RC Weslowski’s Online World Tour: San José, California

RC Weslowski is the 2021 Zaccheus Jackson Nyce Memorial Award Winner, The 2016 Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award Winner and a Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and Victoria Spoken Word Festival Poet of Honour. RC is a Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Champion, an Underground Indies Champion, A CFSW Team Champion, a Haiku Death Match and Nerd Poetry Slam Champion. RC co hosts and produces Wax Poetic and Oh No Not Another Podcast podcasts. RC is the Artistic Director for Hullabaloo: The BC Youth Spoken Word Festival and curator for Mashed Poetics, a quarterly spoken word and music mash up event that has been running for over a decade. RC’s first book of poetry, “My Soft Response to the Wars” is out on Write Bloody North Publishing. www.writebloodynorth.ca

BOOK LAUNCH: MY SOFT RESPONSE TO THE WARS

My Soft Response To The Wars is the debut poetry collection from Canadian Poetry Slam Champion, RC Weslowski. With a clown’s eye and a trickster’s lip these poems work to rewrite the trauma of childhood sexual abuse with the scissors of surrealism and absurdity. Love and how to survive its loss and transform it into something we can carry forward no matter how wretched, weird and ridiculous it may seem in the aftermath of betrayal is the driving principle in all these poems.

Whether embracing faith through doubt in “Let’s Not Get It Together” or covering himself in grease and blood in the inspirational “It Begins” to the feverish twin exhortations of “I’ve Been Thinking” and “There’s No Fucking Time To Fucking Live” RC Weslowski asks us to follow him into the whirlwind and have whatever mule hair we have left to be blown back into our faces while looking our best in “Dead Horse Mascara.” The poems in this collection invite you to ride the Tilt o Whirl backwards and find your own “P.N.E. Love Affair.” Put a pair of diapers on the ass of your logic and allow it to shit itself and find the meaning beyond the meaning by reveling in the joy and sacrilege of these words

SPECIAL GUESTS

Zofia Rose Musiej is a Polish and Dakelh First Nations, singer/songwriter, poet and interdisciplinary performer. She resides in Vancouver (on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples). She is a slave to the muse, currently working on her first EP and first poetry manuscript, a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU (2019), and her poetry has been published in Prism, Room Magazine, and Salt Chuck City Review.

Fernando Raguero is a long time regular in the Vancouver Poetry slam scene. He has authored 8 poetry chapbooks, is a two time haiku death match champion and is the winner of the 2002 CBC poetry faceoff for British Columbia. Fernando has been a member of two Vancouver poetry slam teams and co-founded the Crotchless Diaper Hotdog eating contest. Raguero serves up irreverent verse and has a wildly comical view of reality. His favourite yoga pose is saddle. He has his moments.

Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Petch was the 2017 Poet of Honour for SpeakNorth national festival, winner of the Golden Beret lifetime achievement in spoken word with The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it's a Queer Slam. Petch is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. In 2021, they are launching "Daughter of Geppetto", a multimedia/dance/music/performance poetry piece with Wind in the Leaves (TBA), their first full length poetry collection "Why I Was Late" in Sept with Brick Books, and their libretto "Medusa's Children" with Opera QTO.

Stephanie Chan (they/she) has won national poetry slams in Singapore (2010) and UK (2012). They produce a monthly spoken word event called Spoke & Bird. Their first poetry collection, Roadkill for Beginners (Math Paper Press), explores placemaking, found family, growing up and queerness in Singapore, rural Ohio and London. They are currently inspired by strange birds, the complexity of human relationships and the squeaks that come out of bushes at night.

Duncan Shields is a computer games animator, spoken-word poet, and flash-fiction writer. He is a staff writer at 365tomorrows.com. He made it to the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize long list. He is also a two-time Vancouver Haiku, Ghost Story, and Nerd Poetry Champion. He has five small volumes of poetry in print but he’s happy to present this first book of flash fiction. He lives in Vancouver, BC, with his wife and daughter and their cat.

Hosted by Mighty Mike McGee, San José coffee drinker, humorist, writer and layabout.