Bio

Barbara Pelman is a retired English teacher living in Victoria BC. She is an active member of the writing community, as an assistant at Planet Earth Poetry, the weekly poetry venue. She facilitates poetry workshops at her home and through Planet Earth Poetry. She has three published books, One Stone (Ekstasis Editions 2005), Borrowed Rooms (Ronsdale Press 2008), and Narrow Bridge (Ronsdale Press 2017) and a chapbook Aubade Amalfi (Rubicon Press 2016), as well as poems in various literary journals. Her glosa, Nevertheless, won the Malahat Review Open Season Contest in 2018.

All
things
begin
in silence.
The Hebrew aleph
with its finger across its lips:
the long breath before the uphill climb to reach the peak,
the years of waiting for the birth, the transformation, the cocoon to break open.