Nelson is touring with poets

Last night, at the Vancouver Poetry Slam, Decatur Georgia poet, Stacie Boschma rocked the house with her performance. Stacie's poetry is the kind I like: direct and honest, telling stories about real-life situations, revealing truth and beauty with humour, intelligence and heart. She started out with "Freedom," remembered by many of us who saw her perform it at the Women's Showcase at iWPS 2007 in Vancouver, then segued to others including "The View from Gotham" (the Batman poem), "Pineapples," and "Love in the Key of Panda." Stacie was appreciated tremendously by the packed-house audience. We hope she'll return soon. In the meantime, I bought her CD, Happy Rainbow Poems from the Unicorn Petting Zoo and The Shout Rainbows EP.

I first met Stacie at iWPS07, where she performed and volunteered. We've been in touch by blog, email and facebook since. I was hoping we might get her to visit Port Moody, but she and her friends Hollin and Arrie had to leave their three beloved dogs in the US because they did not have the complicated paperwork required to bring the dogs across. So on Canadian performance days they have been border-hopping so as not to neglect their canine companions.

I have known Stacie to be a lover of animals since I met her. She has shown a special enthusiasm for our pet plastic rat, Nelson, who has travelled quite a lot in the past couple of years. I have told Nelson about Stacie, and he asked if he could come to the slam to meet her. You can imagine how excited Nelson was when I asked Stacie if she would take the rat on the road to share adventures with her and Hollin and Arrie and the dogs. He was grinning from whisker to whisker! So Nelson will be away for a time. We know he'll have a spectacular adventure, and we hope he'll write to us once or twice and maybe send a photo. We're grateful to Stacie for packing him along. I have told Nelson to be polite and not eat all of Stacie's potato chips (or if he does, to pretend it was the dogs).

If you would like to catch up on some of Nelson's adventures, here's a compilation of my Nelson blog posts.

question: where would you take Nelson, if you could?

mompoet - happy to see my gypsy rat doing what he likes best