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About
Bruce Hunter

In his late twenties, Bruce's published poetry won him a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts to study with novelist W.O. Mitchell and poet Irving Layton.

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Photo Credit: Lisa Stein

Born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Bruce was deafened as an infant and afflicted with low vision much of his adult life. He grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Ogden in the shadow of Esso’s Imperial Oil Refinery and now decommissioned Canadian Pacific Railway’s (C.P.R.) Ogden Shops. ​​

In his early teens Bruce discovered poetry as a compass to navigate in a chaotic hearing world. In poetry, he could hear everything - and be heard. After high school, he worked for ten years as a labourer, equipment operator, Zamboni driver, and completed his technical education (Olds and Lakeland Colleges) and apprenticeship as a gardener and arborist.

In his late twenties, Bruce's published poetry won him a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts to study with novelist W.O. Mitchell and poet Irving Layton. From there he went onto York University to study film and literature and taught in the creative writing department with Don Coles before landing a position at Seneca College.

Bruce taught for twenty-five years at Seneca, where he created the poetry and spoken word workshops based on a pan-cultural curriculum. He also developed and ran two campus learning centres supporting special needs and language across the curriculum.

​Bruce Hunter’s poems, stories and essays have appeared in over 80 publications in Canada, China, India, Italy, the U.K and the US. His 12th and newest book, In the Bear's House is forthcoming from Frontenac House Ltd. (2025). Originally published in 2010, In the Bear's House won the Canadian Rockies prize at the Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival. Recent books include Galestro (2023) and A Life in Poetry (2022) both from iQdB edizioni in Italy. In 2010, his book Two O’Clock Creek – poems new and selected, won the Acorn-Plantos Peoples' Poetry Award for Canada.

Bruce was the 2017 Author in Residence for Calgary Public Library. His past residencies and presentations include the Banff Centre, Deaf and Hear Alberta, Richmond Hill Public Library, University of Toronto, Sir John Abbott College, Mount Royal University and many others across Canada.

Bruce is a life member of the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (C.H.H.A.) and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (C.N.I.B.) as well as long-time member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.

INTERVIEWS WITH BRUCE HUNTER

Sandro Pecchiari and Giovanni Fierro interview Bruce Hunter for Fare Voci 

In January, 2025 Bruce was interviewed for Fare Voci magazine about his presence in Italy. “I fell in love with her in sixth grade and my mind and heart were captured forever after my first visit in 2012, one week after I retired. It opened a whole new phase in my life as I say here. Grazie, caro amici.”

Poetry also comes from Canada, with Bruce Hunter and his “Galestro”, and in the interview about him he tells us all about his fascination for his homeland and Italy. And the dialect is the protagonist of the poetry of Ezio Solvesi and his “Tutintùn”.

 

The fascination with jazz musicians, I think, fuels the entire book. Both from a devotion to their music-making, and from the breadth that his writing shares with jazz-making. Is that so?


Thank you so much for your insightful and generous commentary. YES. Jazz (and blues) is poetry to the musical mind. Like poetry, jazz covers the gamut of the human psyche and musicality, from pain to rhapsody, from euphony to cacophony. Channeled through New Orleans, American jazz combines European harmonics and African rhythms.


All forms of poetry emerge in jazz and blues: lyric, narrative, drama, dialogue, both formal and overt. Whether it is the plaintive voice of a lone saxophonist on a street corner calling to us or the African griot rising amid the cacophony of village life around him. Like poetry, jazz invites us into the world, with a fusion of all the sounds of life.


My last poem in “Galestro”, “The Rooks in the Sycamores at the Tomb at Dunn” is a sort of jazz fusion using mythology, literature, botany, anthropology, etymology, family and social history as both story, lyrics, puns, dialogue, verse, Scottish and Gaelic dialect. As is my title poem in Galestro, about Tuscany, its history and its dialect. I share a musician’s obsession with skill and tone. In both English and Italian.

Two subjects that feature prominently in “Galestro” are childhood and nature. What do they have in common? And what is so important about them?


History, nature, and childhood are themes that run through my life from early childhood to today. Long before I formally studied botany, I was introduced to tree planting by a teacher who gave our middle school class green spruce saplings in baby food containers as Arbor Day gifts.


