WATCH YOUR HEAD
  • Watch Your Head
  • Contributors
  • About
    • Mission
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Frequently Asked Questions
    • News
    • Media Coverage
    • Resources
    • Donations
    • Events
    • Contact
  • Gallery
  • Film & Video
  • Nonfiction
  • Fiction
Picture

Picture
Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN ​& Climate Justice Toronto.
A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it.

Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical.
​

This is a call to climate-justice action.

...Watch Your Head does not disappoint. It serves as a warning to heed, a reminder to be thought of often, and a well-thought-out piece of art. Throughout the anthology, readers encounter pieces that provoke and insist, demanding attention, consideration, action, and creativity. Essays and stories and images alike bring about questions and statements on Indigenous rights, white privilege, exploitation of land and people, colonial power structures, place, home, language, and imagination.
​                                                               
​The New Twenties
Buy WATCH YOUR HEAD from these booksellers
​

Another Story Bookshop
~
Coach House Books
~
Glass Bookshop
~
knife | fork | book
~
​Librairie Drawn & Quarterly
~
Massy Books
~
Munro's Books
​
If you are an independent bookseller and are carrying this book, let us know!
This anthology is not to be missed. The pandemic may have defined our year, but the climate crisis defines our time in geological history. See how this roster of talented writers and artists advance the conversation, put the crisis in context and call for climate justice.
                                                     
​
The Quarantine Review
Picture
Sign up for our newsletter!

PERFORMANCE: JAMES LEGASPI

1/31/2021

 
Picture
still from change
James Legaspi
change
Medium: performance documentation
Duration: 10m19s
April 2020

change is a 10-minute performance comprised of a single-channel video projected over a lone singer. The singer’s voice first delivers a rendition of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come through a vocoder, then moves into spoken poetry. By manipulating archived, found footage and combining it with its interactions between the body and voice, this performance confronts decolonization through an Asian-Canadian lens, notably putting the singer/speaker/artist directly into the environment being challenged. Created and performed at the wake of the pandemic, change’s main function is to respond directly to the xenophobia, Sinophobia, and unabashed racism that the current COVID-19 pandemic and biased mainstream media encourage.
James Legaspi is an emerging Filipino-Canadian multimedia artist currently completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and Sheridan College, living and working in Brampton, Ontario. Recent activity includes work exhibited at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and Gallery 44, curatorial work at the Blackwood Gallery, professional experience as a teaching assistant at Sheridan College, and participation in the most recent rendition of Visual Arts Mississauga’s Creative Residency.

THE CITY IMAGINES: WRITERS & THE CLIMATE CRISIS

1/22/2021

 
If you missed our Word on the Street Toronto event, you can watch it here.

​In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it.

Join us for a conversation with editor Kathryn Mockler and anthology contributors Carleigh Baker, Simone Dalton, Christine Leclerc, and Carrianne Leung on their calls to action for the climate crisis facing us all.
​
The City Imagines series is presented by The Word On The Street, a national celebration of storytelling, ideas, and imagination.
About the Panelists
​

Carleigh Baker is a Cree-Métis/Icelandic writer. She was born and raised on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Stó:lō people. Her first collection of stories, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award.

Simone Dalton is a Trinidadian-Canadian writer, arts educator, and recipient of the 2020 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize for nonfiction. Her work is anthologized in Watch Your Head, Black Writers Matter, and The Unpublished City: Volume I. Her play VOWS was produced in 2019. As a memoirist, she explores themes of grief, inherited histories, race, class, and identity.

Christine Leclerc lives, works and studies in Coast Salish Homelands / Burnaby, B.C. She is an award-winning author and Physical Geography major at Simon Fraser University. Leclerc serves on the non-profit boards of Embark Sustainability and Climatch. She has also served on the board of Sierra Club BC.
​
Carrianne Leung is a Canadian writer, who won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2019 for her short story collection That Time I Loved You. Originally from Hong Kong, Leung moved to Canada in childhood, and grew up in the Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario.

