Welcome
Welcome to the official website of Lorraine Gane, poet, writer, teacher, editor, and writing/creativity coach
Over the past fifteen years my aim has been to write about the place where the ordinary and extraordinary meet. I’d like to share that with you through my writing workshops, poetry readings, online writing courses, and creative consultations.
Upcoming Workshop on Salt Spring: The Poetry of Witness, Feb. 25
My first opportunity to practice the deep looking in such work was during the writing of a collection of poetry about the illness and death of my fiancé from cancer in the early and mid `90s.
Nearing the completion of Even the Slightest Touch Thunders on my Skin, I became increasingly drawn to the natural world to deepen my explorations. On my walks into the forests and other undisturbed places of Salt Spring Island, which became my home in `98, I began to see “closer and smaller,” as Gerry Gilbert described the practice. From this came the chapbooks Earth Light (2001) and The Phantom Orchid (2007), as well as numerous essays and other pieces.
A third chapbook of poems, Beyond Beauty: Songs of Small Mercies, will be published in 2012. I have completed a second full-length collection of poems, Threshold, and I’m working on a third, The Blue Halo, which explores beauty and transformation against the backdrop of profound changes taking place in the world.
Writing truthfully brings us face to face with our deepest resistances and also our greatest potential. Our ally on the journey is an openness that allows us to see what we’ve held apart from ourselves and invite it back into the whole. The writing that comes from this has a depth and texture, an authenticity. Censoring cuts off vitality, the life blood of our writing. We don’t want to appear flawed. But this very flawed experience is our humanness. As Rumi said, “Our defects are the way glory gets manifested.” We offer the world our lived experiences. These are our treasures, our gifts. –Lorraine Gane
