Spoke 'n' Word!

This Sunday, Almonte's Spoken Word Plot is being renamed the "Spoke" n' Word Plot in honour of Mississippi Mills Bike Month... and I'll be performing, along with my fellow Kymeras! We'll be doing a set of poetry and storytelling celebrating bikes. There's an open mike at 6:30, and then we're up after that. 

I think I have this blog to thank for this show, actually: Danielle Gregoire, the co-ordinator, contacted me saying something like "Hey, we're doing a bike-themed Spoken Word Plot and so naturally I thought of you!" I guess that's what you get for talking about biking all of the time.

And I suppose this is proof of what I've discovered since I started writing this blog: there's always something to say about bikes. If you're bike people, that is. People relate to their bikes. They anthropomorphize them. They use them as extensions of their personalities, their sense of style. They even, sometimes, name them. You come to realize, when you bike, that there is a culture out there, and I found that in my case, at least, you slip right into that culture and discover where you stand within it. You learn the ongoing conversations about infrastructure, city planning, bike lanes, helmets, traffic, tactics, gears, causes. It's hard not to become a bike activist when you bike: get clipped by a car, hit a nail in the bike lane, get trapped in a bad intersection, or read the comments left by ignorant people online, and you tend to develop some stronger opinions. And then you find yourself rubbernecking when a particularly nice machine goes by, and stopping total strangers to tell them how much you like their bike.

So yeah. There are poems and stories to be had out of biking! I'm really looking forward to the show.