In the Fall of 2018, the Small Walker Press invited poet Adam Dickinson and artist Lorène Bourgeois to walk through a former landfill (1976-2001), the Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site. Located on the Niagara Escarpment, overlooking the City of St. Catharines, Ontario, it functions today as a public recreation area.

Dance and musical improvisation are ephemeral expressions urging us to embrace the moment in thoughtful joy. Devon Fornelli’s improvisations documented here are two performances: his CitySounds, created on 18 September 2015 for the opening of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts in downtown St. Catharines, Ontario; and his Garden Performance, five years later, on 9 May 2020, offered as a reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic and the temporary lockdown of the MIWSFPA.

“Arc” by award-winning author Paul Savoie is a poem which captures the pensive impressions of a moment and is suffused with a quiet musicality. Savoie’s passion for and practice of music inform this long melancholy song. Mélanie Mesager, a French dancer and scholar in contemporary dance, selected a few passages (in bold in Savoie’s text) and,