…I crouch between the toes of the earth, swept by the hem of this sky’s skirt…

For 22 years – since I was 10 – I lived in Peterborough, Ontario. Although I took courses at the Ontario College of Art, I chose my Peterborough collaborations as my art college.

For five years I worked as apprentice and assistant painter to David Bierk. Late at night in that studio I began to experiment with encaustic. There, I painted my first dress painting.

Since leaving BierkArt in the spring of 1999 I’ve designed for theatre, written for newspapers, told stories and written poems. I’ve undertaken countless mural projects with youth. I’ve toured my artwork through festivals, commercial and public galleries.

Starting in 2001, I painted summers in the Yukon. I’ve lived here since 2003.

I’m touring Listening to the Mountain, a show of paintings and drawings in installation, with writing to the mountain on the walls beside the paintings.

Over the past year I have tried to paint 100 small encaustic paintings of dresses in as many different places as possible. Their names, written on the wall beside each painting, make a list of a hundred little things I noticed then and there.

This is a new way of listening to the landscape. It allows me to draw both from the clouds’ particular shapes against the hills, and from the human dreams, anxieties and stories that live there.

www.nicolebauberger.com

Paul Haines, is well known and loved in the jazz world as a poet whose work is so musical it can be played - and has been in various collaborations with musicians like Michael Snow, Carla Bley, Evan Parker, Albert Ayler, Paul Bley etc. etc. A book of his collected works - "Secret Carnival Workers" -has recently been published by Coach House . His wife, Jo Hayward-Haines will be reading from his new book in his honour.

P.J. Thomas has been involved in underground publishing for over 25 years. She was editor-in-chief of her university newspaper and went on to write for and edit several local publications. She became seriously mentally ill at 30 years of age. Ms. Thomas published her first novel, 'Almost Up and Down' in 2004 following 10 years in and out of psychiatric institutions.

I grew up in Morocco and Liberia, West Africa before immigrating to Canada with my family when I was thirteen. I have a BEd and an Honours BA in Creative Writing from York University. I have lived in several provinces, including for many years in Ontario, and am now settled on coastal BC.

Oonagh is the story of Oonagh Corcoran, an Irish girl in the 1830s, who emigrates to Upper Canada to a settlement north of Cobourg. She meets and falls in love with Chauncey Taylor, a fugitive escaped slave from the States. The novel explores their growing relationship in a time when south of the border, black people were still brutally enslaved and where north in our country, the society, while officially opposed to slavery, was all too often racist in deed.