Canadian poet and fiction writer Barry Dempster died on November 27, 2025. Since then, I’ve wanted to say so much, but was held back by the usual writerly fears and intrusive thoughts. Who am I to speak? Others knew him better.

So much about him has already been said in online spaces. But here I am adding to it. Because I want to. Because today, January 17, is his birthday. Because you should know of his legacy. Because our friendship spanned decades and was filled with emails and visits between Alberta and Ontario – conversations about our lives, our writing, books and films we loved.

I first met Barry at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan in 2010. He was there to take part in a reading series at St. Peter’s College; I was there on a writing retreat. The day after his reading, I tipped unsalted peanuts into his palm as we walked down the windswept tree tunnel to the monk’s cemetery, and I laughed and took photos as he lured chickadees to his hand for the first time. We agreed this is how all the best literary friendships must begin.

This won’t be a eulogy. I’ll continue my grieving in private. But I want you, dear book lovers, to hear Barry Dempster. He was a gifted writer, a person full of generosity and curiosity and playfulness. A writer of intensity and darkness, and so much light and lushness of language. He wrote 18 books of poetry, three short story collections, two novels and a children’s book.

But this is not a review of his work or a summary of the prizes and accolades he received – there are many more qualified people out there who have already done this, and his website will tell you everything you need to know about where to find his books. And I hope you do find his books, if you haven’t already. Your life – maybe even your very heart – will be better for it. I’m here to share a few words – of his, of mine – from his books and from the hundreds of emails we sent each other over the years. I’m here to summon his voice and to celebrate his bright, rich, and joyous spirit.

Well, perhaps one review, of his short story collection, Tread (Tightrope Books, 2018). I was deeply honoured when Barry asked me to blurb it. The book broke my heart, and healed it again. Here’s what I said officially on the back cover:

“These marvellous stories by Barry Dempster are all about love – the striving for it, the rejection of it and the unexpected collisions with it. These characters find love difficult. They don’t know the language; the survival skills they were taught as children fail them as adults; they want love but only on their terms; they’ve never stopped to consider if they had terms. Dempster’s characters are often unskilled and seemingly hapless, sometimes funny, bursting with baggage and startling moments of awareness. Always, they are heartbreaking in their resiliency and in their push for joy. Dempster knows how to write about the human heart, flawed and hopeful as it is.”

More privately, a few snippets of our email conversation as I was reading the unpublished manuscript in preparation for writing the blurb (the short story is titled “Jeffers”):

LG: Barry, I’m out at the monastery … I’ll tell you about that another time. What I need to tell you right now is that I am completely shredded by the Duke and Jeffers story …. I couldn’t even scroll back up to check the title, I just had to move away from it and cry for a while.

It’s perfect and awful … I have to go feed the birds now and spend a little time at a slight remove from Duke and Jeffers so I can love them without feeling so wrecked … I think this means it’s a fucking amazing story.

BD: Dear Leslie,

You and I, Duke and Jeffers, drifting through the same story. I can’t begin to explain what a thrill it was to read about your reaction. Every line, every scene of “Jeffers” was a gift to me. Now, another gift, through them, from you … I pray that you’re feeling less shredded today, that the chickadees and nuthatches gave you healing as they swooped down into the treasure chest of your palm …
Thank you, dear friend.

Years later, Barry said in an email, “In my memory, [St. Peter’s is] a truly holy place, my having met you there, and to have felt the electricity of a chickadee landing on my fingers for the first time. I also fell in love with the graveyard. I sat out there on that blue Muskoka chair in the snow reading the tombstones.”

I also have a deep affection for that blue chair; I’ve photographed it hundreds of times over 25 years as it’s faded from bright to pale blue to a weathered grey. Barry and I shared a fascination with finding the holy in the commonplace, and I still feel his presence when I walk the monastery woods every year.

Another precious thing about Barry: he loved to be dazzled and dizzied; he looked for it and found it everywhere. In a chipmunk, in wearing a crown as he played dolls with his niece. In Barry’s world, bananas sighed hymns and peaches seduced each other “with soft false promises.” (“You’re the Last Thought,” Love Outlandish)

The Nanaimo bar has a motor at its core
which makes my tongue vibrate
long after the bite has been forgotten.
My teeth feel like pears that have just
been peeled. My uvula something rawer,
still clinging to a stem. What a glorious
way to get high. There are nights
when it seems okay to put anything
in my mouth, to be that intimate and hungry.