I planted my first tree when I was eight, then planted dozens as my brothers and sisters brought them home. More than sixty years later, those trees still stand in my parents’ old yard. My parents and siblings are gone now, but those sturdy green spruce feathers stand tall.


I studied horticulture and arboriculture in college before receiving a poetry scholarship to graduate school. In my apprenticeship as a gardener I learned the universal language of plants, soil and time, which I have never forgotten and which remains one of the powerful links between past and present, earth and sky, in my life and in my writing.

Another significant aspect is his attention to the history of the places he talks about. How important is this attitude of his? Is it to indicate the way in which one should relate and approach them?


I first fell in love with Italy in elementary school, after studying a chapter dedicated to the Greek and Roman wars. Then I found a National Geographic photo reportage of the excavations of Pompeii, where archaeologists discovered the perfectly preserved body of a boy my age who was running an errand for his mother; at that moment, history became something personal. I was that boy trapped in time.


Later, I studied Latin in high school and still later, as a college professor, I taught the children of postwar immigrants from southern Italy. One and a half million Italians, most of them from the south, live in Canada.


Like me, many of my students were the first in their working-class families to get a higher education. But I must admit that, as a simple tourist in Italy, I was initially nervous to write about Italy's rich and storied history.


In Italy, history surrounds us and teaches us all, if we let it. I always come to Italy with an open heart and mind because I believe that when we travel we come back young and vulnerable.


We are all tourists, temporary visitors, wherever we are on this earth. We become different people when we respond to a new place we encounter, just like my newborn nephew exploring our garden.


From new experiences, from vulnerability, spring images are born that often connect the past with the new and unknown.

Because then in these pages he builds a real geography of places. And I ask, is the journey the tool to unite them? To bring them closer together? And what meaning does he give to the concept of travel?


My short answer is that adventure and wonder unite the poems wherever they are set. I am lucky to have a companion in adventures, my wife Lisa, who is a lifelong traveler and a photographer. For her, travel is all about images and the surprising wonder of discovery. For me, it is the images, even the wonder, and the stories, the jokes, the quips that underline the journey. My poems always speak of people, of land and history.


We have been lucky enough to visit much of Italy, Turin, Cinque Terre, Alba, Umbria, Salento, Amalfi Coast and more. How much beauty and variety there is in the Italian regions, each with its own charm, its own dialect and foods that are unique.​

 

Consequently, it seems important to me to underline how, from “Galestro”, the thought emerges that the road is a real school of life. Is this correct?


Absolutely. The road, or the journey of my life, began like for many others, I was inspired by the novel “On the Road – Sulla strada” by the American Jack Kerouac. With my high school friend we hitchhiked for 3000 kilometers from Calgary, Alberta, to San Francisco.


The road then as now is the unrecognized classroom of life. On the road we are free, we travel light, but vulnerable and open to whatever happens. Which is a state of grace from which poetry and art are born. My friend and I slept in ditches along the roads, in the forests and once in a sandy cemetery in the desert in Winnemucca, Nevada. The dead are good neighbors! Rattlesnakes neither.


Often strangers would take us to their homes, these two young Canadians in plaid wool jackets, looking thin, young and rough.


We spent a night in the abandoned Tenderloin of San Francisco, as Kerouac and Jack London had done. We met teachers, preachers, truck drivers, a traveling Bible salesman, a Coast Guardsman—all good people who were willing to give us a meal, a bed, or a ride.


Alas, we were two years too late for the Summer of Love, but because of literature we went in search of great adventures that taught us, in so many ways. This was my life.

“Galestro” also looks to the past, to the time that was. And the memory of past friendships is alive. How can we live with it?


Buddhists believe that we tend to all our emotions, our fears, our pain, the same way we tend to a garden. Pain, for example, stops the soul, but in poetry we honor it together with the loved one and give it a special place in the garden of the psyche.


As a young man I worked as a gardener in a cemetery and saw how it was not a place of death but a vibrant celebration of life. And often it is also a place of great generosity and beauty, of plants and animals drawn to a lush green Eden in the middle of a city.


