Imagination – Literary Notes

The Morrin Centre joins forces with the Ligue d’improvisation musicale de Québec (LIMQ) to present a notewordy concert. Tune in to listen to readings by Jes Battis, Domenica Martinello, and Derek Webster, accompanied by music improvised and performed by musicians from the LIMQ which captures the spirit of their poetry books.

The Poets

Jes Battis teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. They are the author of The Winter Knight with ECW Press, the Occult Special Investigator series with Penguin, and I Hate Parties, their debut book of poems with Nightwood Press. Their work has been included in Canada Reads, and shortlisted for the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and the Sunburst Award for Candian Literature of the Fantastic. The Winter Knight won both an Independent Publisher’s Award and an Indie Foreword Award. Jes is currently working on two projects: a nonfiction book on the film Labyrinth, and a queer romance novel that combines witchcraft with the cozy mood of Schitt’s Creek.

Credit: Gino Visconti

Domenica Martinello is the author of All Day I Dream about Sirens (Coach House Books, 2019) and Good Want (Coach House Books, 2024) and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The title poem of her most recent collection, “Good Want,” won the Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize in 2023. For her prose writing, Domenica won the carte blanche 3Macs Prize (2017) for a genre-bending work of literary criticism on Elena Ferrante, and has published reviews and criticism in The Globe & Mail, The Montreal Review of Books, Canadian Notes & Queries, and elsewhere. Domenica has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2019 and Best Canadian Poetry 2025 (Biblioasis, forthcoming), and her work has been supported by The Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She lives in Montreal.

Credit: Saleema Nawaz Webster

Derek Webster received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Carl Phillips, and is the founding editor of award-winning arts magazine Maisonneuve. His first book of poems, Mockingbird (Véhicule Press) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best poetry debut in Canada and his second collection, National Animal, recently won the 2024 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. In the words of Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Diane Seuss, “National Animal embodies the body politic, entangled in war and estrangement, and the human animal caught in a vanishing natural world. From Joni Mitchell to Blanche DuBois, and in forms that range from the sonnet to an epic, physics-driven creation myth, Webster uncovers the universe’s capacity to ‘equilibrate’ without a modicum of sentimentality.” Webster lives in Montreal and Toronto. His work can be read at derekwebsterwriter.com.

Moderator: Luc Murray Mercier

With the Ligue d’improvisation musicale de Québec

And the contribution of QWF’s Writers Out Loud