Creekstone Press

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Photos from the Enpipe Line Prince George Launch

About 60 people joined the radical rabble of Prince George for an evening of resistance poetry to celebrate the launch of The Enpipe Line at ArtSpace in Prince George on Monday, March 26.

“On-line for over a year, [The Enpipe Line] resonates as a manifesto on devotion to our world and inscribing that attention into the earth and water works of our imagination and our desire for a sustaining world.”
—Fred Wah, Parliamentary Poet Laureate


Prince George poets Rob Budde and Al Rempel, who contributed work to The Enpipe Line, and Sarah de Leeuw and Gillian Wigmore, whose work looks honestly at the sometimes harsh realities engendered by business as usual in the north, were joined by Sheila Peters, a Smithers contributor to the project and co-owner of Creekstone Press which published the project in book form. Contributors Charlene Mattson and Weston McGee also read.

“Global economics bring great forces to bear upon our corner of the planet,” Peters said. “Many of us make poems, as John Berger says, to place something substantial against the cruelty and indifference of the world. Most of us are also planning to make written or oral presentations to the Joint Review Panel examining the Enbridge project.”

The Enpipe Line project started in Prince George in November 2010 when Budde invited Vancouver poet Christine Leclerc to read at UNBC. She had taken part in an occupation of the Enbridge offices in Vancouver. That was where the “enpipe” image first came to her. (To enpipe—a project coinage—is to block up and/or fill a pipe to bursting.) It lived online at http://www.enpipeline.org until Peters approached Leclerc about publishing the project as a book.

“The project speaks powerfully to those of us living along the proposed pipeline route, reminding us that we are not alone in resisting these pipelines,” Peters said.

An editorial collective made up of some of Vancouver’s most interesting younger writers – Jen Currin, Jordan Hall, Ray Hsu, Christine Leclerc, Nikki Reimer, Melissa Sawatsky and Daniel Zomparelli – worked with close to one hundred poets from around the world to create the book.

“We came together as a community to write something that speaks to the heart of the resistance to Enbridge’s tar sands pipeline,” said Leclerc. “The possible world we hear on quiet days has a breath as close as imagination.”

Proceeds from the sale of the book go into a Northern Gateway Pipelines resistance legal defense fund administered by the editorial collective.
Launch Photos