Between a Sock and a Harp’s Lace:
A Bilingual Poetry Workshop

Explore the endless possibilities of constraint in this Creative Community bilingual poetry-writing workshop facilitated by Vanessa Bell and Simon Brown. Through a series of zany and engaging exercises, you will get a sense of the generative potential of limitation—all while having fun along the way!

This activity is bilingual, English and French will be used alternately. It is open to all, with no previous experience required.

Credit: Justine Latour

Vanessa Bell

Poet, performer, artist, curator, and literary activist, Vanessa Bell is also director of the poetry collection at Éditions du Quartz. Her literary arts practice has taken her work to the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Australia. She is the author of the collections De rivières (2019, La Peuplade) and MONUMENTS (2022, Le Noroît), the book Fendre les eaux (2023, De l’Homme) and co-director of the Anthologie de la poésie actuelle des femmes au Québec 2000 | 2020 (2021, Remue-ménage). Her writing is vivid and sharp, a whirlwind of audacity whose central themes are sisterhood, filiation, and real and fantasized territories. She has won several grants and awards, including the Prix Félix-Antoine-Savard (2021, FIPTR), and was a finalist for the Prix de l’Institut canadien de Québec (2021) and the Prix du CALQ – Artiste de l’année en Capitale-Nationale (2023). Under the mentorship of Nicole Brossard, Vanessa Bell is the first francophone Canadian to be supported by the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Rising Stars program (2022).

Credit: Maude Veilleux

Simon Brown

Simon Brown (he/they/il/iel) is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, and translator from rural New Brunswick based in the Quebec City area. Simon’s English and French-language texts have been presented in literary journals, zines, chapbooks, and poetry collections, as well as in media artworks, films, dance pieces, operettas, experimental readings and performances at the Banff Centre (Banff), Versefest (Ottawa), Frye Festival (Moncton), Centre international de poésie (Marseille), Maison de la littérature (Quebec City), Festival acadien de poésie (Caraquet), and the Darling Foundry (Montreal), among others. Since the early 2010s, Simon has hosted many creative workshops combining poetry, improvisation, and performance in partnership with organizations from across Canada. An anthology of Simon’s performance poems, La surface vivante: poèmes pour la voix 2014–2024, will be published by Les Herbes rouges in 2026.

This activity is part of the project Creative Community—Making Art Together, made possible thanks to the support of the Government of Canada.