Tosh Taylor - The voices of New Brunswick writers are the heart of WordCraft, a podcast aimed at creating community through words. WordCraft is a creation of the Writers Federation of New Brunswick, a non-profit organization that helps New Brunswick writers to write, acquire skills, and showcase their talents to the world. The show is hosted and produced by Jenna Morton, with technical production by Tosh Taylor. The WFNB acknowledges that the land on which we live, work, and gather is the traditional unceded territory of the Wolastoq and Mi'kmaq peoples. And we honor the spirit of our ancestors' treaties of peace and friendship. We acknowledge the support of ArtsCultureNB.
Jenna Morton - Welcome to the second of our two episodes featuring winners of the 2025 New Brunswick Book Awards. The 10th annual awards were presented in the spring of 2025. In our previous episode, we heard from Nelson Keane, winner of the 2025 Mrs. Dunster's Award for Fiction, and from Valerie Sherrard, winner of the Books for Young Readers Award. This episode features Michael Pacey, winner of the 2025 Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize for his work, Van Gogh's Grasshopper, and thoughts from Keith Helmuth, who, along with Ted Bennet, James Wheaton, Daryl Hunter, and Nicholas Smith, won the 2025 Writers Federation New Brunswick Nonfiction Award for Tappan Adney from Birchbark Canoes to Indigenous Rights. First, my conversation with poet Michael Pacey. Welcome to WordCraft, Michael.
Michael Pacey - Thank you.
Jenna Morton - I'm very glad to get the chance to talk with you and to learn more about your work, in particular about Van Gogh's Grasshopper, your award-winning collection of poetry. Congratulations.
Michael Pacey - Thank you.
Jenna Morton - Can you tell us a little bit about the works that are in that collection? What's the themes and the poems that we can find in Van Gogh's Grasshopper?
Michael Pacey - Okay, well, there's 50 poems in the collection, and they're all about insects or other tiny creatures. And there are many themes that bind the book together. One is just the strategy that I take in each poem. I often refer to the origin of the name for the insect and what the etymological meaning of the name is and so on. Each poem is kind of an ode to their beauty, an ode to the strategies that they use to survive. And Can I just read something which I happen to have here with me just like this? Is that okay?
Jenna Morton - Oh, of course. Please do.
Michael Pacey - This is what Margo Wheaton, who was the judge of the Fiddlehead Prize portion of the New Brunswick Book Awards, had to say about my collection. And I tried to sum up on the blurb on the back of the book all the themes and so on. And then when she awarded me the prize, she had this to say about my book. And it's so much better than anything that I wrote that I'm tempted to just read it, if that's okay.
Jenna Morton - Please.
Michael Pacey - In Van Gogh's Grasshopper, Michael Pacey invokes the kind of intense observation and passionate curiosity that suffuses the rich, time-honored tradition of naturalist writing. Focusing on the vibrant life of insects and their survival, these thoughtful, beautifully crafted poems pay homage to the complexity, ingenuity, and transcendent mystery of tiny, non-human life forms. Pacey's finely polished, contemplative poems usher us into a meditative world and remind us that the universe hums in the smallest of things. Isn't that lovely?
Jenna Morton - That is beautiful. I would imagine that you'd want that just posted on your fridge to see every morning to remind you of what a wonderful job you've done of capturing people's imaginations.
Michael Pacey - Yeah. So I spent a lot of my childhood studying insects, not, I've never been a professional entomologist, but there are family photos that show me just in the backyard, chasing butterflies or studying ants, looking at them very closely. And I just, I've always found them fascinating. So, when I started writing poetry, I just, not intentionally, but it was… one source of my poetry has always been insect poems. Not a great profusion of them, but just from time to time, something about an insect would come to me and I'd write a poem about it. So, a couple of years ago, when this book began to take shape, I had just written a sequence of butterfly poems, which are in the book. And I got thinking about it and I realized that from time to time I'd always written butterflies - sorry - insect poems, and they've always fascinated me. So, I said to myself, well, you know, maybe you could write a whole book of these. And I wasn't sure at first, as I got going, if I would be able to fill the whole book. But they just kept coming to me, ideas for them. And I was doing a lot of research, of course, because as I say, I'm not a professional entomologist. So, I had to go to a number of sources, both online and in books, to track down enough information to feel that I was qualified to write about each one. And yeah, so it worked. It came off. I managed to do it. I wasn't sure for a while there around, say poem number 37 if I was going to be able to do it. But yeah, eventually it worked out fine.
