Le paradis n'est pas artificiel …

Hello, I'm Maureen Evans. Spezzato is my electronic notebook. I'm a writer, poet and anarchist from the Canadian Northwest, but I haven't been home for years.

I'm fairly obsessed with the study and practice of creative writing. My work is occasionally published by international English-language publications/publishers, such as Ferment Zine, Huffington Post, Ulster Tatler, Room Magazine, Fugue, Kearny Street Workshop, League of Canadian Poets, Grist Mill, and others. I earned my MA English (Hons) at Queen’s University of Belfast, and previously studied writing and anthropology at UBC, earning a BFA (Hons).

You might have arrived here via Twitter, which has turned out to be a fantastic laboratory for two of my creative experiments: over one thousand haiku as @maureen, and a collection of tweeted recipes as @cookbook.

The latter has been simultaneously my most successful and personally unexpected writing project. Eat Tweet: 1020 recipe gems from the twitter community's @cookbook" has been an exercise in comic relief, and a nice experience of being practically useful!

I attempt to make contributions to my communities and to larger society, and the search for how to do that is part of my writing. I like to enable more people to write also, for example, serving as Poet in Residence for a Canadian youth poetry forum, and transcriptionist of some oral history of Sudan for McSweeney's Press. Relatedly, I was an editing tutor on three teen-written books from 826 Valencia, a venerable non-profit writing center, and I'm soon to serve some similar function at the Ministry of Stories, as well.

I currently live in London with my love and travel accomplice, Blaine Cook. We ultimately plan to homestead in British Columbia, where I'd like to foster anarchism as both a writer and teacher.