THE EXPERIENCE | “Water Connects”

Step inside a shifting waterscape, where a recorded voice ripples among projected surfaces. The theory of water having memory becomes an experiential metaphor: carrying stories, loss, and renewal across distance and time. More than a reading of poems, it is a journey: like entering a canoe of sound and light, where each body present is carried into the current.

Scrying (n.) — A form of divination using reflective or translucent surfaces—such as water, glass, or crystal—to glimpse hidden meanings or visions. In this work, scrying evokes the idea that water has memory, carrying and revealing stories across time.

Drawing from Joanna Streetly's recorded poems and scrying sessions with Tofino water, the studios walls transform into a flowing, luminous environment—at once intimate and vast.

Six years ago, Joanna's Streetly's two stepsons and their boat disappeared into the ocean on an eerily calm night, barely 200 feet from Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, BC.
Water Connects includes poems from her book All of Us Hidden, poems that inhabit Tla-o-qui-aht traditional territory, the remote summer whaling islet where Streetly lived for several years with her former partner and stepsons. In the aftermath of the boys' disappearance, she returns to the island to document how both she and the island might have changed. Streetly's poetry ripples out beyond location and loss, into a broader investigation of time's capricious shaping and re-shaping of children, parents, Earth and the self.

Explore the virtual chapbook Dear Island which includes audio poems, visuals and more at https://www.joannastreetly.com/chapbooks