The Vancouver Poetry House presents, Magpie Ulysses.

Writer, Rabble Rouser, fancy talker; Magpie began performing at the age of 17 to save her life. Since then she has performed across North America at hundreds of venues, is a veteran member of two national champion Vancouver poetry slam teams and was named a Poet of Honour at the Canadian festival Of Spoken Word In the Fall of 2012.

Having lived across BC in communities large and small for the better part of the past 20 years, Magpie continuously finds herself asking questions of home and what it is to be human as part of the environment she dwells in. An activist at heart, Magpie is known for her visceral writings about addictions, environmental issues and working class struggle. She recently completed a collection of prose poems telling the stories of strangers and self from her experiences of hitchhiking over 25,000km across North America in her late teens and early twenties. With an electric soundtrack composed by James Lamb, the 40 minute show is a condensed, yet expansive piece of writing exploring the themes of adaptations, space, fear, faith, place, othering and the act of storytelling while following a rich Canadian landscape.

Magpie has spent much of the past five years heavily involved in the arts while living in rural BC. She spent most of the winter of 2014/15 living in her recently alzheimer diagnosed 85 year old grandmother’s basement in Calgary, Alberta with her husband, grandma and a dog named Brandi. She has become increasingly interested in questions surrounding memory, place, body, aging and how we choose to tell our own stories. Magpie has returned to call Vancouver home for the next while and is really looking forward to buying a condo and settling down in a quantitative life surrounded by stuff (just thought I’d see if you read that far). See you soon home slam.