Jenna Morton - Well, obviously it did those amazing words from the judge really kind of encapsulate, obviously, that, you know, the poems come through with a lot more meaning than just observations about insects.
Michael Pacey - Right. Thank you. Thanks very much.
Jenna Morton - I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about some of those, the themes and some of the responses you're hoping to get from people when they read about your insects.
Michael Pacey - Sure. One of the things I talk about a lot in the book is how dominant female insects are, both in our imagination and in their daily life. The whole book has kind of a feminist slant because, in the insect world, it's the females who rule. While the men rule? No, I don't know. I don't know where that came from.
Jenna Morton - From your childhood, that's, I know that poem.
Michael Pacey - Yeah. Often or not, very frequently, actually. It's the female who is dominant. It's the female who raises the young. It's the female who, you know, after mating, for example, different insects will, the female insect will bite off the head of her lover as a final, so long kind of thing. So there are many instances where It's the female who really does the important work in their lives. And the male is just kind of unnecessary almost.
Jenna Morton - And yet you're very necessary in reflecting back what's happening.
Michael Pacey - Oh, yeah. Okay. I see what you mean. But another thing was insects and music and dancing. Like a lot of people don't think about insects in that way. But they do make music with different parts of their body. And they do inspire us. We've named many of our own dances after insects. So, I list off a whole number of those in one of the poems. And there's music and dancing again and again throughout the book. So that's another theme. There are rituals of death, there are rituals of mating. And another thing that's a constant theme in the book is that a lot of famous people, and I'm not just doing an Entertainment Tonight plug here, but a lot of famous people in history had important and extraordinary, even, relationships with insects. I'm talking about Darwin, Jung, Descartes, Spinoza, Nabokov, Fabre and Van Gogh himself, of course, as in the title poem. And they had relationships with insects. And I was able to create poetry out of that and have little poems which are historical in subject, but are, you know, very much up to date. So that was a… that's a theme that keeps coming up again, is people who've had sometimes life-changing relationships with insects.
Jenna Morton - I think that's really a fascinating way to look at the world in general and to make us stop and remember how important it is to look at the small things that we might sometimes overlook.
Michael Pacey - Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think that's what poetry does. I think that's what poetry is all about is novelists get these big sort of tableaus and stories in their mind, but we get little bits and pieces of things. And it's by putting together these little bits and pieces, we poets, that we create something new. Do you know what I mean?
Jenna Morton - I do. That's a beautiful thought.
Michael Pacey - Thanks.
Jenna Morton - I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your reaction to finding out that Van Gogh's Grasshopper was the winner of the New Brunswick Book Award for 2025.
Michael Pacey - Yeah, that was quite a night. I felt elated. I felt full of joy, just to be perfectly honest. It felt like all this work that I'd put in this book and whirring away at it and wondering if I'd be able to pull it off, have a full-length book of insect poems and so on. And to see that people liked it and enjoyed it. And I don't mean just poets, other poets. I mean, that's important too, to know that your peers enjoyed the work and respect it. And of course, one of my peers was a judge, the Nova Scotia poet, Margo Wheaton. And I just find that knowing your peers appreciate your work is kind of the icing on the cake. It's when you reach out to a whole bunch of people who maybe don't buy or read that much poetry. I try to make my poetry accessible. I'm not playing little word games. I want to talk about the fascinating things in the world, and that's what I try to do in my poems. And so, I really am pleased when a lot of people who maybe don't read that much poetry, but they happened on my book and they really liked it. And that's what really makes me most happy, I think.
Jenna Morton - That's a lovely thought. I'm wondering what you think winning an award like this can do for a poet or a writer in New Brunswick.
