Stuart McKay Artist-in-Residence

As part of our Canada Day Celebrations in Historic Markerville, Stuart McKay will share a poetry reading on the courtyard stage, including “Canada” by Stephan G. Stephansson, and one of his own original poems. Begins at 3:00 pm.

I am a Calgary/Edmonton based poet. My fourth book of poetry, “the commune of our waking” was published in 2024 by AOS Publishing of Montreal. Community involvement is a major concern of my artistic practice. To that end, I serve on the Board of Directors for the League of Canadian poets, and serve on the poetry editorial collective of filling station. As well, I am a writer on the margins. I live with a permanent disability - learning and visual - and am a recipient of Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped from the Alberta Government.

During my residency, I will continue work on two writing projects. “bohemia, with a twist of lemon, please” and “celadon in tonality”.

“bohemia, with a twist of lemon, please” is a long poem memoir, examining the relationship between my disability, my poetic life, and my faith life.How have my experiences as a disabled person affected, and influenced my growth as a poet? How does my Christian faith influence and affect my understanding of disability, my aesthetic practice? “bohemia, with a twist of lemon, please” is not a religious tract; nor is it a guidebook on disability politics, or a document of personal poetic personal history. I wish to go deeper than surface considerations, and ask difficult questions about the nature of disability. How and in what manner does the experience of living with a disability lead to an aesthetic sensibility? Does a life of faith mean resisting or embracing the rigours, joys and challenges of disability, of a life dedicated to creativity?

“celadon in tonality” elaborates on my belief that poetry is a form of memory. “celadon in tonality” examines how the material world delivers memory through, for example, an encounter with a work of art, a ceramic cup, a piece of music. In one of the long poems in the series, I imagine a child touring an art gallery featuring the work of the Regina Rive group of artists. He hears the music of the Vancouver composer, Barbara Pentland, play in the background. He remembers this experience years later when he hears the music again. Another long poem is concerned with the Soviet Venera probes to Venus in the 1970s and 1980s. How can a long poem memorialise the event? A long poem about the time-defying power, and meditative possibilities suggested within ceramics will also feature in the series.

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