Author: Greg Blee

Poster to my own gregblee.ca blog, and others.

‘other men’s wives’ hot off press

other men's wives (What was i thinking?)I’m pleased to announce that my chapbook other men’s wives : love poems to a village of creative women is fresh off the press, as of a couple of weeks ago. Only 55 copies were printed — we’ll see how long they last.

We held a triple launch party on Nov. 22, as the kickoff event of the Clayoquot Oyster Fest. In addition to OMW, the packed-house evening featured a (very) dramatic reading from Tofino Timeless, a collaborative story by 10 members of the Clayoquot Writers Group, and David Floody’s wry Kittenstein and Frankenfur, the Gambling Cats (ebook here).

I must admit to some trepidation about publishing two dozen mostly bona fide love poems, most quite personal and many about women who still live here on the Wet Coast. I did my best to disguise all references to individuals (there were many), but i fear there may be a backlash of some sort.

UPDATE THREE MONTHS LATER — There are just four copies left. No significant backlash, though i did have a couple of “corrections.” Not surprisingly, about 80% of the copies were bought by women. As i say in the foreword, Women, wonderfully, are still susceptible to poetry. They get it; they understand it; it touches them.

Volunteer vs volunteer board

I sit on the boards of a couple of local non-profits, and one of them had a planning meeting recently. At the meeting, the complaint was made that “the board members aren’t stepping up to help run things.”

I’ve heard the same sentiment a dozen times, and i bet everybody in town who sits on a non-profit board has heard it too. And it occurred to me that there’s a fundamental flaw with the way our whole area thinks about, and enacts, the board model. Continue reading “Volunteer vs volunteer board”

The market is a…

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged, and widespread suffering of conscious beings.

–from The State of the Art, stories by the late Iain M. Banks, 1991

September Non-Disclosure?

DOLT September non-disclosure formLooking for the September Non-Disclosure Form (as mentioned in my piece in September 2013’s Tofino Time magazine)? Click the thumbnail to download it.

Wondering what the heck this is about? Read the piece (below) and all will become clear.

 

 

 

The DOLT Revolt
by greg blanchette 2013

I kicked up my skateboard, glanced up and down Campbell Street, and casually pulled open the door to the district office, like I was going in to sign up for a macrame class, maybe, or ask about the noise bylaw.

Laura was expecting me—all smiles as usual, but you don’t mess with a gal who knows a dozen ways to take you down with her bare hands. I nodded politely and gave the password. “You’re late,” she said. Continue reading “September Non-Disclosure?”