Michael Pacey - Well, I don't know yet what kind of effect. Are publishers going to be more likely to publish my books? Are communities more likely to invite me to go visit there and give a reading? I think that will happen, yeah. I think so. It's a little early to know for sure right now. I just sent off my, what will be my, or what I'm hoping will be my fifth full-length collection of poetry. It's called Encyclopedia of Fun. and it's quite a light-hearted book for the most part. It's mostly about the human body and how we feel about our bodies and the strange things our bodies do to us and so on. I'm really starting to find out about some of those now that I'm in my 70s. So, it's a lot of fun. I sent that off to a maritime publisher and I don't know yet if they'll be taking it or not. So, I can't really tell you that, yes, as soon as you win the Fiddlehead Award, it's going to be a snap to get your books published and your poems and magazines and get invited to communities to do readings. So, it's a little early to say that, but I'm hoping for the best. I certainly, I feel right now that I'm at the midpoint of my literary career. I know that sounds funny for someone in the 70s to say that, but I didn't accomplish that much when I was younger. It took me a long time to get good enough to get published. And also, there were other distractions like getting my PhD and teaching and all that stuff that I didn't publish hardly any poems for years there when I was doing a lot of my post-secondary education. And so, when I came back to it, I've been going quite intensely just to make up the fact that I wasn't working hard enough on it when I was younger. And I have about five more books planned of collections of poetry. Two of them I think I will be completing this coming year. So, I'm thinking that if I publish another five or so, I honestly have that many ideas flying around, things I'd like to try. It's funny when you get to my age, you're not sure. Your main worry is, am I going to have enough years to finish all these projects that I'm thinking of and making little notes about? So, it's been good. It's been very good, I think, to win this award. It really felt like I'd accomplished something. Do you know what I mean? I do. I'd gotten to a level, whether that means, I get to publish my work more easily or not, I don't know yet, but I know that it was a very rewarding evening when I was given that prize.
Jenna Morton - It's a lovely thought that it's it really is more about that personal impact rather than what it might mean from a strictly business professional standpoint.
Michael Pacey - Yeah, right. I mean, there's so many fine poets in Canada. It's hard to get too much attention, you know, with so many interesting young poets now. But, you You hope you'll be remembered, I guess, is all you can really say. Yeah.
Jenna Morton - Thinking of those young poets and the people, whether they're young or they're just starting their writing, whatever age that may be at, what advice or insight would you like to leave those people with who are listening, who don't feel like they're at a midpoint yet?
Michael Pacey - Right. There's so many things. I have sort of a list of a few things I could mention, though, would be really go to, for example, the Writers’ Federation meetings or go to places where you're going to meet other poets and talk to them and get to know them and see if maybe they would join a club with you where you swap poems back and forth and help criticize each other's poetry, in a constructive way, and make suggestions about your poetry and pat you on the back when you've written something really good this time. I really think that's so important to form a little club, even if you can, with poets who live nearby and get together and read your work to each other on a regular basis. And that is so important just to know how other people who are doing the same thing - how they're feeling, what they feel about yours and what they would… maybe suggestions they make about your work and listen to them. I think that's very important. Another thing that's very important is keeping a notebook. A lot of people who are writing poetry, they wait until they have, they're in that mood where you get a poem and you can see that you can write a poem about this. But they ignore or they often ignore little things that pop up in your head from day-to-day. You need to have a book where you write all those little things down. Because those things, you don't know where they're coming from. Sometimes there's something inside you that wants to, you know, some is putting these notions in your head. Who knows? So, I think you need to have a notebook and write down things, no matter how insignificant they are, even if they're just a word you like or something you heard on the bus or whatever. Just keep note of those little things. And that's often what you build your poems from is all these little things. You'll notice that you keep talking about the same things in your notebooks and, “hey, I just need to put some of this stuff together, and that's a poem. That's a poem that I've been trying to write without even knowing I was doing it.” So, keep a notebook and write down any little insignificant thing that seems to you, it has that poetic ring to it. For some reason, you're drawn to it. Do you know what I mean? It may be an object that… that's always been close to you, but you never thought about writing about it before, or an insect, a creature, a bird, it could be anything. But just keep a notebook. That's really important too. And if you have a file of your old poems, keep your old poems. And have a file that you go to and read them from beginning to end and see how you've changed, how you're getting better. That's good to kind of help guide your way because writers are always kind of doing things in the dark. You know what I mean? You're feeling for things, but there's things you can't usually see, and you just need to feel these little pulls and tugs of your imagination to really understand what you can write about.
Jenna Morton - I love that. I love that those little pulls, those little tugs… is such a such great imagery, which of course does not surprise me coming from a poet. But I think it, you know, it is it's so important to go back and read through your work and see how you've grown and also to take those moments and acknowledge when you when you do well. And I think sometimes I know for myself, I often I'll come, I'll walk away from something and come back to it maybe even a year later and went, oh, did I write that? That's way better than I give myself credit for.