Moderator
​

Kathryn Mockler edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. Her debut collection of stories is forthcoming from Book*hug in 2023, and she is an Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at the University of Victoria.

POETRY: KIRSTEEN MACLEOD

1/10/2021

 
SWANS

​One frigid midwinter afternoon, early
for the symphony, I look out on the frozen lake.

Unseasonable cold, I worry. Climate change.
That moment a huge bird glides by, slow

motion, long neck outstretched, black bill,
wings extended, body a downy white.

I’ve never seen a trumpeter swan, mythical
creature, surely dreamed to life.

Inside the concert hall beautiful music
swirls, like the thrill of the swan, elevating

me, a wild reminder I’m part of the living
world, an animal too.

Trumpeter swans were nearly extinct.
We think we protected them.

But they protect us, from the impoverishment
of a world without trumpeter swans.

The music ends and I rush out, hoping
to glimpse the swan, what it offers us --

a rare, precious encounter with what
is real, the given world.
Kirsteen MacLeod’s poetry and prose has appeared in many literary journals, and she was a finalist for Arc Poetry’s Poem of the Year in 2020. Her nonfiction book, In Praise of Retreat, is forthcoming in March 2021 from ECW Press. Her debut collection of short fiction, The Animal Game, was published in 2016.

PHOTOGRAPHY: KERRY rawlinson

1/10/2021

 
Picture
Waiting for the Driver, kerry rawlinson
Picture
Cold Comfort, kerry rawlinson
Picture
The End, kerry rawlinson
Picture
Montreal Wall #4, kerry rawlinson
Statement
My creative leaning is expressionistic, towards exposing  the battle-lines of people vs place; the examination of the edges & intersects of nature/ construct, culture/ chaos, order/ anarchy, failure/ success; what emerges from people, collectively, and what happens when we’ve disappeared.
Decades ago, autodidact/ bloody-minded optimist kerry rawlinson gravitated from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil. Now she stalks Literature & Art’s Muses around the Okanagan Valley, still barefoot, forgetting to eat. Some contest achievements: Winner, Edinburgh International Flash Fiction Award; Hon. Mention, Fish Poetry Prize; CAGO Online Gallery. Newer pieces in Foreign Literature,  Synchronized Chaos, Across The Margin, Painted Bride, Tupelo Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Pedestal, Boned, Arc Poetry, amongst others. Visit tumblr; Tweet @kerryrawli

VIDEO POEM: EMILIE KNEIFEL

1/10/2021

 
note: this video was made in may 2017 by 2017-emilie, four months before emilie got sick. 

video transcription: the video is in portrait mode. finger-dragged words read bottom-to-top in grey sand that gets darker/wetter to the right. they say: “TIME IS RUNNING SHORT WITH MOST THINGS I FEEL LIKE THE TIDE RISES TOO FAST.” after six seconds, a wave takes most of them. the words left: “SHORT THINGS FEEL LIKE THE FAST,” or, almost, “SHORT THINGS FEEL LIKE THE PAST.” 

em/ilie kneifel is a poet/critic, editor at The Puritan/Theta Wave, creator of CATCH/PLAYD8s, and also a list. find 'em at emiliekneifel.com, @emiliekneifel, and in Tiohtiá:ke, hopping and hoping.

POETRY: STEPHEN BARRETT

1/10/2021

 

Bluescape from Stephen Barrett on Vimeo.

Faces In the Stones from Stephen Barrett on Vimeo.

Stephen Barrett is a writer, teacher, dad and husband. He composes poetry, writes songs and loves playing his guitar and blues harp. Winters are spent scouring used bookstores in Toronto for old volumes of poetry and summers walking the shores of Lake Huron looking for unique stones and detritus on the beach.

