s Pacific coastline, she is a manager at Russell Books, one of Canada’s largest used, antiquarian, and new bookstores and is an Artistic Director emertia of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series. Zoe has published two award-winning chapbooks and her first full-length poetry collection, Staff Picks for Invertebrates, is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in 2026.

Tracy Wai de Boer (she/they) is an award-winning poet, interdisciplinary artist, curator, and PhD candidate. Her debut book, Nostos, was published in May 2025 with Palimpsest Press. Tracy’s chapbook, maybe, basically, was nominated for the bpNichol Award. She has co-authored Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, which won the Book Publishers of Alberta Best Non-Fiction Award and was named one of CBC’s Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year.

All four poets live Victoria, British Columbia, on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən people

The Poet Laureate Podcast is recorded in studio at Haus of Owl: Creation Labs—supporting artists to create the best work of their careers. Original music by Chris Regehr. To learn more or reach out, visit www.thepoetlaureatepodcast.com or find us on Instagram @poetlaureatepodcast & poetlaureatepdcast@bsky.social.

We acknowledge with gratitude that this work was created on the unceded homelands of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.

Poet Laureate Podcast – Episode Eight Joanna Streetly | Deep Time, Transformation, and the Ethics of Place

In this eighth episode, Kyeren Regehr sits down with Joanna Streetly—poet, memoirist, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Tofino. Writing from a float house in Clayoquot Sound, Joanna explores the intersections of deep time, personal grief, and the fluid nature of transformation.

The conversation navigates the ethics of writing about place as a settler, the "brave swimmer" metaphor for exploring darkness, and how the strict discipline of Haiku can sharpen a narrative voice. Joanna shares moving stories from her laureateship, including her work amplifying the histories of Japanese internment and residential schools through community elders. Featuring three poems, including the evocative “Cochlear” and the searing “First Supper.”

Joanna Streetly’s work appears in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Best Canadian Essays 2017, and numerous literary journals. Her latest collection, All of Us Hidden (Caitlin Press), arrives this fall. Her memoir, Wild Fierce Life: Dangerous Moments on the Outer Coast, is a BC Bestseller. Other titles include Paddling Through Time, Silent Inlet, and the poetry collection This Dark (Postelsia). She has been shortlisted for the FBCW Literary Writes Poetry Contest, The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul Award, and the Canada Writes Creative Non-fiction Prize. Raised in Trinidad, Joanna moved to Canada at 18 and has lived on the traditional territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht people since 1990. She served as the 2018-2020 Tofino Poet Laureate.

This episode is generously supported by Mermaid Tales Bookshop. A charming independent bookstore in Tofino, BC, Mermaid Tales is known for its carefully curated collection of novels, local interest reads, and literary treasures that help readers take chances on stories that open new vistas. Discover more at mermaidbooks.ca.

The Poet Laureate Podcast is recorded in studio at Haus of Owl: Creation Labs—supporting artists to create the best work of their careers. Original music by Chris Regehr. To learn more or reach out, visit www.thepoetlaureatepodcast.com or find us on Instagram @poetlaureatepodcast & poetlaureatepdcast@bsky.social.

We acknowledge with gratitude that this work was created on the unceded homelands of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.

In this seventh episode, Kyeren Regehr welcomes Yvonne Blomer—poet, editor, and the fourth Poet Laureate of Victoria. With nuance and urgency, Yvonne speaks to reimagining myth through a feminist lens, her environmental curation of the anthologies Refugium, Sweet Water, and Sublime, and the ways poetry intersects with mothering, disability, and visual art. Featuring three poems, including the haunting palindrome “Audubon: Still Life.” Recorded at Haus of Owl Creation Labs on Lekwungen Homelands in Victoria, BC.

Yvonne Blomer is the author of Death of Persephone: A Murder, a poetic noir mystery rooted in myth and the ongoing violence against women and girls. An excerpt won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize in 2021. She has edited five anthologies, including the celebrated eco-poetry triptych Refugium, Sweet Water, and Sublime, as well as Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page, and served as Arc Magazine’s poet-in-residence for 2022–23. With an MA from the University of East Anglia, she teaches immersive poetry workshops online and lives on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking people.

This episode is generously supported by Bolen Books. Independently owned and operated by the Bolen family since 1975, Bolen Books is Western Canada’s largest single-location independent bookstore and a cornerstone of Victoria’s literary life. Discover more at Bolen Books.

The Poet Laureate Podcast is recorded in studio at Haus of Owl: Creation Labs—supporting artists to create the best work of their careers. Original music by Chris Regehr. To learn more or reach out, visit www.thepoetlaureatepodcast.com or find us on Instagram @poetlaureatepodcast & poetlaureatepdcast@bsky.social.

We acknowledge with gratitude that this work was created on the unceded homelands of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.