Chapbook-Making Workshop with Kevin Spenst

While chapbooks can be crafted from handmade paper with fantastically ornate bindings and bells and whistles, they can also be made on the fly with whatever’s at hand. In this workshop at Enabling Arts, we’ll write some poetry (using two poems by May Swenson as models), and we’ll learn a few basic chapbook folds. 

In the process of transferring our newly generated poems into the chapbooks that we’ve made, we’ll consider the process of editing and what goes into crafting a poem. 

Touching upon the resources around us, we'll also consider the multitude of ways chapbooks can be made. In looking at a large sampling of different types of chapbooks from micro-presses across the country published in 2024, everyone will leave with not only their favourite looking chapbook, but also their very own handmade chapbook and poem. 

A poet, teacher, and reviewer, Kevin Spenst (he/him) has published four full-length poetry collections, most recently A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024) and 19 chapbooks, most recently Ghosted Under the Christmas Tree (above/ground press, 2025) and Windowful (Anstruther Press, 2025). He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is one of the poetry ambassadors for Vancouver’s 2025-2027 Poet Laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner. He is one of the Poetry Mentors at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory.

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