2026/27 Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet Readings and Lecture Series

Renowned poet Stephen Collis is Vancouver Island University’s (VIU’s) Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet for 2026/27.

Collis’s lecture is October 22nd from 7 to 8:30 pm on the Nanaimo campus in Building 355, Room 203. It is free to attend and will be followed by a catered reception, cash bar, and book signing in Room 211.

Collis will also perform two poetry readings. First, there will be a reading and Q&A for students on October 21st from 11:30 am – 1:00 pm in Building 310, The Malaspina Theatre lobby. Second, there will be a community reading that night (October 21st) at Windowseat Books (321 Wesley St) from 7-8 pm; student poet Lee Groen will open for Collis, and there will be music.

***

Collis’s lecture on October 22nd, “Small Craft Warning,” will trace and explore the recurrence of small boats as both images in and an image of his work in poetry. In his abstract for the lecture, Collis writes the following:

In a small craft one cannot buy into the lie of mastery, but must come to the elemental world asking, in respect, seeking nothing more than fluid intra-relation, slipping over the surface of powerful forces and Big Things Beyond your Ken. What are Big Themes but swelling seas? What can one’s craft do with them, other than skirt their limits, ride their swells, stay afloat and seek safe harbour?

VIU professor Dr. Mike Roberson will introduce Collis at the Distinguished Poet’s Lecture. In reflecting on the impact of Collis’s poetry, he offers the following celebratory words: “Stephen Collis is a Punk Romantic!  Imagine Johnny Rotten channeling Henry Thoreau among the climes of Wordsworth’s Lake District suddenly transported to the various brambles of southwest BC, without an amp and microphone (although perhaps a megaphone), but with a narrow pad of paper and a fierce love for the unownable—words and water alike.”

VIU Chair of Media Studies Joy Gugeler notes the poignant interplay of responsibility and wonder she feels when reading Collis’s work: “Stephen Collis keens for nature winnowed of awe and we are powerless to deny the heaving reckoning his words demand. His poems necessarily capsize, for ‘Who sank us sank a seed in sound’.”

***

Stephen Collis is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including A History of the Theories of Rain, which was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for poetry; The Commons; the BC Book Prize winning On the Material — all published by Talonbooks. In 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. Stephen’s newest book is 2024’s The Middle, is the second volume in a trilogy. The final volume of the trilogy, Sweet Vernal Grass, is forthcoming in 2027. He lives on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Copies of Collis’s books and a series of limited-edition Gustafson Distinguished Poet’s Lecture chapbooks will be available at the VIU bookstore and at the reception. The Gustafson Distinguished Poetry Chair was established in 1998 from the estate of the late, preeminent Canadian poet Ralph Gustafson and his wife Betty.

For more information, please email Dr. Neil Surkan, Chair of the Gustafson Committee (Joy Gugeler, Mike Roberson, Sonnet L’Abbé) at Neil.Surkan@viu.ca.