POETRY: GILLIAN JEROME

1/10/2021

 
FAREWELL, MY SEA
— poem for the Salish Sea
 
The morning the quake hit the city
I swore I’d ride full gallop into that sea
never look back. I listened to Jay-Z, shoved
tiny nectarines into my satchel,
and fled West past the Prime Minister
who stood at the corner of 4th  and Trutch
disguised as a Dutch milkmaid with rosy cheeks.
Kits beach was furious.
But I found my pony di Esperia  
standing in my dory and so put myself
upon her and we rowed –
At Howe Sound a gang of dinghies
shepherded by muscular oilers slicked up around us.
In their faces the coast was a Shrinky Dink. 
Dogs and cats galore were chucked and dunked
into the floatsam. The masked activists who had lain
their bodies down beneath bulldozers at Burnaby Mountain
flung themselves straight as arrows off the Sea-to-Sky cliffs.
Pony and I, in those first days, small in our boat,
shared our raisins and stale Triscuits with pirates
from Fort McMurray who stabbed each other up for their last rails.
All of the city’s private property was now public, but useless,
floating as it was, in shit. None of it, not the iPhones or Jaguars,
the Hunter boots or toy giraffes imported
from France, now bobbing maniacally in the water,
mattered. We shared stories and whatever raisins were left.
Alanis Obomsawin, sitting around our campfire beside Pauline Johnson,
asked what colour the sky was. St. Kateri Tekakwitha,
Ike and Tina, Joan of Arc, Marco Polo, Snuffaluffagus— they all came
galumphing back. Buffy St. Marie. Neil Young. Louis Riel. 
We all sat around roasting raisins –
all of us intermittently
marooned on an unidentifiable Arctic island at Great Bear Lake. The sky? 
We hadn’t looked at it.
Babies cried. Laura Secord handed out milkshakes.
Georgia O’Keefe stood as still as a petroglyph, entranced
by the horizon. We’d come too seldom
to the ocean. We were too busy with the 21st century. 
But eternal return isn’t infinite. Not everyone comes back,
nothing lasts. My pony refused to do the dirty work
and her brackish eyes were glassy. On her way to the slaughterhouse,
years ago, standing in a dark box car, despondent, she felt the sudden
hospitality of a man’s arms around her neck.
Turns out those arms were Nietzsche’s, crash-test dummy,
beloved by thousands of boy students of philosophy
the world over, lover of blood and birds and horses. When, after more
Arctic transit, we moved from ice cap to ice cap and watched off
the coast of Greenland the final outburst of the tide
flower up and die, we stopped
so that Pony could peer into the oily face of the sea.
 
*This poem was published at New Poetry (ed. George Murray) in 2018.


Previously published at New Poetry (ed. George Murray) in 2018.
Gillian Jerome is the author of a book of poems, Red Nest, which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and won the ReLit Award.  She co-edited an oral history project, Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which won the 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award. Her poems have recently appeared in GEIST, Hunger Mountain and New Poetry. She teaches literatures and writing at the University of British Columbia where she has taught full-time since 2004. She serves a teacher-mentor in the Poetry in Voice program and teaches sexual health to teenagers.  Born in Ottawa and raised in Orléans, Ontario, she lives in Vancouver with her daughters, Rory and Micah Sophia, and their silver-eyed unicorn Geneviève Hugo. ​

POETRY: JUDITH PENNER

1/10/2021

 
WHAT ABOUT THE WEATHER?

1.
July 2, 2012, Vancouver,
just after 7 pm.                  In 32
 
out of 49 United States
temperatures are higher than ever recorded,
a hundred and five, a hundred and seven,
a hundred and nine or more....
 
In some TV places the air is un-
conditioned, no longer homes there,
where fires have demolished neighbour-
hoods in Colorado Springs.
 
Everything here is lush, soaked,
just a little out of season.
I can sleep — if I’ve walked, worked
at my desk, felt loved by someone,
 
but these days even love won’t
assuage anxiety. It’s not just
a globe that’s warming, it’s
something else –
 
a rise in obfuscation,
a lilt of lies?                            Oil
oozing over the map
will be no surprise and
 
even the rain won’t stop
it now, (such small hands and all
that talk is over)  — citizens
gloved and scared.
 
