Thank you for coming to the 16th annual James Reaney Memorial Lecture celebrating poet Colleen Thibaudeau’s ‘Big Sea’ Vision this past Saturday November 29th. This year’s lecture is part of Colleening 2025, a year-long celebration of Colleen Thibaudeau’s centenary.

Thank you, Peggy Roffey, for leading us through a thoughtful exploration of Thibaudeau’s poetry. After getting us to reflect on someone dear to us and on what we associated with that person, Peggy said that we “… had all done a bit of Colleening. You’ve used memory and imagination to reach beyond time and space. You found an association, made a connection and had that associated detail there. You’ve also connected to somebody else in the room.”

“You’ve touched on the way Colleen wrote her poems; they are peopled, very peopled. Full of significant objects, places, experiences, but all attached to people. I actually counted the number of people that she named by name or role: five hundred. Five hundred people in just over two hundred poems….”

We would also like to thank London poets Patricia Black and Ola Nowosad who read Colleen Thibaudeau’s poems so beautifully. A video of Peggy Roffey’s lecture is available on the Words Festival YouTube channel.

Thanks also to Alannah Vanderburgh-Oakley and Dan Hamilton of the London Public Library for their coordination and assistance, and to Josh Lambier of Words Festival for his technical expertise.

Earlier Wordsfest lectures on James Reaney:

2016: John Beckwith on James Reaney and Music 
2017: Tom Smart on James Reaney: The Iconography of His Imagination 
2018: James Stewart Reaney on James Reaney’s Plays for Children
2019: Stan Dragland on James Reaney on the grid
2020: Stephen Holowitz and Oliver Whitehead on James Reaney Words and Music
2021: Kydra Ryan and Adam Corrigan-Holowitz on Tales for a Reaney Day: Two Great Writers, Three Short Stories
2022: Terry Griggs for Stan Dragland: James Reaney Off the Grid
2023: Katy Clark on The Beckwith Connection: An Afternoon of Big Hits from the Reaney and Beckwith Songbook
2024: Jeff Culbert in Conversation with Josh Lambier: Snapshots of Jamie

This year’s James Reaney Memorial Lecture celebrates the legacy of poet Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012), the late wife of poet and playwright James Crerar (Jamie) Reaney (1926-2008). Our grateful thanks to the London Public Library and Wordsfest for giving the lecture a new home and partnership.