Once Wanda Waterman had identified herself as a poet, she forthwith tormented friends, families, and teachers with her verses. Her works would always elicit comments like, “It’s so nice that you can do this to help you deal with your emotional problems,” which only sent her into piques of rage, bouts of self-pity, and a sense of being profoundly misunderstood.
“I’m ahead of my time,” Wanda would sigh, “and will only be appreciated after I’m gone.”
Eventually someone who’d never read her poetry commented, “A poet, eh? What are you doing here? You should be in Montreal.”
It had never taken much to get Wanda to do anything stupid, as her college chums had often tittered, and so she pulled up stakes for Montreal, working as a music journalist, interviewing hundreds of musicians and composers, writing other people’s blogs, writing songs, captioning films, and posing as a bohemian writer.
She’s done spoken word performances at Sister Fairs in Nova Scotia and at 100,000 Poets for Change and Nuit Blanche in Montreal. Her poetry’s been published in Canada in Descant, Skylight, Pottersfield Portfolio, and Our Times, and in the U.S. in Shaman’s Drum and Tigertail. Her articles have appeared in Coastal Life, This Magazine, Our Times, and The New Internationalist. Her book, Dervish at the Crossroads: A Soundquest Through the First Two Decades of the New Millennium, will be released by Guernica Editions in the fall of 2020.
She’s lived in Maine, California, Vermont, Nova Scotia, New Hampshire, and Tunisia, and now makes her home in Montreal.
Wanda Waterman 