KEVIN SPENST
Where the Walls Remember, the Poet Writes

By Ashima Shukla
(click images to enlarge)

**west end author, poet, and educator Kevin Spenst.**

I met Kevin Spenst at the West End Community Centre’s 50th anniversary celebration, where he was reading excerpts from his upcoming book, Stanley Park Manor: A Collective History.

What drew me to him first was the combination of keen eyes and a kind demeanour, and then the pin on his shirt: “Art Against Fascism.” When I complimented it, he unpinned it and generously gave it to me. One can hardly make a better first impression than that!

WHERE THE POEMS BEGAN

Kevin is the author of four full-length poetry collections and 19 chapbooks. He organizes the Dead Poets Reading Series (find links to all groups cited in “Related Links” below), writes for subTerrain, serves as a poetry ambassador for Vancouver Poet Laureate Elee Kraliniji Gardiner, and occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetics on Vancouver Co-op Radio. He also teaches writing at UBC and mentors at The Writer’s Studio at SFU. So how did such a prolific writing journey begin?

Kevin’s relationship with the written word goes back to the first page of his first school reader. “I so distinctly remember opening the first reader in Grade 1 to read Janet, and then turn the page, and then John, and then the third page was Janet and John,” he says. “That experience struck me as so powerful. It felt like the opening into the potential for understanding the world.”

This want for understanding, Kevin realizes in retrospect, came from his difficult childhood. His father lived with schizophrenia, and was in and out of the house and institutions. “I think at a very young age, I was really keen to understand what was going on,” he recalls. “And with the literary arts, there was the promise.”

He started writing poetry as a teenager and hasn’t paused since. He has written daily since 2003, when he began writing flash fiction every day. Poetry, he says, is “a place for reflection, but then also play,” a space where something profoundly serious and something absolutely ridiculous can coexist. “There are so many fantastic paradoxes at the heart of so much poetry.”

**the cover of kevin spenst’s new book.**

SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN

For Kevin, poetry and social justice are not separate pursuits. Poetry is an oral tradition, he points out, an art form that can exist between people with little to no mediation. “You don’t need a Hollywood budget to make a poem. You don’t need gasoline to make a poem. At its core, it’s a place where people meet and listen to charged language.”

The night before we spoke, Kevin shares, he attended a reading at Christchurch Cathedral by Fiona Tinwei Lam and Russel Thornton. Thornton closed the evening with a phrase that stayed with Kevin: “An abiding oneness.” Because poetry connects us to everything, especially in a culture of restless seeking. “So many people are looking for meaning, and they pursue it in sometimes dangerous ways, sometimes environmentally costly ways,” he says. Poems, in his view, are “little reprieves,” moments to step back and undo a little of the programming that says you’ve got to constantly buy and consume. If we can cultivate relationships and ways of living that require one another, he adds, we might help slow what feels like an inexorable forward movement.

This is also why he is currently rallying about “Poetry in Transit.” Since Translink’s announcement discontinuing the program that saw BC poets’ works featured on the ad panels inside the buses, Kevin and fellow poets have started a petition to save it, signed by over a thousand people already. “That’s something I believe in,” he says.

HOW THE POET FOUND A HOME

Kevin started our video interview with a tour. I found him sitting near his mantle, with one of the building’s original electric fireplaces, and walked me through the layout of his suite. The building is mostly bachelor units, he clarified, gesturing towards his galley kitchen. In the foyer hangs a gorgeous piece by Shannon Pawliw, a gallery owner, neighbour, contributor to his book, and the designer of The West End Journal’s logo.

But Kevin’s own story with the Stanley Park Manor begins, fittingly, with a poem and a pandemic. His third book with Anvil Press came out at the very start of the Covid-19 pandemic, just as venues for a launch disappeared. So, he organised ten outdoor readings instead, one of them in front of the Stanley Park Manor. During this reading, he sang a couple of his poems.

Lyn Guy, then the building manager, had met Kevin through his girlfriend at the time, and he admits with a grin, she had never really given him the time of day. Moved by his singing, Lyn was more amenable to helping Kevin find a place at the Manor after his breakup. And although he never saw any of the rumoured ghosts that haunt the 100-year-old building, he says, “I did see and feel the healing magic. And I started writing.”

That sense of refuge feels pressing to him now. “There are so many parallels right now between the present and the 1930s,” Kevin explains. He finds his sentiments reflected to him in the work of Swedish American poet May Swenson, who asked in her New York diary in the late 1930s whether fascism would come to America. “These days, we see the rise of nationalism, fascism, xenophobia, and monoculture, and it’s heavy. So how do we both acknowledge the weight of what’s happening around us, while also sustaining some sort of love, and the opportunity for sharing joy?”

