Victorious Voices, 2017!

Victorious Voices 2017

Hi Folks:

Last week marked the 8th annual Victorious Voices Festival here in Victoria! We missed the first two years, but we’ve been stalwart supporters of the event ever since. If you want to read our previous posts on this amazing creative blending of people and talents, you can find them here. Back in 2013 Mike wrote his first (and so far, only) slam poetry piece in honour of the courage of the many young people who perform during this event. If you’re interested, you can find that here. Continue Reading →

Victorious Voices 2016

Victorious Voices

Hi Folks:

April 13-15 marked the seventh year for Victorious Voices, and our fifth year of being able to attend! A part of Raising Voices, hosted by the Victoria Poetry Project, Victorious Voices is a spoken word poetry competition for high school students in the greater Victoria area. It’s a way of giving students a voice and showing them how to use it, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s about writing, creativity, cooperation, teamwork, literature, presence and so much more, and Victorious Voices is a competition in the original sense – from the Greek competere: “to strive together”. Whether performing individually or in teams, the poets are encouraged to bring forth the best in themselves and each other. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month

Hi Folks:  Well, if you promise not to mention that the ‘photo of the month’ post was due yesterday, I’ll pretend not to notice!

At a meeting of our local photography group recently, several people did presentations of images based on a specific theme.  Mine was on ‘faces’.  I should explain that I’m not a people photographer, and people appear in far less than 5% of my work.  I shot a wedding, once, and swore I would never do it again.  However, as a landscape photographer one thing I like to do is to look for ‘faces’ and things in other objects.  Sometimes they’re fairly obvious and sometimes they’re more elusive.  If you go through my Flickr photostream you’ll find a number of such images, but I chose one to highlight as April’s photo of the month.  It’s a piece of driftwood I found along the shore on Dallas Road – nearly an entire tree, in fact, and there are some good size rocks embedded into the roots.  However, looked at from the bottom of the tree the shape forms a fairly good representation of a human skull. Continue Reading →