Thank you for coming to the 16th annual James Reaney Memorial Lecture celebrating poet Colleen Thibaudeau’s ‘Big Sea’ Vision on Saturday November 29th. This year’s lecture is part of Colleening 2025, a year-long celebration of Colleen Thibaudeau’s centenary.

A video of Peggy Roffey’s lecture is available on the Words Festival YouTube channel.

Thank you, Peggy Roffey, for leading us through a thoughtful exploration of Thibaudeau’s poetry. After getting us to reflect on someone dear to us and on what we associated with that person, Peggy said that we “… had all done a bit of Colleening. You’ve used memory and imagination to reach beyond time and space. You found an association, made a connection and had that associated detail there. You’ve also connected to somebody else in the room.”

“You’ve touched on the way Colleen wrote her poems; they are peopled, very peopled. Full of significant objects, places, experiences, but all attached to people. I actually counted the number of people that she named by name or role: five hundred. Five hundred people in just over two hundred poems….”

We would also like to thank London poets Patricia Black and Ola Nowosad who read Colleen Thibaudeau’s poems so beautifully. And thanks also to Alannah Vanderburgh-Oakley and Dan Hamilton of the London Public Library for their coordination and assistance, and to Josh Lambier of Words Festival for his technical expertise.

About the presenter: Peggy Roffey is a Londoner who did her Master’s Thesis at UWO on Colleen’s poetry to 1975 and was a frequent reader alongside Colleen. Peggy has also had an interesting career in organizational culture and leadership development at St. Joseph’s Health Care London and at UWO (Western). She taught English Renaissance Literature and Canadian Literature at Western for the last 15 years of her career.

This year’s James Reaney Memorial Lecture celebrates the legacy of poet Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012), the late wife of poet and playwright James Crerar (Jamie) Reaney (1926-2008). Our grateful thanks to the London Public Library and Words Festival for giving the lecture a new home and partnership.