Summer 2026

The sweet summer sunshine sees us relaxing and looking back on all we’ve had to celebrate in the first half of 2026.

Our 50th Anniversary Workshop Series culminated in a youth poetry zine workshop that had us playing collaborative poetry games and strewing our office with collage detritus ranging from spacy National Geographic scraps to text snippets excised from past CV2 issues (we’re still finding enigmatic paper fragments in corners and cracks in the floor: “ballet slippers,” “maple syrup,” “in the quiet times,” “remember that’s exactly where”). Whether or not there’s any truth to the reports that the kids aren’t reading anymore, it’s clear they’re still creating—with the inventiveness, insight, and wit that they always have.

National Poetry Month saw us hosting our annual 2-Day Poetry Contest, which
tasks participants with creating a poem in forty-eight hours using ten words—many
of them nefariously sesquipedalian—provided by us. Besides propagating scores of
amazing original poems, the contest reminds us of our wonderful community of
readers and writers, who sign up each year for the challenge, for the fun, or for
the camaraderie (especially evident on Discord, where jokes and commiserations
abound).

This spring we held our first Poetry Month Wrap Party, with live music
and readings by Winnipeg contributors. This event was re-formed from the bones of
a tragically blizzarded-out party in December, and we were so grateful to get a second chance.

It’s the treasured CV2 moments—sharing an evening together with our local literary
community; moderating a Discord server predicted to go off the rails over the
word “zugzwang”; crafting a collective zine with a crew of teen poets-in-training—
that remind us how grateful we are to have our people and to find opportunities
together to make art, meaning, and memories.

The creative spark smoldered brightly here through spring’s false starts
and soggy melts, and now the warmer weather nurtures new energy and hope for more of
these moments to come. We hope you find a few such special moments in this issue,
and that they sing you through summer months rich with inspiration and adventure.
In the words of Theresa Thor, the songwriter-poet who provided music at our party,

“Now I could swim / I could swim to Glasgow / Or Moscow or even Winnipeg /
Maybe I will / What the heck.”

Dive in—it’s time to swim!