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From The January 2025 Magpie Newsletter

Here is the full Mixed Media feature from the January 2025 issue of the Festival newsletter, The Magpie. 

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Anna Marie Sewell and Rhonda Parrish have been appointed as the 2025 Writers in Residence (WIR)

Anna Marie Sewell and Rhonda Parrish have been appointed as the 2025 Writers in Residence (WIR) at Strathcona County Library, St. Albert Public Library, and Edmonton Public Library (EPL). The acclaimed authors will offer a wide range of support and programs to writers of all ages and experience levels during their residency, through a partnership between the three libraries.

Dubbed “Canada’s best-known and most prolific speculative fiction anthologist” by the Ottawa Review of Books, Parrish has been recognized with numerous awards and nominations. Her work spans science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal non-fiction, with recent releases including the Saltwater Sorrows anthology and novels Blindspots and One in the Hand. Excited about her upcoming residency, Parrish shared “I am so very honoured—I can’t wait to meet more of our city’s incredibly talented storytellers and continue the community-building already done by my predecessors. This is going to be fun!”

While Parrish focuses on storytelling within Edmonton, the writing communities in the surrounding areas will flourish under Anna Marie Sewell’s guidance. Serving as Writer in Residence for St. Albert, and Strathcona County, Sewell brings extensive multidisciplinary collaborative experience, including choral scores from Journey Song (with Mari Alice Conrad), At First Light, and To Wash the World (with Caleb Nelson), which is set to premiere in March 2025.

Together, Parrish and Sewell will offer the local writing community unique opportunities to grow their craft. Parrish will spend her year on the second floor of EPL’s Stanley A. Milner Library in the Writer in Residence office while Sewell will be stationed at the Strathcona County Library from January through June, and at the St. Albert Public Library from August through December. Area writers can access Writer in Residence programs and services at either library throughout the year.

During their residencies, each writer will devote roughly half of their time to mentoring other writers and the other half to working on personal projects. This balance of mentorship and creative work has been a hallmark of the WIR program, as demonstrated throughout 2024 by the impactful contributions of outgoing WIR Premee Mohamed and Katie Bickell. Read more.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t produce better poetry than human-written poetry, despite what you’ve seen or read

A new report from the University of Pittsburgh has given birth to the fiction that generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) can generate better poetry than poetry written by humans. The study, “AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably”, received global media attention, which is unfortunate, because it’s incorrect and full of flaws.

Unfortunately, the report received a huge amount of global media coverage. More than 2,200 links from other websites and more than 500 unique domains point to the study, according to ahrefs.com, the second most active web crawler after Google.

The problem is, the report is incorrect and full of flaws.

Now, millions of people now believe that generative AI poetry is more liked than human-written poetry. This flawed headline will be quoted for months and perhaps years to come as though it’s a fact.Does debunking the AI poetry study matter? Yes, and here’s why:

  1. Many lesser-known writers are under-appreciated and underpaid and have been for decades; in this context, I believe the study will discredit poets, poetry, and writers.
  2. Elected officials and lobbyists opposed to a liberal arts education or poetry courses will use the report to argue against funding poetry and English courses.
  3. The longer-term consequences could impact poetry publishers, festivals, and community organizations around the world.

A closer look at the study ‘AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably’

Porter and Machery’s study participants reported low levels of experience with poetry, with 90.4% of participants reporting they read poetry a few times per year or less; 55.8% described themselves as “not very familiar with poetry”, and 66.8% described themselves as “not familiar at all” with their assigned poet.
During their residencies, each writer will devote roughly half of their time to mentoring other writers and the other half to working on personal projects. This balance of mentorship and creative work has been a hallmark of the WIR program, as demonstrated throughout 2024 by the impactful contributions of outgoing WIR Premee Mohamed and Katie Bickell. Read the full article in Communicateinfluence.com.

Routes back to connection through poetry

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor believes a long lost human ambition for connection remains: yearning for cosmic connection. Even in the age of disenchantment, he says, it never went away. Taylor’s new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in an Age of Disenchantment, tells a story of how poets, beginning in the Romantic period, found a new avenue to pursue meaning in life. He says the insight poetry reveals is too meaningful to be ignored. His book has been named a Times Literary Supplement best book of the year in 2024.

For centuries, most Europeans felt they belonged to an ordered universe. There was a hierarchy that included the divine and the natural world. But by the middle of the 18th century, this feeling had vanished for many people. 

Taylor has long been Canada’s most famous philosopher. He delivered the CBC Massey Lectures back in 1991, on the Malaise of Modernity. Several of his books, like Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, are listed among the most important philosophical works of recent decades.

“People have a very strong sense of the powerful meaning of our relation to nature, the planet. It’s a very important part of the meaning of life for lots of people, perennially, but — in this bewildering way — with great changes,” Taylor told CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed in Montreal, where he has lived, off and on, since 1931. Listen here.

Looking for some poetry collections to read?

Rob McLennan has created his 14th list of ‘best of’ Canadian poetry titles published in 2024. It draws from the poetry titles he’s managed to review throughout the past year. Read the full list here.

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