January is appropriately tagged the “hangover month”. December’s flapping comes home for real, and one faces the inevitable: Everybody pays for everything. Those extra gifts you bought, in the last of a month-long string of weak moments? They heckle you from unopened, unwelcome envelopes. The indulgences you took and advances you made – wine on your breath, hands moving across fine wool – now seem like ice fog, floating across the tops of abandoned buildings you long to explore. And how to account for your idleness? The cracker crumbs in your pants pockets? The decoration found between the cushions – could it have been from last year, or – heavens to Betsy! – the year before? The weekend between Christmas and New Years Day spent revisiting sad films from your all-too-emotional twenties, when everything seemed to have the rosy/black hue of terrible optimism? You verbally railed against the commercialization of Christmas but still bought into the whole crapshow, didn’t you?

Then, whilst cradling a snifter of Hennessy, you cued up Miles Davis and slid into bliss as you watched January’s snow populate the birch across the street. You weren’t sure where the jazz ended and the dizzy white began.

Membership Banner 2014

Now that the New Year has removed its coat and decided to stay, it is now time to renew your membership commitment to the Edmonton Poetry Festival Society. Membership rates are now $15.00 per year, up from $10.00 last year. Sometimes, you gotta do these things. This means that you will now have to give up 15 Ikea breakfasts per year to cover your membership. Or three lattes. Or two pairs of underwear (depending on where you shop, that is). Or 60 handfuls of candy from those red vending machines in the doorway of Safeway. We urge to make a sensible sacrifice and renew your membership now.

More news to come soon. February holds much to admire.