Dear Shadfly.com
Last week, July 7-12, I was working as a creative writing instructor at Canadore College, teaching the craft of writing to a group of adult authors. On Monday night, on a visit to downtown North Bay, I was overwhelmed by the fishy perfume of shadfly bodies lying ankle deep in the entryway to the North Bay Mall. The next morning, I gave an assignment to my students: "Write five shadfly poems." That evening at a reading they read their poems in what I called, 'a shadfly interval' in the middle of a public reading I gave at the college. The results were quite brilliant. Three of my students were from North Bay and knew shadflies intimately, though it had never occurred to them to write about shadflies. One of my students and I had little if any experience with shadflies prior to Monday evening' s inundation.
In addition to reading the poems, I used postit notes and wrote the tiny poems on them and folded them and pasted them to the window so they stuck to the inner glass the way shadflies were clinging to the other side. These became our 'concrete shadfly' poems.
I'm sending you as an attachment, my own shadfly poems. I only hope that my students do the same. They have certainly been encouraged to do so.
All the best, John B. Lee
Read the poems by John B. Lee below....
In Their Sad Desertion by John B. Lee
Variations on Shadfly Silence by John B. Lee
