For the first time this year, POW! includes poetry writing / performing workshops. What are your thoughts about facilitating a POW! Festival workshop?

As a publisher of literature, I know that about 70% of the readers who buy literature are also deeply interested in or already engaged in creative writing. As I have experienced the strenuous economic, emotional and spiritual costs of writing, I want to offer to young or emerging writers whatever assistance I can toward the production of innovative and excellent work. If I can be of some small service to Cobourg and area poets and writers, I will be pleased.

How would you describe your own writing?

I write fiction, poetry and non-fiction, and each genre has a very different feel to its writing atmosphere. I try to get on the vertical line in my writing, and descend. And then go a little deeper. Saying more, and then again more, about one thing. I sweat the details.

When did you start writing and what prompted it?

I started writing in high school. I was inspired by the writing I loved: Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Hermann Hesse. I had an English teacher in high school who was very encouraging.

Is it your own creative writing that gives you the urge to help others with their writing process in workshops like these?

Yes, my own writing, and also my awareness of how incredibly difficult creative writing is. People with talent need to be supported and encouraged. It's very easy to become isolated, and then to lose one's nerve. If it hadn't been for my high school English teacher, maybe I would have lost mine.

The POW! Festival is built on the notion that poetry should not be relegated to an existence as "a niche art form" that the average person doesn't care about.
How do you respond to that?

There isn't a human being alive that has the power to relegate poetry anywhere. Poetry is simply not for everyone. In addition, school programs do a lot to kill many young persons' burgeoning interest. [Poetry should not be taught so much as offered in grade school, I think.] But culture shouldn't be reduced to advertising and promotion. If we make poetry available, as POW! Festival does, the curious and the interested will come. Poet Pier Giorgio di Cicco says people come to poetry after they have had a transformative experience. But no one can plan to give another such an experience. Ever. Poetry is one of the mysteries of human life. Not everyone has the stomach for the mysteries.