Poet Laureate Podcast: Inaugural Community Episode (2025)

Featuring: Lorne Daniel, Jeremy Loveday, Zoe Dickinson & Tracy Wai de Boer

Recorded live in the Garden Studio at Haus of Owl Creation Lab, this episode celebrates community, poetic resilience, and the power of shared voice. Four poets with new or forthcoming collections join Kyeren Regehr to read and reflect on the craft of poetry and the lives behind the words. We open with Lorne Daniel’s quietly rousing invocation of the ocean as a metaphor for enduring care, followed by Jeremy Loveday’s fierce and vulnerable meditation on masculinity, protection, and the tensions of public vulnerability. Zoe Dickinson brings a bookstore dreamscape alive with wit, longing, and ecological reverence, and Tracy Wai de Boer closes with graceful insight and imagistic precision, threading language through memory and the body.

Together, these poets offer a chorus of perspectives—on vulnerability, humour, grief, embodiment, and the shifting boundary between art and daily life. With three debut collections and a fifth from a seasoned poet, their combined experience spans decades of literary engagement: from managing bookstores to mentoring youth, from editing anthologies to animating public space through poetry and visual art.

Lorne Daniel was one of the first poets to emerge from the Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s and published four collections. He also co-edited the seminal poetry journal Canada Goose and the anthology series Ride Off Any Horizon. As a freelance writer, Lorne contributed reviews, op-eds and features for dozens of newspapers and magazines across Canada. What is Broken Binds Us is Lorne's newest and fifth collection.

Jeremy Loveday is an award-winning poet, spoken word artist, and community builder. As co-founder and former Artistic Director of Victorious Voices, Jeremy has helped hundreds of young poets find their first stage. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Best Canadian Poetry 2023. Jeremy was the 2020 winner of the Zaccheus Jackson Nyce Memorial Award. After more than two decades of performing poetry, Maybe the Starling is his first full-length collection.

Zoe Dickinson's poetry is rooted in British Columbia’s Pacific coastline, she is a manager at Russell Books, one of Canada’s largest used, antiquarian, and new bookstores and is an Artistic Director emertia of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series. Zoe has published two award-winning chapbooks and her first full-length poetry collection, Staff Picks for Invertebrates, is forthcoming from Guernica Editions in 2026.

Tracy Wai de Boer (she/they) is an award-winning poet, interdisciplinary artist, curator, and PhD candidate. Her debut book, Nostos, was published in May 2025 with Palimpsest Press. Tracy’s chapbook, maybe, basically, was nominated for the bpNichol Award. She has co-authored Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, which won the Book Publishers of Alberta Best Non-Fiction Award and was named one of CBC’s Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year. 

All four poets live Victoria, British Columbia, on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən people

The Poet Laureate Podcast is recorded in studio at Haus of Owl: Creation Labs—supporting artists to create the best work of their careers. Original music by Chris Regehr. To learn more or reach out, visit www.thepoetlaureatepodcast.com or find us on Instagram @poetlaureatepodcast & [email protected].

We acknowledge with gratitude that this work was created on the unceded homelands of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.