The Manor, which West End artist and The Tyee’s culture editor Dorothy Woodend has called a “living embodiment of the city’s social and cultural history,” became one such place, made possible by simple personal interactions among some of the city’s most creative inhabitants.

THE MANOR TELLS ITS OWN STORY

**Stanley Park Manor circa 1929.** *(City of Vancouver ARchives)*

Kevin’s upcoming book rests on conversations and connections. Lyn Guy, building manager for 25 years, collected much of the building’s history. She would hear from people who had grown up in or lived in the Manor. She once invited a man back to see the suite he had lived in as a boy in the 1940s, with his mother and brother, and recorded their conversation, which appears in the book.

A few floors down, in that same decade, lived Simma Holt, one of the first women in Vancouver journalism to write beyond the conventional home-and-garden and weddings beats. She covered crime and later joined the Trudeau government in the 1970s. Holt recalled that the Manor was one of the few places that rented to Jewish people in a city where antisemitism was widespread in those decades.

Closer to the present, Kevin also interviewed his neighbour Greg Dickson. Dickson is a retired CBC broadcaster and journalist, who welcomed him and shared about his career, and about other journalists who have called the Manor home. The transcript of this conversation also appears in the book. Among Dickson’s peers, Pierre Berton, a major name in Canadian literary history, also wrote about living in the building in his memoir.

In between these surprising and delightful stories of connections, Kevin has allowed the building to tell its own story. Actors, artists, writers, and other creative souls who have called the Manor their home have contributed to this book, in the form of interviews, personal accounts, and photographs of their homes. Kevin found these stories with the help of Lyn, and over an intense period of two months, the bulk of the book came together.

Serendipity also lent a hand. At an event, Kevin found himself seated next to a doctor who had grown up in the West End in the 1970s. Over conversation, Kevin discovered that the doctor’s family, who had escaped Vietnam, found refuge in the Manor. His story, Kevin notes, sits alongside a darker history: a murder in 1974 triggered an exodus of women from a building whose units were largely occupied by women. Kevin also researched the building’s ownership, asking what conditions allowed that violence to happen. “So the book holds all these complicated stories from various chapters of Vancouver’s past.”

THE HEART BEATS IN REMEMBRANCE

If one piece anchors the collection, it is a lyric essay Kevin wrote during the pandemic about losing his friend and fellow poet Jeff Steudel. They met when their first books came out with Anvil in 2015, and grew close when the publisher sent them to a literary festival in Portland. Steudel died of cancer, and the pandemic limited the options available for his celebration of life. With a tearful tremor in his voice, Kevin remembers the small group that gathered outside the Manor, where Jeff had lived and where he met his future wife. They read Jeff’s poetry aloud, and a remarkable coincidence took place, which Kevin has preserved in his essay. “It just felt like this serendipity of the book, which exists on so many fronts, is centred for me in that particular piece.”

WHAT MADE THE MANOR A PLACE OF HEALING

Part of the answer is architecture. H.H. Simmons, who designed many movie theatres of his day, was the architect of the Manor. Kevin reckons the grand entranceway is suggestive of that big, theatrical imagination. Its developer and first owner, W.A. Lightheart, built it for single women in the city, according to his granddaughter, Leslie. Kevin learned that Simmons was gay, “which means a West End building that now often flies the rainbow flag was designed by a gay man,” Kevin explains. “All these factors allowed for a certain independent spirit to emerge, and then connect friends, and friends of friends.”

This spirit certainly shows up in many of the lives lived in the Manor. Alfred DePew, a writer who moved to Canada from the United States, was one of the only tenants to rent two units at once. He did this because he kept one of the units as a ‘dream workshop,’ where people came to write and develop their creative practice, Kevin shared with a twinkle in his eye. The book also includes Alfred’s conversation with Joel Sturrock about the building as a creative space. Similarly, Kiran Singh, an award-winning journalist, shared about arriving at the Manor while working as a janitor. Ten years later, he had found the confidence to come out, to find love, and to build the career of his dreams.

LYN GUY CAST THE MANOR

Kevin is quick to say the book would not exist without Lyn Guy. He thinks of her as a co-author, as someone who, “casts the Manor. She nurtured the caring spirit of the building that has been a mostly uninterrupted through-line of its history. Without her, this book would not exist. And I'm so grateful to be able to have worked with her, to help pass that along,” Kevin expresses.

“I remember when I moved to the West End,” Kevin shares towards the end of the interview, “To know this place through so many different points of view feels pretty special. In a city where old homes are torn down to make way for glass towers, it feels special to live in this apartment building that's not only endured, but has been central to Vancouver history,” he concludes.

Stanley Park Manor: A Collective History launches in November. Find more information in “Related Links” below.