northern poetry & charity Friday

It's Friday!  What social causes deserve your attention this week?

• My colleague Shaneka is running a 5k race on October 20 to raise funds for Food for the Poor Canada at the Toronto Waterfront Marathon. This organization provides aid to Jamaica and Haiti. Donate here: http://my.e2rm.com/personalPage.aspx?registrationID=1987124&langPref=en-CA  

• My friend Ali volunteers for the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Centre. Every once in a while she posts photos of really cute seals that she gets to work with. Cute seals are a great cause! Donate here: https://bbnc.vanaqua.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=1522.

•  My sister-in-law Julie wants to make a music video protesting the tar sands pipeline, and has started up an Indiegogo campaign to raise the funds for it. Support her artistic endeavours here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tarfree613-song-video

my morning glories are in bloom!

In other news, I won third place in a Northern poetry contest! I entered Up Here Magazine's Robert Service poetry contest. Up Here is a great Northern lifestyle magazine that makes living in Canada's far north seem pretty exciting. The poetry contest required contestants to write a poem about living in the North in the style of Robert Service, the famous Canadian poet who wrote great poems such as The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee.

Anyway, for this contest, I wrote a poem called The Redemption of the Sewage Truck Driver. It's all about how our sewage truck drivers just don't get enough appreciation for the important work they do. For those of you who aren't familiar with how the sewage system works in most Nunavut communities, we don't really have a functioning underground sewage system. Instead, our sewage is sucked out of our houses by truck, and then carted away, while water is delivered by a different truck. It's a pretty smelly process, but an important function.

All this to say that my poem won third place in the contest! You can check it out here: http://uphere.ca/node/971, or in the latest issue of Up Here Magazine. 

Big thanks to my husband, Aaron the editor, and the sewage truck drivers for the inspiration. 

a beautiful moon hanging low over the tundra horizon at sunset. i missed sunsets! i missed the moon!