Dark Canadee

Dark Canadee is a twisted poetry fantasy, set in an alternative Canada Water, and tailor-made by T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated Glyn Maxwell for the times in which we find ourselves. The project takes the form of a serial literary fiction where, each fortnight, 6 poets sail into a dark port to take shelter from a swirling plague and join clandestine writing workshops. The world is fabricated, but the poems are real, submitted by participants before each voyage, and Glyn’s feedback on these is genuine, being skilfully woven into each narrative. Part avant-garde tutorial, part publishing experiment, this promises to be a unique experience and we hope you would like to join us for these first sessions.

Read The Pilot Voyage here

29^th January, featuring Roger Bloor, Vanessa Lampert, Sara Levy and Samuel Prince

Read The First Voyage here

19^th February, featuring Stephen Boorman, Diana Cockburn, Katie Colombus, Helen Curtis, Janet Smith and Chris Welch

Read The Second Voyage here

5^th March, featuring Caroline Davies, Kate B Hall, Antony Mair, Kitty Martin, Greta Ross and Nisa Saiyid

Read The Third Voyage here

30^th March, featuring Anne East, Erica Jane Morris, Sandra Galton, Emma Simon, Vishvantara and Barry Tench

Read The Fourth Voyage here

26^th April, featuring Matt Bryden, Jennifer Jones, Jeanne Cannizzo, Kate Edwards, Shardool Kulkarni and Emilio Puerta

Read The Fifth Voyage here

17^th May, featuring Laila Anne Farnes, Annabelle Markwick-Staff, Melinda Zimmerman, Helen Eastman, Kate Ghyll and Huan Zhang

As you’ll see, the project is expansive, Glyn’s feedback is detailed and extensive, and the overall experience is totally unique. We will publish each instalment in an online Poetry School Magazine, featuring innovative writing, reviews, criticism, and new poetry. Alongside being an exciting piece of literary fiction and an experimental poetry workshop, we envision Dark Canadee as an anthology of the poems published within it and a future compendium of sage advice, critique, and direction on what readers can learn about poetry and apply to their own writing and lives, in the vein of Glyn’s earlier books On Poetry and Drinks with Dead Poets.

Click here to subscribe to our Dark Canadee newsletter to receive the new instalments of the project as they are published.

To join an upcoming voyage, please purchase your place here. The next voyage is scheduled for 25 June, with the instalment being published on 5 July.

All we will need from you to take part in a Voyage are the following materials:

(a) A poem (one side) that you would like feedback on.
(b) Seven Things About Yourself, true or false, that can be used in the fiction (100 words max). These Seven Things should be about Yourself as a person living through these Plague-Times of 2021 (rather than as a character from a different time).

After booking a spot, we will be in touch with you to let you know how to submit your poem and Seven Things.

If you have any questions about Dark Canadee, don’t hesitate to email us on [email protected].

Please note that our usual concessions are available, you can find more details on this here.