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Jane Munro is a Canadian poet, writer and educator. 

Jane Munro’s prose memoir is Open Every Window (Douglas & McIntyre, 2021). Her most recent poetry book is False Creek (Harbour Publishing, 2022 ). Munro’s sixth poetry collection Blue Sonoma (Brick Books) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her previous books include Glass Float (Brick Books), Active Pass (Pedlar Press), Point No Point (McClelland & Stewart) and Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (Brick Books).

All Lit Up - “Inner Ear: Listening for Poems.”

Latest Publication

False Creek

Harbour Publishing
October 1, 2022

"Munro’s False Creek is illuminated by generous humanity and deft virtuosity … Alive to the worlds of dream and imagination, she also confronts the violence of history. Written by a poet at the top of her form, False Creek opens a cabinet of wonders."

Anne Simpson, author of Speechless

 

"Jane Munro’s sanely observant eye, so evident in her Point No Point poems, now details with equal clarity her urban inhabitance. The short lines of these poems map her vision, from "in your hands, the weight of bone" to "False Creek/ Vancouver’s keel of grief" and out to "stars – where
earth’s been and is going."  These are deeply necessary poems, a gift to readers."

Daphne Marlatt author of Then Now

"With the grace of “water / the surprise / source of energy,” Jane Munro finds her way amidst the confluences of ecological disaster and despair, settler-Indigenous relations, and griefs of body and soul. Uncovering both dissonances in scale and resonances between human and planetary space and time, she corrects our sense of ourselves, urging us towards change. These often spare poems model the difficult but necessary practices of openness, curiosity, self-scrutiny, and show “where we’re at … what’s beyond us."
–Maureen Scott Harris, author of Drowning Lessons and Slow Curve Out

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Open Every Window: A Memoir
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Award-winning poet Jane Munro recalls the slow-motion ordeal of losing her husband to dementia in this frank memoir. The book isn't only focused on the yearslong period of his illness. Munro touches on her own life — early childhood in Vancouver, marriage, children, divorce, a failed romance and her life with Bob, who was 20 years older and in his 70s when the first signs of dementia appeared. Her life takes a back seat throughout Bob's illness as she copes with grief, frustration and the endless demands of being a caregiver. Self sacrifice may be praiseworthy, but it's Munro's determination to reclaim a part of herself that is inspiring.

—Pat St. Germain

The writer and poet Jane Munro discusses her memoir Open Every Window (Douglas & McIntyre, 2021), with Joseph Planta.

The pain experienced as a loving relationship is forced to transform is at the core of Jane Munro’s memoir, Open Every Window. With an honest and generous spirit, Munro shares her personal journey of caring for her husband, Bob, after he is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

—Andrea Geary, Winnipeg Free Press

BC Booklook article about the memoir

https://bcbooklook.com/caregiver/

Open Every Window is a genre-bending prose account of the unravelling of a life—two lives—when Jane Munro’s husband Bob is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir charts a path through sorrow—the pain of seeing a partner age and approach death, the exhaustion of caretaking, and the regret in seeing life’s scope narrow and diminish. Written with courage and love, Munro grapples with what it means to care for a husband who is gradually but devastatingly deteriorating. Her identity as a writer, yoga practitioner, mother and grandmother, are all eclipsed by a single word—caregiver. Even a doctor admonishes, “What job could be more important than caring for your husband?” In this portrait of the myriad lives contained in a single life, Munro ultimately finds respite in the power of writing, and in the rhythms of the moon—not to heal but to allow her to face grief without breaking.

“Munro’s lyric prose is lit from within. A remarkable memoir, both fresh and graceful.” 
—Jan Zwicky, author of Songs for Relinquishing the Earth


“With characteristic clarity, honesty, and restraint, Jane Munro unveils the extraordinary devotion of women to parents, children, husbands, families, to everyone but themselves. Open Every Window reminds me of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women as it charts the socialization of girls over a lifetime. When does one yield to expectations? When must one resist? Never a word wasted, never an extraneous detail, Munro reveals the conundrums, self-denial, the invisible labour of women in all their roles. She writes with insider knowledge of the conflicts women face as they try to preserve a life of their own. The lingering beauty of Open Every Window is the revelation that a single life can hold so much more than one life.”

