How secret poetry appreciators and others need places to act out their wild imaginings

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Kerry Dorey, Jay Molloy and I had this idea. 

Officially, we’re the Society of Secret Poetry Appreciators, but you should know that this is a made-up thing. Like, we made it up. 

Everything in the whole world started this way, you know… the stock exchange, your favourite restaurant, the TV show you and your friends quote endlessly, democracy, white supremacy… it all started as someone’s made-up idea that they acted on and somewhere along the line, others began to treat as real.

Open Mic, Jay and Kerry said. 

I was sceptical. I have trouble watching stand-up. Too much of an empath. When you’re not funny, I suffer for you. I encouraged my deeply shy best friend to join the debate team in high school and when she gave her first speech, she shook so hard that she dropped all her notecards and couldn’t recover her place once she’d picked them all up out of order, and I sat there dying, thinking, I did this to her. She was a perfectly happy and fulfilled person until I forced her to stand up in front of people.

My 2025 creative collaborators were enthusiastic, however, about standing up in front of people. In April, they had backed me when I said, “I think we should invite people to a night where we all sit in a circle and read our favourite poems out loud to each other.” So it was my turn to say, YES. And so we continued the merry adventure of making it up as we went along, because that is how new things come into the world. 

Jay went scouting for locations. She met with Charmaine at the Pemberton Museum and explained the vision and also, that while we had applied for some money from the Pemberton Literacy Table, we didn’t have funding yet. We were really just exploring our options.

“Don’t let that stop you,” Charmaine said. “Just pay the $10 event insurance and we’re happy to have you.” Suddenly, we were a go.

Before we knew what was happening, fifty people had registered online and suddenly people were getting a “sold out” message on our eventbrite listing. Undeterred by this roadblock, a stalwart mysterious poetry appreciator named Saadia messaged the Museum asking how she could get in, and Charmaine dutifully forwarded the request to us. How on Earth a tourist visiting Pemberton had heard of our little grassroots made-up thing was another mystery, but Jay emailed her a welcome, and HERE’S THE POINT OF THE STORY, a week after the Open Mic actually happened, blowing all our minds with the generosity and talent of the audience and participants, Saadia emailed us to say “thank you for such a warm welcome. We were in Pemberton as a family on our first trip away from home, after my husband died in January, at just 58 years old. He was the most wonderful kind human and we are heartbroken. The love and support from family and friends is helping us to carry on, but there is something about the kindness of strangers that is particularly touching.” She referenced poems and songs shared during the Open Mic that spoke directly, unexpectedly, to them. “I assume we were not the only ones who were moved to tears. My husband would have loved the evening. It seems we were exactly where we were supposed to be.”

Somewhere along the way, made up things become actual medicine. So go ahead and make something up. Our communities are so hungry for it. If you’re sitting around waiting for an official person or an official group to do it, you might be waiting a long time, because a lot of their time gets spent in meetings, doing official things. (Go join their official group. They’re usually all eager for new people.) Or find a couple of friends, have a meeting powered by tea and brownies, book a venue, speak your vision out loud, send out the invitations. I suspect you will be as gobsmacked and delighted as we were, by who shows up. (Shout out here to Angie Wilde and Quentin de Lorenzis who also showed up as fellow organizers in the most perfect and magical way.)

But here is the catch. Culture needs real estate. 

If the Museum hadn’t offered their space, (edit: their utterly perfect tailor-made for community events and Open Mics and grassroots-vibing things space), our idea would have died before it got up and dancing. 

Humans need third spaces in which to gather.

And culture needs outlets. Actual real estate. In which to take place.

And our communities, here in Whistler and Pemberton, need people and officials and organizations, to lobby for it, protect it, envision it, fundraise for it, fund it, value it. Not the culture alone, but the real estate dedicated to it.

If you’d asked me when I was younger if poetry could ease grief or if communities needed cultural spaces or if anyone other than artists and rich people needed art, I would have said, I dunno, probably not. And most of us, now, have an endless personalized download of culture and content in our hands, on our devices. Who needs to do “content” in public? But I didn’t know what grief was. I didn’t know that sharing made it lighter. I didn’t know how relentlessly complicated and heavy and lonely and confusing life can sometimes feel. And how ineffable. And how the effort to turn that into a song or a joke or poem or a painting, and to share that, and to witness and be witnessed in the wrangling and wrestling of it, is, quite possibly,  the whole point.

And definitely the way through.

And it takes space. Actual physical meat/meet-space.

Let’s make it so.

Event photography by Brenda Bakker