Sechelt Library: Arleen Paré Author Event

Award-winning poet Arleen Paré, from Victoria, presents a timely and emotional poetry collection—Encrypted is a tribute to family and youth in a time of complex anxiety and loneliness.

In September 2020, Arleen Paré’s almost twenty-year old grandson moved into the basement of her home to attend courses nearby. After suffering a bout of severe anxiety and depression, he was forced to drop out of his second-year computer science program after one month. In an effort to quell her own feelings of helplessness and growing anxiety about the situation, Paré turned to poetry.

In the words of Jane Munro, Paré assessed the age of anxiety with “anguished clarity”—social media, climate crisis, pandemic, addiction, inflation, depression. Both a tender tribute to a beloved grandson and an elegy for coming of age in our modern, online society, Encrypted is an honest and illuminating narrative of a life arrested and a home haunted by grief
Eventually, her grandson was able to return, little by little, to his studies. Paré’s grandson still lives with her today.

Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer with ten collections of poetry, one chapbook and one co-edited anthology. She’s been short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay BC Award, and has won the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Prize, the bp Nichol Chapbook Award, the American Golden Crown Award for Lesbian Poetry, twice, and a Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry. She lives with her wife, Chris Fox, in Victoria on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people.

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