Meet Kayla
KAYLA GEITZLER is from Moncton, NB which is within Siknikt of the Mi’kma’ki, the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq People. Named “A Rad Woman of Canadian Poetry” by All Lit Up, she is Moncton’s inaugural Anglophone Poet Laureate & host of the Attic Owl Reading Series. Her first book That Light Feeling Under Your Feet was a Calgary Bestseller & finalist for two poetry awards. Kayla is co-editor of Cadence Voix Feminines Female Voices, a multilingual poetry anthology, the first publication of its kind in NB. Kayla holds an MA in English Creative Writing from UNB & has worked as a technical editor on Canada’s largest pipeline projects & written courseware for Air Traffic Controllers. She has recently accepted the position of Poetry Editor for Galleon.
An East Coast Entrepreneur
“At five years old I knew what I wanted to do with my life: write.”
Writers commune with place & my home, Moncton, is a writer’s refuge. Small, natural, fluid in landscape & tongue, our most abundant commodity is time. Life is slower here. New Brunswickers are hardworking, friendly & caring. These values are a part of my business. I care about my clients, I give you my time. My clients are writers of all levels & genres, self-publishers, women in business & public life, entrepreneurs & small businesses, non-profits, academics & students—anyone who needs assistance with documentation or writing projects.
Be heard. Change the world. Write you.
Awards & Achievements
- The Antigonish Review:
Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest 2020, “Apple Blossom Queen
of 1942″ – Honourable Mention
- festival Frye Festival:
2020 Opening & Closing Poems with Jean-Philippe Raiche
2020 Festival Event Co-host with Jean-Philippe Raiche
2019 How to Twine Tongues in Poetry, Day workshop
2019 Prelude – Emerging Anglophone Poet
- That Light Feeling Under Your Feet:
2018 WFNB Fiddlehead Poetry Prize – Finalist
2018 Alberta Publishers’ Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry – Finalist
2018 NeWest Press Inaugural Text – Crow Said Poetry Series
2018 Calgary Bestseller List
2016 WFNB Bailey Prize for Best Unpublished MS – Winner
- University of New Brunswick:
2010-2012, MA in English, spec. Creative Writing
2012, Diploma of University Teaching
2010, Dean’s List; Angela Ludan Levine Writing Award
2009, Angela Ludan Levine Writing Award
2006-2010, BA in English, First Class Honours
- Galleon:
Poetry Editor, 2021
Editorial Assistant, 2015-2019
- Each for Equal 2020 International Women’s Day Conference: Network for the Empowerment of Women Halifax, NS
Day 2 – Emcee
Day 1 – Presenter, How to Better Your Business Writing
- The Fiddlehead:
Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, 2020 – Judge
Editorial Assistant, 2008 to 2012, 2016 to 2020
- artsNB Category C Creation Grant:
2020
- Moncton Inaugural Anglophone Poet Laureate/Poet Flyée:
2019-2022
- Laubach Literacy Innovation Dinner 2019:
Keynote Speaker
- Attic Owl Reading Series Host:
2019-Present
Interviews
- CBC: 14 Poets to Watch for in 2018
- Poetry Grrrowl: THAT LIGHT FEELING UNDER YOUR FEET + Kayla Geitzler – All Lit Up
- Poetry in Moncton: Big Plans for Poets-Laureate – Telegraph Journal
- NB Poet Laureate says Pandemic Proving to be ‘kind of renaissance for writers in Canada’ – Aya Al-Hakim, Global News
Feb.6th, 2020 – Kayla Geitzler is Moncton’s Poet Laureate. Her role is to put into poetic text the mood & feeling of Moncton. Cultures from around the world give voice to their communities in such a way. Kayla brings this idea to places like schools and the Frye Festival. Soon shell be expanding her reach with working with the Arabic community and their poets as well as embarking on an ambitious project. Kayla visited us in the studio to tell us all about it. Watch the interview here!
readings
A video my bestie took of me reading my teenage poetry at Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids. It was a great night. Formally trained poets are discouraged from losing their composure, but the audience was infectious. I turned into Morty Smith, “Awww geez.”
