Photo: fireplace in The Library at the Gault Hotel; our conversations will be over lunch at gourmet restaurants very nearby
Montréal Conversations
Beginning at the welcome dinner Monday January 19th, and continuing at lunch on Tuesday January 20th: Visions for the Future—-Non-traditional responses to the climate disaster, a conversation with Lise Weil around dreams, an experiment in trusting body intelligence, plant intelligence, animal intelligence. Our guides will be your dreams and material drawn from the Dreams Before Extinction anthology.
Lise Weil is editor of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, an online journal devoted to healing our broken relationship to the earth. She was founder and editor of the US feminist review Trivia: A Journal of Ideas (1982-1991) and co-founder of its online offshoot Trivia: Voices of Feminism, which she edited through 2011 (www.triviavoices.com). Her memoir, In Search of Pure Lust (She Writes Press, U.S., Inanna Press, Canada) was a finalist for an International Book Award. She lives in Montreal and taught in Goddard College’s Graduate Institute, where she helped found a concentration in Embodiment Studies. www.liseweil.com
Thursday January 22nd lunch discussion: Green to Grey a conversation with Ian Thomas Shaw about calling to envionmental action via literary arts (various genres)
Ian Thomas Shaw is a Canadian novelist, who writes both under the unusual pen name Con Cu (owl in Vietnamese) and his own name. The pen name was derived from a nickname given to him by a Vietnamese friend, whose stories about Vietnam and coming as a child to Canada inspired his first novel, Soldier, Lily, Peace and Pearls. Shaw was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. He worked as a diplomat and as an international development worker, living in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. He currently lives in Aylmer, Quebec (just outside of Ottawa). His second novel, Quill of the Dove, is a blend of literary fiction and political thriller set against the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Quill of the Dove was published by Guernica Editions in Spring 2019 and optioned for a TV limited series by Original Pictures in June 2019. The novel was subsequently translated and published by Éditions David (French translation), Dokusou ediciones (Spanish) and Literaturwissenschaft.de (German). Shaw is the founder of Deux Voiliers Publishing, the Prose in the Park Literary Festival and the Ottawa Review of Books. Shaw is also a translator of literary fiction: Choosing Eleonore (from French, Guernica, 2021) and Treize pierres (from English into French, DVP, 2024). Shaw co-edited The Marginal Ride Anthology for DVP in 2019 and the Green to Grey anthology of environmental fiction for Guernica Editions in 2025. His website is www.ianthomasshaw.com.
Wednesday January 21 lunch discussion: “Artivism” is activism through art. Explore together how we do this work, and how our work can overlap and support each other. Introduction of the Montreal poetry map project.
Lis McLoughlin, PhD is the founder and director of NatureCulture® www.nature-culture.net (you are on this website now), a publishing company through which she directs the Writing the Land® Project www.writingtheland.org, which pairs poets with conserved lands, and creates anthologies sold for land conservation. As of 2025, Lis works with over 350 poets and 150 land conservation organizations, mostly in the USA, and has published 16 Writing the Land anthologies and 9 other books about Nature. She works at the intersection of arts, environment, and social justice, and holds annual international in-person retreats for environmental writers. Lis has degrees in Civil Engineering, Education, and Science and Technology Studies. She lives off-grid in Northfield, Massachusetts and part-time in Montréal, Québec.
Other contributors to our Retreat
Anne Bergeron: Embodied writing through yoga
Anne Bergeron’s essays and poems appear in Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, The Hopper, The Dark Mountain Project, About Place Journal, Eastern Iowa Review, The Calendula Review, and multiple print issues of Blueline Magazine. She is a contributing writer for Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, and an editor for the journal’s recently published anthology, Dark Matter Women Witnessing: Dreams Before Extinction. She is the solo finalist for the 2023 Barry Lopez Creative Nonfiction Award at Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. Her writing is anthologized in The Black River: Death Poems, and in the forthcoming book, ICE. Anne teaches teens at a rural school, shares yoga with people of all ages, and lives on a handmade homestead in Vermont where she and her husband grow food and share their lives with a medley of animal companions. Visit her at annebergeronvt.com.
Carole Baker: A Montréal non-profit
Carole Baker is a co-founder of the nonprofit housing collective Les Rebelles for low-income senior lesbian citizens. She’ll tell us about how this project was conceived and carried out in the heart of Montréal.
Our Reading January 24, 2025
Hotel Gault, Montreal, QC, Canada
Confirmed Readers:
Lise Weil
Anne Bergeron
Ian Thomas Shaw
Authors in Green To Grey
Special Guests including Paul Richmond, publisher, activist, and land conservationist