Feb 12 3pm Love Poems Book Launch

Romance is in the air at Historic Joy Kogawa House. Come celebrate Valentine’s Day with love poems, chocolate and vino, and help launch Leaf Press’s anthology The Wild Weathers with readings from Peter Trower, Daniela Elza, Susan McCaslin, Elsie Neufeld, Berenice Freedome, Jocelyn Pitsch, Meg Torwl, Leanne Dunic, Lenore Rowntree, and Robin Susanto. Vancouver’s poet laureate Evelyn Lau has been invited and the Kogawa House writer-in-residence, Deborah Willis, will attend.

When: 3 to 5 pm, Sunday, February 12

Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House is located at 1450 West 64th Avenue (2 blocks east of Granville)

Cost: Tickets are $15 and include a glass of the best vino and all the chocolate in the house

Please rsvp to kogawahouse@yahoo.ca. See you there!

This anthology features my recent poem Sheldon.

For more info and to order from Leaf Press 

Photos of the launch on Facebook 

Jan 24 2012 Exhibition of Creativity by Caregivers

Two of my poems, Remote  and acts considering caregiving from those receiving and giving it, will be on display in an exhibition celebrating creativity by caregivers.

Tuesday January 24 2012. Garden Room. West Vancouver Community Health Centre.
2121 Marine Drive
West Vancouver
6.30pm to 8.30pm


North Shore Caregivers Resources

2011 A Great CREATIVE Year!

Meg Torwl reading July 2011 at the SFU Writing and Publishing Graduation with Trish Webb, Karen Lee

2011 was a good year for me creatively! I got to work or exhibit in several disciplines - writing, performance, audio, video, new media and curate.

I wrote an audio Podplay in a workshop with Jan Derbyshire with Neworld Theatre. About dealing with cancer while going to university. How depression holds hands with illness behind your back and tries to convince you every day is the same. Meanwhile your creativity tries to see the sun and remember everyday is new and full of possibility - even as Fukushima burns.

Two of my films screened. Act Your Age!? with the Generations Project Local Docs Series. Where have all the lesbians gone? with an Out On Screen Retrospective Vancouver Visionaries screening.

I curated and exhibited a new media exhibition in Sechelt for  a month - PORTAL/PORTAGE. A wonderful collaboration with meditations on nature with three other women artists whose work I admire very much, Claudia Medina-Culos, Lilianna Kleiner and Diane Tanchak. With the Sunshine Coast Arts Council.

I completed The Writers Studio 2011 at Simon Fraser University, with the wonderful Poetry and Lyric Prose mentor Jen Currin. Such a great group of fellow students too! My work grew and expanded so much in the fecund environment! I submitted 60+ pages for work-shopping and polished  and shaped my final manuscript of 25 pages for deadline, with the help of Betsy Warland’s excellent Minding Your Manuscript class. My final poetry manuscript is a narrative arc through an intimate relationship, illness, to life transitions of all types. There are three inter-related sections 1. The Synesthete and the Kinesthete (intimate relationships, aging, illness). 2. The Autistic Rheumatologist (disability, illness) 3. Transit of Venus (things thought while traveling – family, disability, spirituality, bliss, happiness, mortality).

I took a fabulous elective paper at SFU - The Poems Story and Silence – with Betsy Warland, the out-going Program Director of the Writers Studio. I wanted to write about a magical childhood encounter with a flock of moths, and ended up writing a new suite of 13 poems on the joys and tensions of the great NZ extended family summer holiday! The diversity and talent of the other women in the class was inspiring when we all gave a 10 minute presentation at the last class, each of us with visual elements to our work. It is always wondrous as a mentor what Betsy is able to draw out of us.

I read my poetry at 5 public reading events, and had 9 poems accepted for publication. With Emerge, The Writers Caravan, Enpipe and The Wild Weathers.

I am looking forward to what 2012 brings, so far in the works seeking a publisher for a poetry book, a collaborative performance commission from Calgary, a Mentorship from NZ, and possibly a retrospective exhibition.

Namaste and gratitude.

The Writers Caravan 5th Chapbook Launch Nov 18 2011

Thursdays Writing Collective launches its 5th Chapbook

Friday Nov 18, 8:15pm at the Memory Festival at the Roundhouse Community Centre

Thursdays Writing Collective and guest editor Michael Turner invite you to a reading and launch of
"The Writers Caravan Anthology," a cross-community publication with UBC Law, The 2011 Writer's Studio and Write Club!

Please join us to celebrate the authors, including TWS's Rua Mercier, Dhana Musil, Yaana Dancer and Meg Torwl, at this free event.

Read more about The Writers Caravan here

- I'll be reading from my prose poem in the chapbook 'eight doors to happiness' about Buddhist lessons learned while taking transit.

Come on out and listen the the authors read their work, buy a copy of the chapbook, celebrate inter-community writing.

Photos of The Writers Caravan Anthology Launch on facebook

Buy a copy of the The Writers Caravan Anthology 2011 here

PodPlay Workshop October 2011

For two weekends in October I went on a fabulous PodPlay Workshop, facilitated by the wonderful Jan Derbyshire. A collaboration between Neworld Theatre and Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture.

 'PodPlays is a hybrid of technology and performance and combines sound, story and text. Load PodPlays onto your portable media player, then step outside where the plays become a soundtrack to life on the streets of Vancouver.' (Neworld Theatre).

Playwrights choose a location and use cues from the urban or natural environment to write a play, often musing on life's large or small questions.

Six of us participated in the workshop, recording first draft readings of our short plays, and then we all went on the PodPlays route to check out the results. Marvelous! We wrote on topics as varied as a missing cat, lost love,  life and death, justice and judgment and two a collaborative poem inspired by Occupy Vancouver. Photos here.

You can check out Jan Derbyshire's Westend PodPlay Dog of your understanding, and other PodPlays commissioned for Vancouver's 125 year anniversary on the Neworld Theatre PodPlay site.