The Attic Owl Reading Series closed 2020 with an Open Mic event featuring writers from the UK, QC, NS & NB. I read last. Click on the link below to watch!
https://fb.watch/2JCD7Ryu1P/
During 2020, one of the things we missed most as writers was the interaction we receive from our audiences. I was so pleased that this was such a special & moving evening (despite my technical inexperience). Click on the link below to watch it!
https://fb.watch/2JJLzAGZ2Z/
Publications
Cadence voix fEminines female voices, Frog Hollow Press, 2020
CADENCE is a poetry anthology featuring twenty-five accomplished women, non-binary, trans writers & translators who are indigenous to, or have settled, in the land now known as New Brunswick, Canada. This edition features poetry in Arabic, English, French, German & Vietnamese. Cadence is about the energy & movement of language in NB. Even the word itself, cadence, possesses an interlingual fluidity. A word that in French is feminine, as is the word langue, as are the voices in this collection, des voix féminines…voices of women poets who, like their “many-a-mothers” before them, have always been here, or who, by desire or circumstance, have settled here. Each write from a unique linguistic, social, and cultural perspective. Our literature is this “being”, a cadence of threads & currents, blood & culture, history tangled in future. We live in & on the tongue.
CONTAGION
"CONTAGION" - The Time After, LCP Chapbook Series, 2020 Hear us skimming the lake the spring melt calling to the geese our bantering our imaginations transforming lungs into enchanted forests credulous illuminated we mettle ourselves as magnificent bestiaries of self-isolation as shuttled threads as knots of time in a feral weft woven by manic birds newly returned and you my lumbering loon hoarse and hollering my longhaired gaul wild and swarthy my jaunty homme d’honneur my charming wartime anti-fascist my avellinese capo shhh we don’t talk about la familglia my dreaded pirate my very great friend in rome O Biggus— and you call me your columbina carved with ink your blue- faced celt your valkyrie predisposed to conquer and pillage steal the goats burn the village in our west end streets we are each minute’s exodus and genesis lutist and troubadour we are the ballads of our tendons and our bones we are every sweeping tidal bore mud flats and diaphragm finite as Florence during her black primavera when the young gathered fragrant carnations and carried them sweating sickness laying low Anne Boleyn in her one thousand days her pestiferous nightmares of you and me rapacious incubation and lymphatic swellings contagion— it is like this like this O like this dwelling in—our bodies countries and abodes hours and eras infectious descending and ascending travails and tempests it is like this like this O like this renaissance borne on the scourge’s resurgence scoured hands stinging we are clasped throwing ourselves backwards onto the bed where there is a tolling of us pealing and resonant we are fou rire and flushed—all that we are now all that will ever be of us will never exist beyond this beyond our cells and laughter in this disorder we carry each other’s heart in a fist well-scrubbed squeezed in a rhythm you to me you to me you to me a steady brachial embracing it is like this like this O like this our spirits neither downcast or uplifted but unending suspended in the chest’s tight treasuring in the beat between inhale and breathless
GRETA HRÍMGERDR
"GRETA HRÍMGERDR" - Gnaw & Gnarl, FHP: NB Chapbook Series, 2018 transitional cell-sick stubborn-Greta Hálfdansdottir became hrímgerðr: illness-withered crone-bent smoke-haired pallor-grim Greta Hrímgerðr irritable and quarrelsome round-shouldered and gloaming-fearing pulled the bedsheets to her chin recalled a voyage parent-accompanied on a Nepalese riverboat in her winter-darkened window my galdr gaze scryed their vessel tide-turned and fog-steered rudderless drifting through Terai wetlands halted by a shroud of marsh birds undulating into the dusk by the thousands exposing in the long grasses of that country frost-aged and crone- bent a vǫlva to whom Greta Hálfdansdottir shouted greetings until Eric Hálfdan her father silverheaded pillar-straight strong-shouldered but omen-blind bade his noisy progeny Be silent. Greta Hrímgerðr gestured to her reflection said No vǫlva was there ever—from the bow I hailed my fylgja: crone-grey hospital- gowned bone-bodied. duty-laden Charles Hálfdanson brother-brought his sister- vagabond stubborn-Greta Hrímgerðr tongue flyting to the seiðmenn of oncology: Greta-Hrímgerðr crone-grey body fluid-filled and corpse-bloated flyting Charles Hálfdanson my father silver headed pillar-straight strong-shouldered laid both his sister and his hopes before gods of scalpel and pharmaceutical cure-all Greta Hrímgerðr hysterectomy-delivered the