I was deeply moved to see visitors at the graves of their loved ones. Some came with children who left letters, little gifts for their loved one. All around us were many creatures and above us birds nesting in the tall trees that adorned the graves. This was all poetry to me.

In these poems of yours, what form does Canada emerge? And what is the Canada that you like?


I am drawn to the wilderness, the wilderness, the beaten path, the Dolomites, the mountainous places like where I grew up in Alberta. It is where the prairies rise to the foothills and the snow-capped Canadian Rockies, where the weather comes in from the West Coast.


Canada is a vast country, the second largest after Russia, 10 million square kilometers with about 40 million people, the inverse of Italy’s 300,000 square kilometers with 60 million people. Canada has many vibrant, diverse and distinct regions and cultures, but it is always the mountains, here and in Italy, that I return to. To quote my poem “ Two O’clock Creek ” from “A Life in Poetry”:

…every year
since I learned what rivers look like,
this is the place I come to in my dreams
between the highest point on earth and the sky,
so I can drink from the clouds.

The poem is about Canada, but I feel the same way about Italy. This poem was the “seed” for my new publication in Italy, the novel “Nella casa dell'orso”, coming out in December 2024, by iQdB edizioni of Lecce.

 

There is also a complete and total fascination with Tuscany, which becomes a true synonym for beauty. What does it mean to you?


I have been fortunate to travel extensively in Italy from north to south, to cities large and small: Turin, Alba, Rapallo, Pisa, Florence, Siena, Cortona, Rome, Naples, Sorrento, Capri, Matera and Lecce.


But my first deep connection with the people and places was in Chianti, where I recognized a soil very similar to the one where I grew up, in the southern foothills of Alberta with a view of the Canadian Rockies and in the arid prairies, but rich in agriculture against all odds… We stayed at a farmhouse outside Castellina, in Chianti. One morning I went to the vineyard to taste some of that unique soil, the schist, which in Tuscan dialect I learned is called galestro, and which flavors the best wines of the region.


In college I learned to test the soil for mineral qualities and vitality for the crops. The winemaker saw me do this, and so the next day we visited his land and his winery.


The title poem of “Galestro” comes from that experience. The land and the tour with the winemaker inspired my book. There was immediate recognition.


Later a Tuscan friend of mine told me that galestro is the earth that scares, and that by dipping your hands in it, it sanctifies them. Of course this is something every gardener and farmer knows.


The soil, the product of ancient fallen stars, is what gives life to every living creature. And it has been since the beginning of time. What’s not to love? New places awaken buried memories.


My poems in “Galestro” mix childhood and history. In Italy where the destruction of the last great war is visible if you look. I feel like I’m always coming home to my home, every time I go back.

Guarda Ora

Ti presento un libro... sotto l'albero. IqDB edizioni

Un libro come strenna natalizia, e a consigliarlo sono gli stessi editori. Salentoinlinea.it dedica uno spazio video alle case editrici, attraverso il quale proporre autori e titoli per un regalo di cultura.

Joan Shillington interviews Bruce Hunter for FreeFall Magazine

In 2015, Joan Shillington interviewed Bruce Hunter for FreeFall Magazine, Canada's Magazine of Exquisite Writing. The interview provided a deep dive into Bruce's creative process and inspirations, offering valuable insights into his approach to writing and his thoughts on the craft of storytelling. If you're interested in learning more about Bruce's approach to writing and the stories that have shaped his career, we encourage you to read the interview on FreeFall Magazine's website.

CJSW Writer's Block - Interview with Bruce Hunter by Dymphny Droniuk

Bruce was interviewed by Dymphny Droniuk for the July 2019 episode of CJSW Writer’s Block. We invite you to listen to the complete in-depth interview by following the link below.

Shannon MacKinnon interviews Bruce Hunter for The Artist's Toolbox

In 2016, Bruce was invited to participate in a television production, The Artist's Toolbox, where he was interviewed by Shannon MacKinnon. During the interview, Bruce shared his insights and expertise as an award-winning poet and author, as well as his experiences as a retired professor of Seneca College.

