Writer, Rabble Rouser, fancy talker; Magpie is a performance poet and storyteller who refuses to follow any one literary or oral tradition. Known for high impact performances which showcase visceral, often surrealist writings that extend from the everyday human experience into the depths of natural and inanimate worlds.
Magpie is a queer, neurodivergent, activist, nature nerd, garden witch who started performing poems more than 25 years ago. She accepts her influences come from Punk rock, 90’s grunge, and the American beats (DiPrima, Brautigan, Ferlingetti) while taking gentler cues from the works of Rumi, Cohen, and Annie Dillard.
She has performed poems and told stories across North America and is a multiple award winning, beloved veteran and organizer in the national poetry slam & spoken word community in Canada.
Much of the past two decades of their life has been spent heavily involved in the arts while living in and around BC, Alberta & Ontario. The past many years have been given to guiding a new human and more than a decade spent caring for a grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease.
Magpie’s latest works seek questions surrounding genetic memory, placemaking, grief, aging, our place in the natural world, survival, rebellion, late stage capitalist nightmares and the imminent undoing of our species.
Magpie currently lives with their family on the fringes of most things in the current of time.