— Ian Williams, author of Reproduction


“Jane Munro's memoir is a jewel: spare, bright, and sharp, effortlessly elegant, and illuminated by love’s many facets.”
—Annabel Lyon, author of Consent

Other Publications

Blue Sonoma
Jane Munro won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2015

As if “a voice spoke her name and woke her,” Jane Munro’s new poems are openhearted, yet quick and taut, with a playful – even biting – wit. How can Blue Sonoma be so elegant, so apparently simple, when each poem is a tinderbox?

— Anne Simpson on Blue Sonoma

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Glass FLoat
Featured in FreeFall Review

What contracts and what expands in grief and where does one go when there is no escape from the self?

 …. Glass Float is an ocean of insight bombs.

Micheline Maylor on Glass Float

More About Glass Float
Review of Glass Float by Marguerite Pigeon in League of Canadian Poets

Munro is back with Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020). Her tools are new: narrative and diaristic series interspersed with flashes from the biographical past. But Munro has the same ambition to summon meaning from the jumble of experience.

Review of Glass Float by Kim Fahner in periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics (rob mclennan) 

Jane Munro’s Glass Float is a book that almost seems to float easily and beautifully in either air or water, taking readers on a voyage around the world, but also on a journey that leads us more deeply within ourselves as we read through the poems. She sets the tone with her epigraph, using a quotation from David J. Chalmers, who has written: “Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.”

Review of Glass Float by David Starkey, California Review of Books

Glass Float, Jane Munro (Brick) “Art is suggestion,” the poet remembers being told by her grandfather, “art is not representation.” That distinction holds true throughout Glass Float, and yet Munro is fiendishly good at describing things, in particular a yoga retreat in India not long after the death of her husband. The book ranges from prose poem sequences to the cryptic and beautiful lyrics for which she is best known. Always, though, Munro’s poems enact the advice of one of her yoga teachers: “Shine like a full moon without dispelling the dark.”

Events
Upcoming READINGS

St. Peter's College

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ONLINE Publications
Jane reads her poem “Break the Fear” from Glass Float.

Jane, a dedicated yogi and noted poet, was inspired by her studies in Pune.  Listen below as she shares some of her reflections with us…

https://iyengaryogacanada.com/break-the-fear/

“Receive Your Face” from Glass Float.

"Receive Your Face" published in Inyengar Yoga Newsletter Winter Spring 2021

https://iyengaryogacentre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Yoga-News-Winter-Spring-2021-final.pdf

Jane Interviewed by Rob Taylor for Read Local BC April 4, 2023

The following interview is part four of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.

https://www.readlocalbc.ca/2023/04/04/choosing-to-not-cry-an-interview-with-jane-munro/

Recent Events
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Eden Mills Writers Festival
September 10th, 2023
Guelph, Ontario

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July 12, 2023
Poetry in the Park
New Westminster, BC

CALGARY – ShelfLife Books
May 11, 2023
Poetry Reading by Moni Brar
and Jane Munro

https://shelflifebooks.ca/

EDMONTON POETRY FESTIVAL
April 26 -27 , 2023
Jane Munro lead a workshop:Our Home On Native Land – Your Poems NowPoetry Readings by Jane Munro and Meghan Eaker

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Whistler Writers Festival
Saturday, October 14th, 2023

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May 18 – 27, 2023

SAGE HILL    
Jane Munro lead SPRING POETRY COLLOQUIUM at St. Peter’s Abbey, Muenster SK

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HARBOUR PUBLISHING POETRY MONTH - April 22, 20023

Helicon Books in North Vancouver
David Zeiroth, Jane Munro, Tawahum Bige

March 8, 2023
Poetry Readings by Susan Braley, Karen Enns, and Jane Munro
Munro’s Books, Victoria BC

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SALT SPRING ISLAND Public Library Poetry Open MicMay 4, 2023

April 19, 2023
Poetry Readings by Jane Munro and Jan Zwicky

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March 18, 2023 VERSEFEST
Knox Church – Ottawa – Bren Simmers & Jane Munro

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Illuminations: An Evening with Jane Munro and Sheryda Warrener
Massy Arts Society

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Recent Local In-Person Reading, August 4, 2022 - Jane Munro & Daphne Marlatt: Writing Memoir

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Poetic Justice New Westminster
November 14, 2021

 
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Phyllis Webb (1927 - 2021) read by Jane Munro

Massy Arts Society

Organized by the Haida Gwaii Arts Council

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Memoir Panel Discussion With Jane Munro (Open Every Window), Ian Williams (Disorientation: Being Black in the World), and Mary Fairhurst Breen (Any Kind of Luck at All).

