PATRICIA YOUNG...THANK YOU!

Today, I finally had a chance to attend a workshop given by poet Patricia Young. She's a poet who has published 10 books so far, and she has won basically every poetry award there is in Canada: the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Dorothy Livesay Award, the Bliss Carmen Award, the National Magazine Award, the League of Canadian Poets' National Poetry Competition, and Arc's Poem of the Year contest.

 But here's an even bigger rush: she and her writer husband sat with me at lunch today, and she looked at 7 or 8 of my poems at the same time, and told me she enjoyed them. She encouraged me to publish more poetry, did a bit of blue pencil work for me, and then she took out a copy of one of her own poetry books, An Auto-Erotic History of Swings,

 autographed a copy of it and GAVE it to me. What a sweet gift! Here's the message, at least until I scan the one from the book:

For Ace--with admiration. All the best with your poems. Patricia