Ashleigh Weedon opens Festival Gallery's Poetry in the Gallery season
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
At the Blyth Centre for the Arts on Saturday, rural futurist and writer Ashleigh Weedon ushered in the third season of Poetry in the Gallery with a powerful reading that ran the full gamut of human emotion, from the simple joy of recognizing a place to the rawness of fresh grief, in just under an hour. Every poem felt like it existed as a world unto itself, inviting the audience to enter and reflect on the specific time, place and person who created it.
Before she began, Weedon admitted she was a little bit outside her wheelhouse. “This is a little bit outside of my normal work,” she explained. “I do a lot of speaking and teaching, but I don’t think I have ever done a poetry reading that’s specifically just my poetry.” Although Saturday’s reading was her first time formally participating in Blyth’s premier annual celebration of rural poetry, it was technically her second time performing poetry in the building - attendees of last year’s Rural Talks to Rural (R2R) conference in Memorial Hall may remember the original poem that Weedon included in her brutally honest keynote speech (a highlight of the event).
Although Weedon is far more soft spoken as a poet than she is as a professional rabble rouser, her words on Saturday carried a quiet authority that cut through the cacophony of a corralled Blyth Festival audience, enduring a rain-related change of venue, gradually gathering in the lobby outside the gallery. The noisy anticipation of theatre-goers anxious to experience the indoor edition of Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land could have felt disruptive, but Weedon incorporated the loud interlopers into the reading, just another element in an intriguing blend of rustic awareness and speculative vision grounded in the familiar texture of rural Ontario. She shared memories of summers in Southampton, the land reimagined to reflect the living archive of her memories, alluding always to the external pressure looming just beyond the pastoral.
Her engagement with the gallery space itself strengthened the evening’s immersive quality. Currently, the white walls of the Bainton Gallery are all ablaze with the bold and colourful work that comprises “The Rural Queer Agenda” group show. The striking visual arts and Weedon’s soft spoken word intertwined into a multi-sensory story experience - striking in the sheer variety of shared experiences. “For me, stories are the threads that tie us together,” Weedon mused. “They are actually the universal form of human cognition - we’ve used stories to communicate and learn and share before we even had language - we used pictures, music and pantomime to share important lessons and entertain each other, long before anyone ever scratched out an alphabet.”
For residents of Blyth and beyond, Weedon’s work is a lovely reminder that rural life can be as much about poetry as it is about plowing.
Poetry in the Gallery will occur twice more this summer. On August 9, writer, teacher, environmentalist and East Wawanosh native Tom Cull will share a selection of his poetry in the Bainton Gallery. Cull teaches creative writing at Western University, and once reigned as the Poet Laureate of London, Ontario. He is the author of two poetry collections, and his writing has appeared in various forms of tangible media over the years.
On Sept. 6, man-about-town Mark Hertzberger will be closing out the 2025 edition of Poetry in the Gallery by putting the best words in the best order. Hertzberger is a decorated veteran of The League of Canadian Poets, the Huron Poetry Collective, and other such bands of wandering bards. His first book, Fog and Mirrors, was published in 2019, and his latest book, Crow’s Foot came out in 2024.