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Meredith Quartermain
she/her
Poet, Novelist, Story Writer
Meredith Quartermain was born in Toronto, grew up in the Kootenays, BC, and now lives in Vancouver. She has degrees in English and Law from UBC. She has taught English at UBC and Capilano College, and has enjoyed leading writing workshops at TIA House, Naropa Summer Writing Program, The Toronto New School of Writing, and the Kootenay School of Writing. She was the 2012 Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence, and from 2014 to 2016 she was Poetry Mentor at the SFU Writer's Studio Program. With her husband Peter Quartermain, she ran Nomados Literary Publishers from 2002 to 2019; Nomados published more than 50 books of innovative writing. Her work has appeared in the Walrus, Matrix, the Malahat Review, Prism International, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, filling Station, Raddle Moon, Canadian Literature, and other magazines. Vancouver Walking won the BC Book Award for Poetry in 2006, and Nightmarker was a finalist for the 2009 Vancouver Book Award. Recipes from the Red Planet was a finalist for the BC Fiction award in 2011. Her poems appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2009 and 2018, and her essay "T'ang's Bathtub: Innovative Work by Four Canadian Poets" was named best essay in Canadian Literature 2012.
About Their Work:
Meredith Quartermain’s poetry is “smart metaphysical doing”; these are poems that act out turns and puns and words recoined and repurposed, studding the page with objects and concepts, shifting and turning as they break from line to line. The poems challenge us with alliterative, assonantal sense, alighting and dodging onward in a way that keeps our heart alert and our mind delighted, all the time they hint at a “more of” sense that never quite settles. Beet gloves, servile culvert, a wall housed in high and narrow play—the canny playground of Quartermain’s lines never fails to stir us up And on a different note, let me say
that “Prayer for Geography” gifts just incredibly moving words about us all being frangible matter, and that “There” is how I always wished imagist lyrics actually worked. Vivid, pithy, marvelous stuff.
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