CRAFT-A-STROPHE 3: Cooling Down

The FEELed Lab yard with tall trees and a gravel driveway with the word craft-a-strophe across in cut out magazine letters

craft-a-strophe:
[from craft: making, doing + strophe: part of a poem]
Where crafting, poetry, and climate change come together.

WHEN: Wednesday, 18 October 2023, 3 – 5 PM

WHERE: Woodhaven EcoCulture Centre

**please note, there is ongoing construction on the property, so cars will need to be parked on Raymer Rd and people will need to walk in. Please send a message to our Instagram if you need closer parking for accessibility reasons.**

WHAT: Join the FEELed Lab at Woodhaven EcoCulture Centre for a welcome back/cooling down afternoon of micro-poetry craftivism/button making, learning about the Lab (if you have not been here) and meeting some of our researchers. Tea, coffee and snacks will be on offer.

The leaves are letting go of the branches. After a summer of fire, these lands are cooling down. Perhaps they will have a chance to rest. Meanwhile, the academic year is ramping up: deadlines and meetings and long to-do lists take up the breathing room we tried to welcome over the past months. Can we take a cue from the plants and the animals, and find a way to greet the changing daily rhythms with purpose, but still gently?

We will contemplate this question together, as we compose micro-poems and turn them into buttons (If you wish, you can also simply make “FEELed Lab” and “Fringe Natures” buttons.) All supplies will be provided on site!

We will forge our micro-poems from the words of others who have considered both heat and cold and their implications in the complex business of climate catastrophe as both personally and communally felt phenomena. These texts include “Heatwave,” a poem from (former FEELed Lab Research Associate) Natalie Rice’s new collection Scorch, which was written primarily at Woodhaven in the aftermath of the 2021 wildfire summer, “Fall Song” by Mary
Oliver (to get us into an autumnal mood), and a 2020 Okanagan regional report on climate projections. While we won’t be re-composing it as part of our micro-poetry endeavours, we also invite you to read and consider We Will Protect the Water, a water strategy prepared by the Okanagan Nation Alliance.

Syilx lands and neighbouring ones were not the only ones to contend with devastating wildfire this summer. Thinking and acting in relationship to Hawai’i and the wildfires experienced in Lahaina, one additional poetry-generator text will be the introduction to Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart’s book Cooling the Tropics (Duke 2022), where she examines “normative thermal relationships between bodies and environments” that “have developed as a function of American imperial power” and, as Hobart
argues, “continue to operate today as embodied expressions of ongoing settler colonialism.”

What alternative, gentler and more relational ways of “cooling down” might we imagine and enact together?

These texts are available below for you to read in advance if you wish. We will also have copies available on the day – to read and remake into different kinds of cooling worlds.