Creative Writing Assoc. Prof. Nancy Holmes (left) will host UBCO’s Sharon Thesen Lecture virtually on September 27.
What: Annual Sharon Thesen Lecture: When We Both Were Clothed Alike: Conversation Poetics
Who: UBCO Creative Writing Program, Associate Professor Nancy Holmes
When: Wednesday, September 27 at 7 pm.
Where: Online via Zoom
UBC Okanagan’s Creative Writing Program is hosting its fourth annual Sharon Thesen Lecture with Creative Writing professor and author Nancy Holmes.
Holmes will give a virtual lecture titled “When We Both Were Clothed Alike: Conversation Poetics.” The audience will watch the live broadcast of Holmes’ address from the Corbishley Family Reading Room at UBC Okanagan Special Collections and Archives, located in the Commons building.
Holmes will explore the quality of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry and remind us that poems do complex work around division, balance and incorporating difference—a kind of thinking and communication that is key to contemporary problems.
“The Sharon Thesen lecture is a unique opportunity to explore important ideas through poetics, in the spirit of Thesen herself,” says Holmes. “She has been a champion of the cultural value of poetry and the necessity of the artistic imagination.”
An Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Holmes has published six collections of poetry, most recently Arborophobia. Her last publication, The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems, is a collection of poems about the place, people, plants and animals of the Okanagan Valley.
Thesen, a renowned Canadian poet and editor, was the first full Professor in UBCO’s Department of Creative Studies and is now a UBC professor emerita. Both Holmes and Thesen can be considered artists and scholars who are essential to the story of UBC’s Okanagan campus. Many of their works can be found within the Okanagan Special Collections (OSC), including their joint editorial venture in Lake: A journal of arts and environment, published by the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies from 2007 to 2012.
Some 60 items relating to Thesen, Holmes and past lecture hosts have been selected from OSC’s holdings for display as a backdrop to this year’s lecture in the Corbishley Family Reading Room. The public is invited to view the exhibition starting October 3. The OSC is open for walk-ins Monday to Thursday, from 11 am to 3 pm, or by appointment. Please contact osc-contact@lists.ubc.ca for more information about access to the exhibition.
For more information about the Sharon Thesen Lecture series or to register for the event, visit fccs.ok.ubc.ca/authors.
