In 2013, Naomi Wakan was appointed the first Poet Laureate of Nanaimo. A verse by the inaugural poet laureate was installed outside the Port Theatre in the spring of 2017, the first stone in the city's new poetry walk. As a poet laureate, Wakan initiated a Poetry in Transit program (poems gracing Nanaimo buses) and created the Nanaimo Poetry Map and a high school poetry competition.

Born in London, England, Naomi Wakan was introduced to works of George Bernard Shaw and the Fabian socialists by her older sisters by the time she was seven. She graduated with a degree in Social Work from Birmingham University. She immigrated to Canada in 1954 and brought her family up in Toronto. She worked as a psychotherapist, specializing in early childhood traumas. She came to Vancouver in 1982. She remarried to the sculptor, Elias Wakan, and traveled extensively including living two years in Japan, a stay that began with a two-week holiday. During their two years teaching ESL in Japan, they took 6,000 slides. Upon returning to Canada, they were pleased to discover Japan had been introduced into the B.C. Ministry of Education Grade 6 Curriculum. They developed a series of slide shows on Japan and Peru, also a Grade 6 subject. The couple formed a small publishing house, Pacific-Rim Publishers, to produce educational books, many of which Naomi wrote and illustrated. Their first title was Food in Peru with a print run of 100 copies. It eventually sold 1,000 copies. They produced 23 unsubsidized titles, the last being Telling Tales on the Rim. Wakan and her husband moved to Gabriola in 1996 and opened a studio, Drumbeg House Studio, where he makes wood sculpture and Naomi Wakan paints, writes and does fabric art as a member of Gabriola Fibre Artists. Wakan has moved from writing books geared to children to books for adults, including Haiku - One Breath Poetry. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Resurgence, Geist, Room of One's Own, Kansai Time Out and Far East Journal. Her advice to emerging writers past the age of fifty, Late Bloomer: On Writing Later in Life, was followed by personal essays about her literary life, Compositions: Notes on the Written Word, and a summary of her reading habit over the course of one year, Book Ends: A Year Between the Covers (Poplar Press, 2010).

With more than 30 books behind her, at age 80, Wakan released a collection of often humourous essays, A Roller-coaster Ride: Thoughts on Aging (Wolsak and Wynn, 2012), in which she considers subjects that include death, retirement homes, elder abuse and what to call people after they're past retirement.

"My early poems, written in my late twenties and thirties," says Wakan in Wind on the Heath (Shanti Arts $18.95 U.S.), "seem very strange and distant to me now at eighty-nine."

At the age of ninety, the long-time Gabriola resident produced a retrospective collection augmented by new poems written between 2018 and 2020. Now and Here (Shanti Arts, 2021) is a collaboration between Wakan (poems) and photographer Christine Brooks Cote. Wakan wrote tanka -- a format of five-line poems originating in Japan -- in response to photographs by Cote. Wakan chose this particular format because it starts with an objective description of the image. The title, Now and Here, comes from Henry David Thoreau: ” . . . all these times and places and occasions are now and here.”

[Photo: Beverly Deutsch, 1980]

BOOKS:

Images of Japan (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1989)
Japanese--An Appetizer (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1990)
Inca Scrapbook (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1991)
Reading About Japan (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1992)
Haiku - One Breath Poetry (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1993)
Puzzling on the Rim (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1993)
One day a Stranger Came (Annick, 1994)
Telling Tales on the Rim (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 1995)
Healing Bag (Lightsmith Publishing, 1998)
They Came from China (Pacific-Edge Publishing, 1999)
Haiku Bag (Lightsmith Publishing, 1999)
Memory bag (Lightsmith Publishing, 1999)
Musicworks, Gardenworks (Artmonsky Arts, 2002)
Drumbeg Park (Pacific-Edge Publishing, 2004)
Segues (Wolsak & Wynn, 2005) - poetry
Late Bloomer: On Writing Later in Life (Wolsak & Wynn, 2006)
Compositions: Notes on the Written Word (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008).
Book Ends: A Year Between the Covers (Poplar Press, Wolsak & Wynn, 2010).
Sex after 70 and other poems (Bevalia Press, 2010) 978-0-9782868-8-0
Reflections: response tanka (with Sonja Arntzen) (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 2011) 978-0-921358-25-1
On Poetry (with David Fraser) (Ascent Aspiration Publishing, 2011) 978-0-9736568-9-3
Think Colour (with Ruth Artmonsky) (Artmonsky Arts, 2011) 978-0-9551994-8-6
Nostalgia & The Attic (with Alice Rich) (2011) 978-0-9865253
A Roller-coaster Ride - Thoughts on Aging (Hamilton: Poplar Press, 2012) $19.95 ISBN 978-18949876-4-6
Naomi in Nanaimo (2014)
On the Arts (2016)
The Way of Tanka (2017)
Poetry That Heals (Shanti Arts, 2018) $18.95 978-1-947067-28-8
Wind on the Heath (Shanti Arts, 2021) $18.95 978-1-951651-55-8
Now and Here (Shanti Arts, 2021) 978-1-956056-09-9. With photography by Christine Brooks Cote
Time Together (2022) $29.95 978-1-956056-41-9

Plus the 'Work' Series - Loveworks, Artworks, Designworks, Foodworks, Bookworks

[BCBW 2022] "Poetry" "Publishing"