Manitoba friends and poets Joanne Epp and Angeline Schellenberg were in B.C. the past week, doing reading events in Abbotsford, Vancouver, and Victoria. H. and I went to hear them Thursday at the Twisted Poets reading and open mic evening, where Angeline was one of the featured readers. The two poets overnighted with us and the next day, before they took the ferry to the Island, we walked on the Boundary Bay dike where lately there have been so many eagles to see, we took a very short tour of Tsawwassen, and we talked writing, of course.
L-r: Angeline Schellenberg, Dora Dueck, Joanne Epp in Tsawwassen.
I spoke (with admiration) of Joanne’s book Eigenheim earlier, here, and her chapbook, Crossings, here.
Angeline’s brand new book is Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books), and it’s terrific too. It has the feel of memoir, as the poems follow the thread of her experience mothering two children (“the diminutive professor” and “the imaginative child”) on the autism spectrum: anticipation and birth, leading into the challenges of discovery of–and strenuous adaptation to–their unique selves, and ending with a kind of resolution, an awareness of what has been gained, some settling into how it is. It’s an honest book and I resonated with it as a mother, not because my experience has been the same, but because literature is like alchemy: the Very Specific of the writer digs into an ore of truth and emotion from fear to heartbreak to tenderness to joy, thereby turning it into something universal by which the reader is made to see their own Very Specific too.
Angeline writes in a variety of forms. She likes word play, but also the simple scene with a poignant image. Such as, “the monarch/ on wind-whipped willow boughs, tugging/ at our ache with each wingbeat” (from Waving). 
She’s tender: “There is my son./ His soft I don’t know. The book/ between us. His head almost/ touching mine on the pillow” (from Beyond Words). And she’s justifiably feisty: “I won’t repeat/ how tired I am of hearing/ that vegan cheese will / change everything” (from Anything Besides).”
Definitely recommended.
Borrowing Bones 
Love the photo! Looks like you’re having a wonderful time!
Thank you, Elfrieda, indeed it was great to be together. And the day was fairly clear, lovely light, not overcast as winter here can be.
Your writing is so concise and so vivid, Dora. These words: “literature is like alchemy: the Very Specific of the writer digs into an ore of truth and emotion from fear to heartbreak to tenderness to joy, thereby turning it into something universal by which the reader is made to see their own Very Specific too.”
You say more in a few paragraphs about poets and books than many reviewers say with ten times the words. Wabi sabi.
Ah, Shirley, you are so kind. — I’m quite sure you remember, as I do, first encountering stories, rare though they were, that spoke into the full range of the mothering experience and feeling this relief that someone was doing so. For me it was Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence. Perhaps even Pearl Buck, though in a different context.