LIONEL KEARNS is a Canadian writer, educator and, along with Gerri Sinclair, a "fairy godparent" to WiER. Lionel was the first writer in electronic residence in 1988!
Lionel worked on WiER as a pilot project at Riverdale Collegiate in Toronto, and Cariboo Hill Secondary in Burnaby. That first project, which Lionel dubbed "Electro-Poets," operated under the auspices of the Ontario Arts Council "Creative Artists in Schools" program. His expertise in the area of online education contributed greatly to WiER.
If you would like to know more about this, please refer to the references under "Resources For Teachers" on WiER's homepage. In particular, you may wish to refer to Lionel and Gerri's chapter "From Text to Multimedia: CMC in the 80s and 90s," or Trevor's chapter "Wired Writing: The Writers in Electronic Residence Program" in Computer Conferencing: The Last Word, which was edited by Robin Mason in 1992 (Victoria: Beach Holme.)
But now, to Lionel's writing...
Since the early sixties his poems, stories, and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, ed. by A.J.M.Smith (1967), The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, ed. by Ralph Gustafson (1967 and l983 eds.), and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, ed. by Margaret Atwood (1983).
Translations of his work have appeared in French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Rumanian and Bulgarian.
In 1986 he gave up his position as Associate Professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University to devote himself to his writing and his work as a consultant in educational technology. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at Concordia University in Montreal, and as Visiting Professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia. And, as a pioneer in online education, he taught an online computer-mediated graduate course entitled "The Cybernetics of Poetry" for ConnectEd, the on-line facility of the New School for Social Research, New York.
Lionel's major publications include
- Songs of Circumstance (Vancouver: Tish Press, 1963)
- Listen Georg (Montreal: Imago Press, 1965)
- Pointing (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967)
- By the Light of the Silvery McLune: Media Parables, Poems, Signs, Gestures, and Other Assaults on the Interface (Vancouver: Daylight Press, 1969)
- The Birth of God (cine-poem, 16mm., sound, 3 1/2 min.) with Gordon Payne, 1973
- About Time (Prince George: Caledonia Press, 1974)
- Negotiating a New Canadian Constitution (cine-poem, 16mm., sound, 3 1/2 min.), with Gordon Payne. (National Film Board of Canada, 1974)
- Practicing Up to be Human (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1978)
- Ignoring the Bomb: New and Selected Poems (Lantzville: Oolichan Press, 1982)
- Convergences (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984). To view the online version of Convergences, please visit www.lionelkearns.com/convergences/
Major critical studies of Lionel's work include:
- George Bowering. "Metaphysic in Time: The Poetry of Lionel Kearns", in A Way With Words. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1983, pp. 101-120.
- L. Moyse. "Dialoguing the Monologue of History and Lyric: Lionel Kearns' Convergences" in Open Letter (Summer 1989), pp. 15-27.
- G. Williams. "Reading Against Consumption: Metafiction in Lionel Kearns' Convergences" in Canadian Poetry (Spring, 1991) pp. 40-53.
- Manina Jones. "Log Entries for Lionel Kearns" in Beyond Tish. NewWest Press 1991. pp. 222-234.