 
2.
The summer of 2015, Vancouver,
the rain    did      stop,
at least for too long,
April to October there
was never enough.
 
The shock of turning
off the tap, just brush
with a cup, do not wash
your car, your bike, the
shoes you wear, stand
with the hose and let
a little dribble quench
the roses, that old hellebore
still blooming, let moss
die on stones, my steps
stay dirty, neighbourhood
vigilantes take their
high road turns.
 
The day of my party,
a turning point in life,
in weather, rain flooded
the patio, the pool,
the fancied guests.
 
But we were only midway
and our thirst was bigger
than the rain—a modest
spatter, enough for a rainbow,
 
not enough to turn
the clock back
to that glory life,
the one we thought
we had forever.
After starting out as a poet, short story writer, journalist (The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories, The Observer Magazine (UK), CBC, NFB), and co-author of several non-fiction books, Judith Penner spent a long time preoccupied with family, travel, teaching yoga and related workshops throughout India and North America, and her work as an editor. In recent years her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in catalogues (readymades, Smith Foundation), anthologies (Sustenance, Anvil Press), The Poetry Foundation, and in literary magazines, including Geist, Prism International, The Capilano Review online, and SubTerrain. Nomados published A Bed of Half Full: a landscape in 2018. She lives in Vancouver.

POETRY: MARNEY ISAAC

1/10/2021

 
BUCK

She hopes no one sees her superstition
built on years of evidence.
Two fingers to her lips, a kiss
blown in quiet embarrassment,
Inherited from buck,
long gone buck,
bye bye buck.
The rivers break and the banks crumble,
at sunset,
at emergency.
Marney Isaac is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto. Her research program investigates plant-soil interactions and ecological principles that govern the structure and function of diversified agroecosystems. Dr. Isaac serves on the editorial board of applied ecology and agronomy journals and has published widely in the field of environmental science. She has also contributed to numerous non-scientific writing projects, including the uTOpia series GreenTOpia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto (Coach House Books).
www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~misaac/ @MarneyIsaac

    About

    Watch Your Head is an online journal of creative works devoted to the climate crisis and climate justice. 

    New work is published monthly!
    ​
    ​Masthead
    Mission
    ​Submissions
    Contact
    Gallery
    ​Film & Video
    ​Nonfiction
    ​Fiction
    Contributors
    Donations
    Resources
    Check out our latest project: a print anthology published by Coach House Books!
    Picture
    Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis
    Coach House Books
    October 2020
    News
    Media Coverage
    ​News
    Picture
    Sign up for our newsletter

