In the fall of 2020, I began co-authoring what would become a book-length poem, Disharmonies, with one of my mentors, Marilyn Lerch. The project evolved primarily out of emails that we sent back-and-forth over three months, and one socially distanced walk along the high dyke behind Sackville’s industrial park. My presentation will critically reflect on this predominantly digital process of collaboration and production across generations, as well as the transformation of these email-poems into a hand-sewn, letterpress book, published by Keagan Hawthorne of Hardscrabble Press. I will also explore how the poem’s overarching themes of political alienation and revolutionary hope were amplified via the form of the online reading, notably one in Australia and a performance as part of Infinite Variety, Sappyfest’s 26-hour homage to the telethon. Overall, my hybrid experiences creating and performing Disharmonies will allow me to trace convergences of modern and more traditional elements of literary production.

Geordie Miller is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Allison, with a specialization in Creative Writing. He has published two poetry collections: Re:union (Invisible, 2014) and Disharmonies (Hardscrabble Press, 2022). The latter book, co-authored with Marilyn Lerch, was one of the twenty “general selections” for the Frye Festival’s “I’m Buying an NB Book Day!” campaign in 2022. His writing on visual art and poetry has appeared in leading journals, such as Canadian Art and Canadian Poetry. He is a member of the Associate Editorial Board (Poetry) at The Dalhousie Review. In 2023, he co-founded an independent literary micropress—High Marsh Press—with a fellow poet, Keagan Hawthorne. One of the main goals of this press is to provide students of Mount Allison University direct work experience in the literary publishing sector through the administration of the annual Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest.