Presentation On Faith And Land Closes Spring Literary Festival

44 Students Participate In Second Annual School Of Writing At CMU

WINNIPEG, Man. — As Canada becomes increasingly urbanized, people are losing touch with the land—something that is to be regretted, according to poet Tim Lilburn.

Poet Tim Lilburn speaks at School of Writing at CMU.

“There is a form of belonging to the land that is deeper than having a local address,” said Lilburn during a May 23 address on the topic of Place And Faith at the School of Writing at Canadian Mennonite University (CMU).

“It’s an earth-longing, a feeling or sense that you flow from the ground on which you stand,” he said.

Since so few people depend on the land for their livelihoods today, “we do not need to know it any longer,” added Lilburn, who teaches writing at the University of Victoria and is author of the essay collections Living in the World as If It Were Home and Going Home. He is also the author of the Governor-General’s award-winning poetry collection, Kill-Site.

People who want to experience this “earth belonging” need to recover a sense of “terrain literacy,” he stated, noting that doing so requires a form of contemplative prayer that involves the “optic power of the heart.”

Seeing the land in this way is an “interior practice, a certain kind of looking . . . drinking in day-by-day the lay of the land,” he said, adding that it can lead to a “resuscitation of the spirit in a Christianity that is preoccupied with doctrinal clarification.”

Lilburn’s presentation was part of the CMU Spring Literary Festival, held in conjunction with the second annual School of Writing. The School, which was held May 19–23, saw forty-four students taking courses in fiction, taught by authors Rudy Wiebe and David Elias; poetry, taught by poet Sarah Klassen; and life writing, taught by Joanne Klassen and Eleanor Chornoboy.

In addition to Lilburn, other authors who spoke and read at the Festival were Sandra Birdsell, Victor Enns, John Weier, David Bergen, Mary-Ann Kirkby and Margaret Sweatman.

The readings are made possible with the support of the Manitoba Writers Guild and the Canada Council of the Arts through The Writers’ Union of Canada.

Posted May 29, 2008

For more information contact CMU Communications Director, 500 Shaftesbury Blvd., Winnipeg, Manitoba R3P 2N2, telephone: 204-487-3300 ext. 630, fax: 204-889-1694, (www.cmu.ca)