HONOURS & HIGHLIGHTS

"Dark Water" Named Finalist for 2023 AMPA Poetry Award

Bruce Hunter received the Gold Award for Poetry at the 2023 Alberta Magazine Publishers Association (AMPA) Awards for his eco-poem "Dark Water," published in FreeFall Magazine. The poem addresses the environmental impact of Imperial Oil's Ogden Refinery in Alberta and is featured in Hunter's poetry collection, Galestro.

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Calgary Public Library's (2017) Author in Residence

In 2017, Bruce had the honour of being selected as the Author in Residence for the Calgary Public Library. As part of this prestigious program, Bruce spent several months at the library, meeting with local writers, leading workshops and providing mentorship to aspiring authors. During his residency, Bruce also contributed to the library's recommended reading list, sharing his favourite books and authors with the Calgary community. You can find the full list on the library's website here.

Poster for Calgary Public Library's 2017 Author in Residence, Bruce Hunter

2017: Guest Speaker: Calgary Women's Literary Club

In 2017, Bruce Hunter was invited to be a guest speaker at the Calgary Women’s Literary Club, an organization that has been promoting literature and supporting local writers since 1906. During his appearance, Bruce shared his insights and experience as a writer, inspiring members of the Literary Club to continue pursuing their passion for literature. You can read more here.

2015: Bruce Hunter presents Russell Thornton for Brick Books 

"When Jane Munro’s Blue Sonoma (Brick Books, 2014) and Russell Thornton’s The Hundred Lives (Quattro Books, 2014) appeared on the Griffin prize shortlist during National Poetry Month in April, 2015, I cheered. As a former West Coaster and as a 50 years and counting reader of Canadian poetry, I knew both names. I thought, I’d not have wanted to be on that jury. Munro’s work in Blue Sonoma is the poetry of language stripped bare, yet metaphorically and emotionally rich. Much of Thornton’s The Hundred Lives, is a departure from his earlier works of compressed lyricism. It’s a book that steps out, swaggers and sways in places. It is garrulous but never galootish. What follows is a short appreciation of The Hundred Lives, my recent conversation with Russell and finally, links to reviews of his work, interviews and articles about him."

2015: An Evening of Poetry About Home and Family. 

In 2015, Bruce Hunter curated "An Evening of Poetry About Home and Family," a special event that celebrated the power of poetry to explore our deepest emotions and connections. The event featured several talented poets and writers, including Bruce, who shared their work and insights with a captivated audience. Bruce promotes accessibility at his events by providing ASL interpreters and captioning services for those with hearing loss.

2013: Bruce reads from "Towards a Definition of Pornography"

In 2013, Bruce was invited to participate in Concordia University's "Living Creatively: Life Writing Methods of Storytelling, Poetry and Photography" workshop, hosted by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. Bruce was one of eleven authors who gave readings during the day-long event, which explored the creative process and the power of storytelling.


During his reading, Bruce shared an excerpt from his article "Towards a Definition of Pornography," which was featured in the book A Heart of Wisdom: Life Writing as Empathetic Inquiry. His reading explores the complex issues surrounding pornography and its impact on society.


Thank you to Concordia University and the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling for hosting this inspiring event.

Watch Now

Bruce Hunter reads "Towards a Definition of Pornography"

Bruce Hunter reads “Towards a Definition of Pornography” at Concordia University (Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Faculty of Arts and Science), October 23, 2013.

PRESENTATIONS & WORKSHOPS

Bruce offers engaging presentations and workshops for audiences of all sizes.

If you're interested in booking a presentation or workshop with Bruce, please get in touch to discuss his availability and fees. Bruce is eager to connect with readers and share his passion for writing, and he welcomes the opportunity to work with you. Thank you for your interest! 

PROGRAMS & INTERESTS

Writers-in-the-Schools

Bruce is excited to participate in the Union's Ontario Writers-in-the-Schools program and the Northern Ontario WITS program. He is always looking for new opportunities to connect with readers and share his love of writing.

Equity Initiatives

As part of the Union's Equity Implementation Plan, Bruce is committed to increasing awareness of authors who are Black, Indigenous, racialized, LGBTQI2S, or living with a disability. Bruce identifies as someone living with a disability and is proud to be part of this important initiative.

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