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Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild’s Well-Versed Lecture Series

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Podcast:
The Commentary with Joseph Planta
November 5, 2021
Listen Here
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Poets Corner:
A virtual reading
July 21, 2021
Watch Here
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Collusion Books Season 2 Launch
Brick Book Book Club

June 3, 2021 - Watch Here

December 1, 2020

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November 27, 2020

http://planetearthpoetry.com/

London (ON) Word Fest - Jane Munro & Penn Kemp in Conversation

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Watch Here

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Lunch Poems at SFU presents Sonnet L'Abbé & Jane Munro
Victoria Festival of Authors Poetry Podcast

September 30, 2020

Jane Munro reads from Glass Float at the Art Bar Poetry Series.

June 2020


 

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Victoria Festival of Authors

July 2020

Jane is interviewed by Susan Braley, a Victoria poet.

https://victoriafestivalofauthors.ca/2020/07/16/qa-with-jane-munro/

Glass Float Virtual Book Launch by

Brick Books & Massy Books 

April 23, 2020

Link to watch Jane's reading on YouTube

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Dead Poets Reading Series
Sunday November 19 at 3pm
Massy Arts Society, Vancouver. BC.

Glass Float

Book Review

A review of Glass Float in the Iyengar Yoga Centre of Victoria’s Yog-e News 

May 8, 2020

Essay

Inner Ear: Listening for poems by Jane Munro

March 20, 2020

Readers Guide

A readers guide for

Glass Float

Blog

Here you'll find a blog post I wrote for Brick Books on why I call my book Glass Float.

Bio
jane munro

Jane Munro is a Canadian poet, writer and educator. 

Jane Munro’s newest book, a prose memoir, is Open Every Window (Douglas & McIntyre, 2021). Her sixth poetry collection Blue Sonoma (Brick Books) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent poetry book is Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020). A Sally Port (Espresso Chapbooks) - short prose pieces about her childhood - came out in 2018. Her previous books include Active Pass (Pedlar Press), Point No Point (McCLelland & Stewart) and Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (Brick Books).

 

She is a member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs (Mary di Michele, Jan Conn, Susan Gillis, Jane Munro) who have published Whisk (Pedlar Press), Rhinoceros (Gaspereau), and Caution Tape (Collusion Books).

As well as working as a writer, Jane has been employed as a professor of Creative Writing at several universities in BC, done educational planning, research and administration, taught many informal writing workshops, and read her poetry to audiences in a wide variety of venues across Canada. She has also given readings in Ireland, the USA, Italy, India and Egypt.

For more than twenty years, she has studied (in Canada and in India) and practiced Iyengar Yoga. 

In 2012, she moved back to Vancouver – where she grew up and raised her children – after spending twenty years living at Point No Point in a rural area on the coast of Vancouver Island. Although BC has been her home base, she has lived in the USA and Turkey, traveled extensively in India and in Europe, and been to South Africa and Egypt. 

 

Born (Patricia Jane Southwell) in Chilliwack BC, she was educated at UBC (undergraduate, M.F.A., Ed.D.), Indiana University (B.A.), and SFU (M.A.). 

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2015 Winners of Griffin Poetry Prize with Scott Griffin

Jane Munro, Canadian Winner; Scott Griffin; Michael Longley, International Winner

photo by Tom Sandler

books
books
books by Yoko’s dogs

Glass Float

Caution Tape

A Sally Port

Blue Sonoma

Active Pass

After the Fire

Point No Point

Grief Notes & Animal Dreams

Rhinoceros

The Trees Just Moved to a Season of Other Shapes

Whisk

Daughters

Open Every Window

False Creek

Books
Contact
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