Michael Pacey - Yeah. And those things you put in a notebook, sometimes you'll think, I don't know why I bothered to put it for that. It was a waste of time. And then it's when you go through your notebook and you do them, when you finish them, you should read them at least a couple of times and keep them around. You'll find that some of the things that really piqued your interest the most are the little things that you said, “oh, why did I bother even writing that down?” You know, honestly, things like that happen all the time. It's full of surprises when you start trying to express yourself in words.
Jenna Morton - Is there anything else that you'd like to share before we wrap up our conversation today?
Michael Pacey - I can't think of anything. I really appreciated winning the award and I'm so thankful for the people like Rhonda who are helping to run the NB Writers Federation now. I think they're doing a wonderful job. I really appreciate having them around.
Jenna Morton - I agree. It's a fantastic organization and it's such a great way for people to get together, like you were talking about, to find other people who are in your area or in your genre or in your, zone of interest that it's really fantastic.
Michael Pacey - Yeah. And sometimes the workshops can really help you too. I find those are great. Yeah.
Jenna Morton - Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and congratulations again on your award.
Michael Pacey - Thank you very much, Jenna.
Jenna Morton - That was poet Michael Pacey, winner of the 2025 Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize at the New Brunswick Book Awards. The 2025 Award for Non-Fiction, sponsored by the Brennan family, went to the book Tappan Adney, from Birchbark Canoes to Indigenous Rights. The book is published by Goose Lane with Chapel Street editions and edited by Keith Helmuth. Keith answered our questions about the book and the award via e-mail and asked that I share these thoughts on his behalf.
Why was it important for this book to be written and published?
Tappan Adney made the most significant contribution to the preservation of Indigenous material cultural in the history of Canadian ethnography, but is not widely known for this achievement. He preserved the knowledge of how to build birch bark canoes. He worked with one of the last Indigenous canoe builders, documenting the process in written form and with drawings. He then went on to build over 150 one-fifth scale models of all the canoe designs found in the Indigenous cultures in Canada. His book, The Bark Canoe and the Skin Boats of North America, has become the workbench bible of all those who are again building birch bark canoes. In addition, He learned the Wolastoq language, formerly known as Maliseet, and assembled its first glossary, laying the groundwork that initiated the documentation that is being used in the preservation of this Indigenous language today. He was also the scholar of history that first introduced the Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1725 into the Canadian legal system in 1946. This treaty proved the Wabanaki Nations of the Maritime Region had never ceded their Indigenous rights to land and resources, a legal fact subsequently confirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court. He spent the last years of his life helping the Wolastoq First Nation establish their official tribal status with the federal government and was an ardent defender of their Indigenous rights. For his dedication to these accomplishments alone, it is important to have a book that tells the whole Tappan Adney story. But more than this, he was also an accomplished artist and scientist who helped pioneer natural history journalism. In the late 1800s, he spent almost two years documenting the Klondike Gold Rush. His 500-page, highly illustrated book, The Klondike Stampede, is the only first-person account of this event written by a professional ethnographer and journalist who was actually there during the height of the Gold Rush.
What surprised you most about the book's reception?
What surprised me most was the number of times people would say to me, It reads like a novel. I couldn't put it down. I've read it in two days. This is very gratifying to hear. When the manuscript came to me, it was incomplete, and the arrangement of the chapters didn't compose a consistent narrative, either structurally or thematically. So, when I hear this kind of response, I know I have accomplished what I hoped for in revising, editing, and adding to the biography.
There are many names associated with this book. Tell us a bit about the process of collaboration that went into this work.