From Disturbing the Buddha, “Ten Thousand Repetitions /4”

Barry came to Red Deer one year when my husband Blaine and I lived there, to stay with us and do a reading at my favourite store, Sunworks (he wowed and charmed and delighted them all, and then we all stayed up late talking and drinking wine, the way writers do). And Blaine and I visited him and his wife Karen at their home in Holland Landing a number of times when we were in Ontario. (Karen: a wonderful woman, a painter, with a sharp intellect and a soft heart who made us brilliant salads and always made me laugh; she predeceased Barry and I mourn her loss, too). We all loved getting together in person, though because of the distance between our homes, the majority of our friendship took place over email, and through reading each other’s writing.

In 2020 Barry emailed me a poem that had been included in the Best Canadian Poetry Anthology in 2020 – this short excerpt, I think, captures the lushness of his imagination and language:

Even flukes dazzle: mushrooms
lined up on platters like
fascinators in a duchess’s closet; ferns
still learning how to chill; pine cones
hanging on by just one sticky drop.
We could praise Nature for days,
like statues gushing water
from their marble mouths.

(Excerpt from “From Cocks to Wings: Spring in Central Park’s Tavern on the Green”)

You know how sometimes you feel like a writer wrote something just for you? In a published interview Barry gave with his good friends and fellow writers Maureen Scott Harris and Maureen Hynes, Barry said this about family and becoming a writer:

“Everyone around me did things to such excess that I had no choice to but to ask myself, ‘What do I think here?’”

(All I Have is the Moment: An Interview with Barry Dempster, by Maureen Scott Harris and Maureen Hynes, 2020)

I’ve written this quote out on a sticky note and pasted it to my laptop. It makes me laugh every time I read it.

The last time Blaine and I saw Barry and Karen in person, in Holland Landing in 2018, he gave me a short Tarot reading. I didn’t know much about Tarot then, though I now have my own deck. On that day, as we talked about my writing, he drew the Death card and the Queen of Wands. His reading was perfect: at that moment for me, the Death card was a harbinger of change – signalling discomfort and pain, but bringing profound and positive change; the Queen of Wands was a reminder to fearlessly and joyously embrace the next stage of my writing journey. Not long after, the rogue editor at a publishing house who’d been stringing me along for two years ultimately rejected my short story collection, and off I went shopping for a new publisher – an exhausting, time-consuming task made brighter thanks to this timely reading and Barry’s ongoing encouragement and belief in me. (Not the Apocalypse I Was Hoping For eventually found its rightful, loving home with University of Calgary Press.)

In 2022, as his Parkinson’s disease continued to worsen and Karen was succumbing to early dementia, Barry emailed me:

I’ve pulled the devil twice in the last few weeks. What else can I do but buddy up with the guy, show him that I’m still capable of having a good time.

So here’s a tarot for you, I did my best to picture you and keep things fairly open to interpretation. The nine of wands popped up, meaning strength, stamina, and confidence. Not bad, eh? Your journey is near completion, but on this final stretch you’ll find yourself growing weary; doubt and fear are running through your mind. The nine of wands asks you to rally your confidence and realise how far you’ve come. Lift your eyes and take a few more steps … soon all your hard work will start to pay off.

This is what we do when we lose someone important: we find their words, and we listen for their voices, and we walk to the places we shared with them. Thus we keep them alive. Thankfully, Barry left an impressive body of work, rich with his spirit and talent, for family, friends, and readers to visit and revisit. And, for those of us lucky enough to be called friends, we have years’ worth of emails – and Tarot cards – we can pull up, when we want to laugh, to be reminded, to feel the comfort of that funny, loving voice.

Excerpt from “Heartbreak as a Bag of Prunes,” from Barry’s last book of poetry, Being Here: The Chemistry of Startle:

Who knows how my next life
will present itself –
a spurt of adrenalin
on a twisty Spanish mountain road,
a glisten of lemon in olive oil,
or that spring morning drench
of having wept everything
out of my system
but good, clean, hope.

In an email from 2013, Barry told me this:

The best way to deal with the bad stuff is simply to face it head-on. It doesn’t go away just because we try to ignore it. And it contains as much love and magic as the good stuff. It’s a wakeup call to something we wish we could just dream ourselves through, but it’s also an opportunity to live the moment and celebrate the preciousness of the whole story, beginning, middle and end.

Live the moment, dear book lovers. Celebrate the preciousness of the whole story.

Find Barry Dempster’s books and more information about his incredible legacy here.