cancer baby-sized and organ-gorging colostomy-bowelled fevered Greta Hrímgerðr harridan-hounded surgeons with complaints of her wound wandering and suppurating from unexpected places so into Odin’s empty eye they slid her— the organ-divining machine discovering liver- hidden the dooming dísir I: Braga Hálfdansdottir the amber-haired verse-smith strong-shouldered Vör-sighted spent each evening heavy-hearted light-voiced visiting my father’s sister stubborn-Greta Hrímgerðr her life-thread measured by the constrictor-cuff machine and sustained through clepsydra-intravenous optimism-sickened hospital food-refusing she took from my aunt-cheering hands the rice I made her from sunset passed moon-rising and after the curfew-crowing slowly going we ward-wandered and paced the breezeway walled by windows winter-sieged Our kinship greater said stubborn-Greta Hálfdansdottir In that we are women of wanderlust: sea-roved and land-rambled. we steered our trek king-tired feet to the sicklings’ chapel I guided her stood hand on the pew’s shoulder as she Bibled at the informal pulpit stroking the Irish lace altar grimacing at the mortuary van visible through the stained glass my aunt Greta Hrímgerðr crone-bent smoke-haired pallor-grim thanked me for my kindnesses but nun-minded was I never—I gave nothing to her but my time I: Braga Hálfdansdottir amber-haired verse-smith remorse- ridden might have studied the doctor’s doctorate been a sleuth of veins and vim taken valkyrie halberd and spear to bodies’ Ragnarok but fylgja-led to the word-smithing of my mother’s people my knowledge-gleaning verse-creating of little use to stubborn-Greta Hrímgerðr my father’s sister norn-denying dísir-doomed the orderlies troll-mighty came to gurney-gather the flesh- wasted bone-body of Greta Hrímgerð down down into the hospital bowels they bed-steered her into care and kind assertiveness of life-end nurses graveyard grey and silent in the palliative care unit my aunt Greta Hálfdansdottir slept pain-sedated in a room cloister-quiet single-bedded cord-tangled with medical equipment Hálfdans gathered wake-waiting in the looming star-spotted winter gloaming I daughter of Charles Hálfdanson accepted his seat of vigil-keeping heart-strong fate-defying Greta Hálfdansdottir sickly-struggled to turn her body Charles Hálfdanson long-loving sister-pitying curled his fingers in stubborn-Greta Hálfdansdottir’s clutching bent his silverhead to her brother-begging voice- failing final-wishing Get me out of here
That Light Feeling Under your feet, NeWest Press, 2018
That Light Feeling Under Your Feet plunges headfirst into the surreal and slogging world of cruise ship workers. These masterfully crafted poems challenge perpetuating colonial and class relations, as well as the hedonistic lifestyle attributed to the employees of these floating resorts. Kayla Geitzler’s debut collection interprets isolation, alienation, racism, and assimilation into the margins as inevitable consequences for the seafaring workforce of the most profitable sector of the tourism industry. from “feral mini fridges of Cozumel” “…in the dreams of the conquered even a cruise ships sleeps weighty 3 am tonnage just a buoy under a faceless moon confiscated mini-appliances hop down from towers of themselves they shuffle to the ship’s ribs & faulty chill-seal mouths bite wheel-handles & crank spreading the vessel’s breastbone wide to a humid wind a swell & they spill into a flapper’s sequined dress fish take wing frenzied…” No mere three-hour tour, That Light Feeling Under Your Feet is an unflinching portrait of life at sea, and the discrimination, racism, and misogyny inherent in the tourism industry. Darkly humorous and deftly realized, the poems in That Light Feeling Under Your Feet stick in the mind like ‘endless leviathans’ harnessing the controlled chaos of the word.” ~ Jim Johnstone, author of The Chemical Life “Like a workaday Virgil, Kayla Geitzler takes us from the upper decks of rum cocktails, jackpot bingo, and conga lines into the underworkings of cruise ships — the sale-to-sail palliative powers of simulacrum, the trinket-exhausted ports, and the forced smiles of deck staff under a manager’s beady gaze. In poem after startling poem, Geitzler’s sustained meditation forces our attention back to this absurd microcosm, proving herself a provocative emissary to frantic mass tourism.” ~ Tammy Armstrong, author of Take Us Quietly Reviews: All Lit Up: Chappy Hour & Rad Women of Canadian Poetry Something in the Water: Kayla Geitzler’s That Light Feeling Under Your Feet
- Rise & Lead eds. 1 & 3, 2020
Inspire Feature – “Kayla Geitzler: Editor & Writing Consultant”
“Rebranding & Sisterhood in the Time of Covid” - Les Effeuilleuses, 2018
Three poems - Poetry Is Dead, 2017
One poem - Galleon ed. V, 2016
Book review & short story - The Fiddlehead, Winter 2015
Three poems
