On Tuesday, May 7th at 6pm PDT, join Massy Arts Society and a collective of brilliant poet organizers for Under The Table Open Mic Series, featuring Leah Horlick.

Zoom room and sign-up opens at 5:50 PDT

(we run on crip time with the understanding that bodies and brains aren’t always on schedule)

We invite you to sign up for the open mic at the event as Under The Table welcomes us to laugh, cry, celebrate and sit in the richness of queer and disabled life, writing and poetics. 

This event will unfortunately not have ASL interpretation available. There will be automatic captions available as well as a PDF of Leah’s set to read along with. We are working to secure funding to continue having ASL at future events. 

Please join the zoom room with the same email you used on eventbrite. If you have any issues joining please email us at [email protected]

About Under The Table:

Under the Table is an open mic series centering disabled and/or queer poets. This series was dreamed up out of a desire to share work, experience art, and connect with community in a covid safer, more accessible, and anti-oppressive space. Partnering with Massy Voices and Kickstart Disability Arts & Culture, Under the Table Open Mic Series will be on the first Tuesday of each month with some events in person at Massy Arts Society and others virtually on zoom.

Under the Table is a space where the richness that is queer and disabled life and art, flourishes and finds a home. It’s a space to share work that’s asking to be told, but might not be welcomed in other spaces, if you are able to access those spaces at all. It’s a space where being queer and/or disabled (whether or not those specific words resonate for you) makes your work a brilliant fit, regardless of how queer or disabled you think the poetry you wish to share is, how connected you are to disabled and/or queer community, and whether you feel disabled and/or queer “enough” to participate. It’s a space to witness and engage with the work of incredible artists, anywhere on their path of sharing their work–from the person who has never shared in front of an audience, to artists who have read or performed work many times. It’s a space where there’s room to be scared, and choose to be in community, share, and engage with others’ work. It’s a space where we don’t claim to know all the answers, but are willing to be in the messy, nuanced space of learning together. Come to “Under the Table” to laugh, cry, celebrate, sit in discomfort, feel understood, and be together.

This project has been made possible by The League of Canadian Poets, the Canada Council for the Arts, Massy Voices, and the Government of Canada.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted virtually via zoom. Automatic captioning will be turned on, we recognize automatic captioning is imperfect. We will have a PDF of Leah’s poem’s available for a more accurate transcript to read along with. We ask anyone speaking or performing to provide a visual description for blind and low vision audience members. We also ask that people don’t message in the chat during poems, to increase accessibility for people using screen readers.

With Author & Featured Poet:

Leah Horlick is a poet and writer who grew up as a settler on Treaty Six Territory & the homelands of the Métis. Her long-awaited, most recent collection Moldovan Hotel is available now from Brick Books. Leah's first book, Riot Lung, was shortlisted for a ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her second collection, For Your Own Good, was named a 2016 Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association. That same year, Leah was awarded Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers. In 2018, her piece "You Are My Hiding Place" was named Arc Poetry Magazine's Poem of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 44th Pushcart Prize. Leah lived on Unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver for nearly a decade, during which time she and her dear friend Estlin McPhee ran REVERB, a queer and anti-oppressive literary reading series. Before finally coming home to Saskatoon, where she now lives, Leah was the 2022-23 Writer-in-Residence with the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program.