Welcome to Go Gentle…

As the 2025 City of Kelowna Artists-in-Residence, Cole Mash and I are so thrilled to welcome you to our community and Spoken Word project titled Go Gentle: Ecological Grief, Spoken Word, and Speculative Hope.

What

We are in the midst of a climate crisis that creates tangible problems for communities around the world to overcome, such as forest fires, flash floods, and food shortage. Climate crisis is often framed as a “fight,” but humans are a part of nature, not its enemy. In contrast to Dylan Thomas’ famous poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night”, we suggest we must ‘go gentle’ as we engage the problems of climate crisis, as a way of both healing our grief and approaching environmental issues with care, love, and community.

From poetry to science fiction, writing has long aided humanity in understanding ourselves and imagining alternative ways of being. Climate-based writing can help us cathartically overcome our grief for an ecologically sick world, while simultaneously envisioning a future where we recover. ‘Go Gentle’ asks how speculative writing and digital making might act as a catalyst, bringing communities together to connect, grieve, and co-create a future post-climate crisis?

‘Go Gentle’ is a series of community engaged writing and video literature making workshops, with an immersive sound and video installation set on Knox Mountain. The project will culminate in a gentle walk through the installation and a public showing of the works created by the artists and the community.

WHO

Cole Mash (he/him) is a poet, scholar, writer, teacher and community arts organizer who lives on unceded Syilx-Okanagan territory in Kelowna, BC. His work often blends poetry and nonfiction, drawing on his working-class roots, personal stories, and pop-culture to explore themes of masculinity, memory, ecology, and family. He has performed poetry locally and nationally for over 10 years, and his creative work has been published in CV2, Pinhole Poetry, Forget Magazine, The Eunoia Review, and anthologized in The Quiet Minds Anthology and Pinhole Poetry’s Volume 2 Selected. His lyric-memoir, What You Did is All it Ever Means, was published with Broke Press in 2021. Cole’s critical work has been published in Scholarly and Research Communication and the SpokenWeb Blog, and he is the co-editor of Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound from McGill-Queen’s University Press. He holds a PhD in English from Simon Fraser University. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of non-profit arts organization Inspired Word Café and teaches at UBC Okanagan and Okanagan College. Cole has a wonderful partner, four kiddos, and two kitties whom he loves all the way to the bottom.

Erin Scott (she/they) is a time-based, interdisciplinary poet and artist who lives on the unceded territory of the Syilx/Okanagan Peoples (Kelowna, BC). Erin is a founding member of Inspired Word Café, a literary and performing arts non-profit. Their first chapbook, "Atrophy", won the John Lent Poetry Prose Award 2019 and was published by Kalamalka Press in 2020. to make it whole again, their second chapbook, was published in 2021 with broke press. Their award-winning performance work has been hosted on stages across Canada. Moving into digital modes of writing and performance, their recent work features in Metatron Press’s digital edition “Glyphoria”, as well as being presented at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in early 2024. Erin holds an MFA in performance and writing and is currently a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Studies, Digital Arts and Humanities at UBCO. Her research and artistic work focus on community art practice, land, identity, and language.

When

July 19 - October 5, 2025.

Where

Venues and locations across Kelowna, including Knox Mountain Park and The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.

Schedule

Open ‘House’ and Workshop 1
July 19 @ 10 AM - 1 PM
Base of Knox Mountain

This gathering kicks off the project! Cole and Erin will sit at the base of Knox with lawn games, beverages, writing prompts, and colouring supplies. They will introduce the project, and syilx storyteller and visual artist Coralee Miller will tell traditional stories imagining the future from an Okanagan perspective.

Workshop 2 - Speculative Writing
August 9 @ 1 - 3 PM
The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art

Workshop 2 is all about the power of speculative writing. Speculative writing is sometimes boiled down to simply science fiction, but it is actually a much wider form of writing that is more concerned with asking questions (often beginning with what if) than laser guns or time travel. It can be set in the past, present, or future: asking questions like: What if a global pandemic swept the world and turned people into zombies (The Walking Dead)? What if women were used as tools to create babies for the ruling class (The Handmaids Tale)? Or what if a person could literally feel the pain of others (The Parable of the Sower)?

In this workshop, Cole and Erin will give an introduction to speculative writing, exploring the genre as a tool that we might use to both process the ecological grief we are feeling in the wake of climate crisis, but also imagine new futures wherein we collectively overcome its challenges.

Workshop 3 - Performance/Digital Writing
August 16 @ 1 - 3 PM
The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art

Workshop 3 will take either the writing done in Workshop 2 or writing you may already have and explore ways in which you can take it beyond the page, whether through performance or digital making. Erin and Cole will explore the basics of embodied performance and voice, as well as audio and video literature to get you on your way to making your next great slam poem, video story, or spoken word album!

Knox Mountain Installation
August 22 - October 5
Begins at First Lookout

Exhibition Closing and Participant Showcase
September 27 @ 530pm - 730pm
Knox Mountain, First Lookout

Join us for the final imagining! At this final event, Cole and Erin will perform original works created as part of Go Gentle, as well as share their experience of the project. There will also be opportunity for any participants to showcase works they created as part of the workshops. From 530-630, there will be an open house where participants can come, experience the installation, and chat with Cole and Erin. The event itself will happen from 630-730.

Get Involved!

Please reach out to use through the contact form to find out more and stay connected.

Go gently, friends.