speak now into the metal mesh
jiggle the puzzle till the parts fall
to the floor drag the presidentsout for a share of the pain roll
the dice and scoop the childrenout of their sandy shoreline // graves
Excerpt from ‘speak now’ in Sotto Voce, Brick Books, 2019
Maureen Hynes started her working life at George Brown College in Toronto as an English as a Second Language professor and teacher trainer. She went on to provide anti-racism education for students, staff and faculty, and also to establish and coordinate the College’s School of Labour. In addition, she helped to initiate the College’s Positive Space campaign to broaden support for students and staff of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Maureen loved her varied and challenging career, which allowed her the privilege of working on issues she was passionate about.
In 1980, Maureen’s teacher training skills took her to Chengdu University in Sichuan, China, and her experiences there resulted in an “epistolary memoir,” Letters from China (Women’s Press,1981). As she turned 40, however, she realized she’d been putting her writing on the back burner, so she began to take poetry and creative writing courses. This was a stepping stone to becoming part of an active and supportive literary community.
Rediscovering her love of poetry and committing herself to its practice have brought Maureen many exciting and fulfilling opportunities—working with senior poets at Banff and Honeymoon Bay in BC, reading with other poets in cities across Canada, making poetry friends across the country, and leading poetry workshops and teaching in the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing certificate program.
One thing that sustains, fortifies and inspires Maureen is meeting regularly with three Toronto poetry groups to write and workshop poems.
To date, Maureen has written five well-received books of poetry: Rough Skin (Wolsak & Wynn); Harm’s Way (Brick Books); Marrow, Willow (Pedlar Press); The Poison Colour (Pedlar Press); and her most recent, Sotto Voce (Brick Books). A new collection, Take the Compass, is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Maureen’s first collection won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award, and following collections have been shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and twice for the Pat Lowther Award. Her Sotto Voce collection was a finalist for both the League of Canadian Poets’ 2020 Pat Lowther award and the Golden Crown Literary Award for lesbian writers (U.S). Her poetry has been included in over 30 anthologies, including three times in Best Canadian Poems in English (2010, 2016 and 2020), and in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2021).
When, on the recommendation of several poet friends, Maureen contacted Marion for a headshot session, she had no idea that Marion had been her student in an ESL teacher training course many years earlier! (By this time, Marion’s surname had changed.) It was a marvellous coincidence and surprise to rediscover each other, and a delight to have a photo session with Marion, a very skilled photographer who is especially deft at allaying her subject’s self-consciousness.
One of the images above will appear on the back cover of Maureen’s new collection, Take the Compass, but, … you will have to check out her new book to see which one!
“A poet’s work … To name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take
Salman Rushdie
sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”