Sometimes, if rarely, Facebook brings pleasant memories of past posts, or rather the stories these posts tell. Yesterday, September 13, 2021, was one of those times. Thirteen years ago–on September 13, 2008–I had posted a note to my Facebook timeline, a flashback to events more than two decades earlier than the post. This gift of memories had been triggered by the arrival in my mail that day of the Special Home Issue of The Windsor Review. Everything I had written in that note is dear to me, and I’d like to again share these memories from a lifetime ago. This is what I had posted on that long ago day.

Yesterday, I received in the mail my copies of the Windsor Review, Volume 41, No. 1, the special home issue which contains two of my poems. Turning the pages of this new issue was like turning back the years. I had long eschewed the academic literary world in favour of spoken word performance, words in visual art, and music incorporating poetry. It had been almost exactly a quarter century since my work had appeared in this prestigious review based at the University of Windsor. To read this aptly themed issue was for me like coming home.

In this issue, I became reacquainted with friends and colleagues spanning half of my life and most of my literary career. The Managing Editor, Marty Gervais is an old friend and poet beside whom I had often been published long ago and with whom I had worked on presenting readings in Windsor. The Fiction Editor, Alistair McLeod had been my faculty advisor for my Masters degree program at the University of Windsor. I had more recently met John B. Lee, the guest editor, who had told me about this upcoming issue. I remember Poetry Editor Susan Holbrook from my Days at the University of Windsor. R. D. Roy and Tai Grove are also more recent literary acquaintances from the Kingston area, while I remember being in workshops and readings thirty-some years ago with Joseph Farina. Joanne Arnott was at the University of Windsor with me, and from the same period I remember several other contributors. The memories and images drift backward and forward through the mists in my mind and I am drawn inexorably back into this literary world in which I had lived so long ago.

To have had these two poems published is more than just publication. It’s a wonderful time machine that carries me through my life less like a slide show than a kaleidoscope of people and images. How wonderful is that!

Looking again at the list of contributors in this edition, I see even more names familiar to me, and I am honoured to have been included among such a stellar group of writers. In the list are included John B. Lee, Joanne Arnott, Heather Cadsby, R.D. Roy, Kim Grove, Joseph A. Farina, Penn Kemp, Kate Marshall Flaherty, and Susan McMaster–with all of whom I have a personal connection through conversation, correspondence, or by performing on the same stage before or since that issue was published. I’m also familiar with most of the other contributors listed and respect their work, though I may not have met them. What lovely memories this flashback brings.

My poems published in that Special Home Issue were “To a Fence Post” (page 81) and “The Dark Shimmering Deep” (page 101).

If you’d like to browse the entire Spring 2008 issue, it’s available online. Just follow this link: The Windsor Review, the Special Home Issue, Vol. 41 No. 1

The new book footsteps in the garden, new and selected poetry by Bob MacKenzie is now available from the publisher, Cyberwit.net, or at Amazon worldwide.

Ask your local bookstore or public library to order this book for you.