Our workshops are primarily for participants from underserved communities. Now, over 15 years later, we provide 35-40 poetry workshops each year for children, youth, and adult learners across the city.
#JOSH VALLUM HOME SERIES#
VSEAL’s outreach program, Poetry for our Future!, began as a series of workshops at Lasalle elementary school in 2003. Can you talk a bit about these partnerships (and any others!) and how Vallum has collaborated with these partners? Some of the outreach partners listed on your website include: South Asian Women Community Centre (SAWCC), Perspectives II Outreach High School, Project 10: Projet 10, Chez Doris, and the Laval Penitentiary. The Poetry for our Future! workshops emphasize the importance of creative writing as a means of self-empowerment and community-building in bringing together established poets and local non-profits, these workshops build connections between communities, aiming to expand and strengthen Montreal’s literary community as a whole. Our outreach program, Poetry for our Future!, further connects us to a wide range of arts and community organizations across the city. We also organize readings, launches, and pop-up shops at cafes around the city. In addition to publishing Vallum: Contemporary Poetry and the Vallum Chapbook Series, VSEAL regularly hosts and participates in events designed to support the local and national writing communities – last year, for example, we co-presented a panel on chapbook publishing, alongside Baseline Press and Anstruther Press.
We have partnered on events and projects with a range of local arts organizations including the Quebec Writers’ Federation, Maisonneuve Magazine, and the Atwater Poetry Project. How would you describe Vallum’s place in Montreal’s literary community? What events are you involved in or do you organize? Are there other literary publications, societies, networks, or spaces you work with, whether in Quebec or elsewhere?Īs the publisher of Montreal’s only English-language journal dedicated to poetry, VSEAL strives to support local poets while also fostering connections with the broader literary and arts communities across Quebec and Canada. The current managing editor in charge of operations is Leigh Kotsilidis.
Today, we continue to publish two issues of Vallum magazine and two chapbooks in the Vallum Chapbook Series per year, as well as coordinating city-wide outreach workshops. In 2005, VSEAL launched the Vallum Chapbook Series, which publishes two chapbooks each year, and whose authors include George Elliott Clarke, Nicole Brossard, Fanny Howe, and more. The same year, the organization was incorporated as the Vallum Society for Education in Arts & Letters (VSEAL), a registered charity publishing Vallum magazine and holding poetry/literacy workshops in Montreal and beyond. In 2003, the organization expanded beyond the magazine to organizing poetry workshops in local schools – these workshops grew into the outreach program Poetry for our Future!which now offers 35-40 workshops across the city each year. They both graduated from Concordia’s Creative Writing program and saw a need for an English-language poetry journal in Montreal. Vallum was founded by poets Eleni Zisimatos and Joshua Auerbach in 2000. For this Organization Spotlight, publicist Rosie Long Decter speaks on behalf of the Vallum team.Ĭan you introduce a bit of Vallum’s history? How was the publication founded? As one of Canada’s top poetry journals with an international focus, Vallum encourages dialogue between Quebec and the rest of Canada and allows Canadian artists to exchange ideas with acclaimed and emerging artists from the United States, Britain, Ireland, Australia, India and other countries around the world. Vallum provides a forum for emerging artists to interact with more established figures while giving them exposure and the confidence to continue with their art. Founded in 2000 and based in Montreal, Vallum magazine is published biannually.
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