Surprise, surprise...

Got a surprise in the mail the other day: The British Columbia Ministry of Education wants to use a poem of mine called Emblem, published in Prairie Fire Spring 2006, for their Grade 12 province-wide exam. Of course I granted their request. They asked me also for my fee and conditions. Discretion makes me feel disinclined to blab about it here, but let's just say it's a generous yet, as far as I can determine, a reasonable amount. More important, of course, is the honour and exposure: a whole generation of BC high school graduates could come to love -- or loathe -- poetry because of me. (Well, at least partly.) It'll be used up to three times over the next five years, and then available for students and teachers as a sample exam on the Ministry website over the following seven years.