That's a long story which I tell in full in the preface, but here's the short version. Jim Wheaton, the husband of Joan Adney Dragon, Tappan Adney's granddaughter, started work on the biography in the late 1970s. Ted Bain, a birch bark canoe enthusiast, came on board to help with the research and editing, and then Jim became ill with a terminal diagnosis. Before he died, he asked his partner to complete the biography, which Ted was eager to undertake. He said he wanted to make the book an Adney encyclopedia and spent another decade doing extensive research. During this time, Ted also edited 2 volumes of Adney's early travel journals in New Brunswick, which were published by Goose Lane Editions. Then Ted became ill, also with a terminal diagnosis. He had expected Goose Lane would be interested in publishing the biography, but the manuscript as it stood was unfinished, not publishable. I had known about the Tappan Adney story since 1967 when I discovered his book, The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. When we moved to New Brunswick in 1971 and settled near Woodstock, we met Joan Adney Dragon, Tappan's granddaughter, and her husband Jim Wheaton, who was soon to start working on the Tappan Adney biography. They had a cottage at Skiff Lake. Jim showed me early drafts of several chapters. After Jim and Ted both died, it seemed unlikely the biography would ever see the light of day. I collaborated with Darryl Hunter to write and publish a short, highly illustrated book on Tappan Adney in 2017. Darryl has a vast Adney archive. Jim and Ted relied on him for many pieces of research. He had a copy of the incomplete biography manuscript, as well as Goose Lane. I eventually suggested to Susanne Alexander, the publisher at Goose Lane, that since I knew the Adney story pretty well, I'd be willing to take a look at the manuscript. And that's how I ended up taking on this project. I essentially rewrote the manuscript, adding two new chapters, an epilogue, and an extensive preface. Daryl Hunter contributed a chapter on the decade Adney and his wife, Minnie Belle Sharp, spent trying to revive her father's once prosperous orchard and nursery business. Nicholas Smith, with the assistance of Daryl, added a chapter on Adney's linguistic research. Nick, as a young anthropologist, had worked with Adney's linguistic papers at the Peabody Essex Museum. That's why the Tappan Adney Biography has five contributing authors, a general editor, and two publishers. Susanne Alexander and I decided to co-publish the biography. Goose Lane Editions has a national and international promotion and marketing reach that could bring the Adney biography to a wide audience. Chapel Street Editions works mostly within the context of New Brunswick. The book's production was a decades-long collaboration on several levels by a crew of people determined to give Adney the credit he deserves for the accomplishments he achieved.
What does it mean to you to have this book recognized with this award?
It's personally very gratifying. I put over two years of part-time work into this project at the same time I was attending to the regular schedule of Chapel Street Editions publications. Chapel Street Editions is a community-based, not-for-profit, culture, heritage, and natural history publisher, which makes it possible to devote this kind of volunteer time to book projects of importance that might not otherwise come to fruition. In addition, Chapel Street Editions has received generous financial assistance from heritage-minded residents of the Woodstock community for production expenses. So, the award is a major confirmation to our supporters that they have backed a winner.
What do you hope winning this award will do for the future of the book itself?
Beyond increasing attention and sales, I would hope the book comes to have a role in focusing attention on two of Adney's enduring accomplishments, that have a contemporary context and expression. Adney preserved the knowledge of how to build birchbark canoes in such precise and illustrated detail that his book has become a manual for all those who are once again building birchbark canoes. In the last few years, at least a dozen such canoes have been built in the Wolastoq Valley from Madawaska to Fredericton. When a canoe building workshop was held at the Wolastoq First Nation near Woodstock in 2012, one of the participants said she could feel the spirit of the ancestors in the canoe. That's a really important part of cultural preservation. The other important part is the growing recognition that the Wolastoq First Nation never ceded their right to land and the land's resources to the Crown or to the European or American settlers. As I mentioned earlier, Adney initiated the movement that led to this critical recognition. Negotiations and legal hearings on this issue are now headline news. Although Adney died in 1950, we can truly say his legacy of accomplishments lives on.
Jenna Morton - My thanks to Keith Helmuth for sharing those thoughts about the book, Tappan Adney: From Birchbark Canoes to Indigenous Rights, the 2025 award winner for non-fiction at the New Brunswick Book Awards. Thank you all for listening to all of our winners of the book awards from 2025, and be sure to stay tuned. The new book award winners for 2026 will be announced in the spring. Until then, you have lots of time to read up on the winners from 2025. We hope that you will return. We have many more episodes to come as well. And until you hear a fresh one dropping into your podcast feed, you can find all of our previous episodes as well as our discussions with the other award winners, with the committee who started the awards, and all kinds of fantastic materials from our previous discussions and episodes this season so far.
Tosh Taylor - WordCraft is a project by the non-profit Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. The show is hosted and produced by Jenna Morton, with technical production by Tosh Taylor. The Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick acknowledges that the land on which we live, work, and gather is the traditional unceded territory of the Wolastoq and Mi'kmaq peoples. We honor the spirit of our ancestors' treaties of peace and friendship.