    Archives

    February 2022
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019

    Categories

    All
    Aaron Kreuter
    Activism
    Adam Dickinson
    Adam Giles
    Adam Gunn
    Akshi Chadha
    Alana Bartol
    Alex Manley
    Alice Burdick
    Amanda Earl
    Amy LeBlanc
    Ann Cavlovic
    Annick MacAskill
    Anthropocene
    Archana Sridhar
    Arianna Richardson
    Armand Garnet Ruffo
    Art
    Aude Moreau
    Ayesha Chatterjee
    Ayman Arik Kazi
    Barry Pottle
    Bren Simmers
    Caleb Nichols
    Camille Intson
    Canisia Lubrin
    Carleigh Baker
    Carrianne Leung
    Cassandra Cervi
    Cassidy McFadzean
    Cate Sandilands
    Catherine Bush
    Catherine Graham
    Catriona Wright
    Ching-In Chen
    Choe Rayun
    Christine Leclerc
    Coach House
    Comics
    Concetta Principe
    Cornelia Hoogland
    Cory Lavender
    D. A. Lockhart
    Daniela Elza
    Dave Monture
    David Barrick
    David Groulx
    David Huebert
    David Waltner-Toews
    David White
    Digital Art
    Ecopoetics
    Editors
    Elaine Woo
    Elana Johnson
    Elena Johnson
    Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
    Ellen Chang-Richardson
    E. Martin Nolan
    Emilie Kneifel
    Emily Lu
    Emily Schultz
    Endangered
    Endangered Species
    Erasure
    Erin Robinsong
    Essay
    Events
    Experimental
    Fiction
    Film
    Fiona Tinwei Lam
    Francine Cunningham
    Franco Cortese
    Fundraising
    Gabrielle Drolet
    Gary Barwin
    Geoffrey Nilson
    Gillian Jerome
    Gregory Betts
    Greg Santos
    Hari Alluri
    Hege Jakobsen Lepri
    Hybrid
    Indie Ladan
    Isabella Wang
    Jacqueline Valencia
    James Legaspi
    Jane Shi
    Jen Currin
    Jennifer Dorner
    Jennifer Wenn
    Jenny Berkel
    Jen Rae
    Jessica Bebenek
    Jessica Houston
    Jessica Joy Hiemstra
    Jessica Le
    Jessica Slipp
    Jessie Taylor
    Joanne Arnott
    Jody Chan
    Jonathan Skinner
    Judith Penner
    Julya Hajnoczky
    June Pak
    Kate Sutherland
    Kathleen McCracken
    Kathryn Mockler
    Kerry Rawlinson
    Kevin Adonis Browne
    ​Khashayar Mohammadi
    Kim Fahner
    Kim Goldberg
    Kirby
    Kirsteen MacLeod
    Kirsty Elliot
    Koh Seung Wook
    Kunjana Parashar
    La Ligne Bleue
    Land Art
    Lauren Lee
    Liz Hirmer
    Madeline Bassnett
    Madhur Anand
    Mallory Smith
    Manahil Bandukwala
    Mandela Massina
    Marco Reiter
    Margaret Christkos
    Marney Isaac
    Marta Balcewicz
    Maryam Gowralli
    Mary Of The Tower
    Meredith Quartermain
    Michael Maranda
    Millefiore Clarkes
    Mona'a Malik
    Moni Brar
    Music
    Natalie Lim
    Nicolas Billon
    Nikki Reimer
    Nisa Malli
    Nonfiction
    Novel Excerpt
    On Writing
    Painting
    Paola Ferrante
    Patrick Murray
    Paul David Esposti
    Penn Kemp
    Performance
    Performance Art
    Photography
    Plays
    Poetry
    Prose
    Qurat Dar
    Rae Armantrout
    Rasiqra Revulva
    Reading
    Rhea Tregebov
    ​Robert Frede Kenter
    Robert Hogg
    Rob Mclennan
    Rob Taylor
    Ronna Bloom
    Ryanne Kap
    Sacha Archer
    Sâkihitowin Awâsis
    Salma Saadi
    Samantha Jones
    Samuel Tongue
    Sanchari Sur
    Sarah Mangle
    Sarah Pereux
    Sea Level
    Shades Of Hope
    Sharanya Manivannan
    Shazia Hafiz Ramji
    Shelley Niro
    Sheniz Janmohamed
    Shinjini Sur
    Short Fiction
    Simone Dalton
    Sina Queyras
    Stephanie Conn
    Stephen Barrett
    Stephen Collis
    Steve McOrmond
    Sue Goyette
    Susan Haldane
    Tanis MacDonald
    Terese Mason Pierre
    The Blue Line
    The Uncommitted
    Todd Westcott
    Tom Cull
    Tom Prime
    Trish Salah
    Trynne Delaney
    Tye Engström
    Video
    Video Poem
    Visual Art
    Visual Poetry
    Wanda John-Kehewin
    Whitney French
    Yusuf Saadi
    Yvonne Adalian

    RSS Feed

Sign up for our Newsletter.
ISSN 2563-0067
 © ​Copyright 2021 | WATCH YOUR HEAD
​​List of Contributors.
  • Watch Your Head
  • Contributors
  • About
    • Mission
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Frequently Asked Questions
    • News
    • Media Coverage
    • Resources
    • Donations
    • Events
    • Contact
  • Gallery
  • Film & Video
  • Nonfiction
  • Fiction