Metaphorically Speaking with Harold Rhenisch

“The body in the world comes first. I, for one, learned to read the world before I learned to read books, and learned to prune fruit trees before I learned to write poetry. When I came to writing poetry, I treated it as a tree, a living thing I was in partnership with. It is not the usual path, but it is a human path. “

- Harold Rhenisch

Wordstorm returns to our poetic roots in October as we welcome poet, Harold Rhenisch to Metaphorically Speaking. Harold will be sharing from his latest work, "The Tree Whisper - writing poetry by living in the world".

To share at the open mic, please email:  wordstormsociety@gmail.com

Harold Rhenisch was born three months early, in a blizzard, on January 5, 1958, and grew up on an orchard in Cawston, in B.C.’s Similkameen Valley. He started writing poetry when he was 15, under the dramatist Bill Greenland. From 1976-1980 he studied Creative Writing at the University of Victoria, with Charles Lillard, Derk Wynand, P.K. Page, W.D. Valgardson, Dave Godfrey, and Robin Skelton. From 1981-1992 Rhenisch worked in the vineyards and orchards of the Okanagan and the Similkameen, eventually running his own pruning, grafting, and nursery business.

Rhenisch’s poetry explores the land on which he lives and where he grew up in an immigrant culture developing orchards and vineyards in the fertile Okanagan Valley. In the juxtaposition of new European cultures and an ancient land.

Rhenisch has been an arts columnist for the 100 Mile Free Press and in 1996 won the B.C. and Yukon Community Newspaper Association Award for Best Arts and Culture Writing. In 1980, the University of Victoria awarded him the Rosalind Hewlett Petch Memorial Prize in Creative Writing, and he won Arc Magazine’s first (1991) Confederation Poetry Prize, as well as their 2003 prizes for best long review of poetry and for poem of the year. He has won The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize (twice), and the CBC Literary Prize. His The Wolves at Evelyn won the George Ryga Prize for Social Responsibility in British Columbia Literature in 2007.  He has given many lectures on poetry at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, and has conducted workshops for teachers and elementary and secondary school students throughout  British Columbia. In 1996 he was writer in residence at Douglas College in New Westminster, and in 2003, 2004, and 2007 taught Work In Progress and Memoir workshops at the Victoria School of Writing. He has been the education chair and communication chair of the League of Canadian Poets and has worked as a member of the B.C. Ministry of Education Fine Arts Curriculum Overview Team.