As the Words Festival celebrations of Colleen Thibaudeau’s centenary end, London’s greatest poet receives a tribute to her words from a dear friend in poetry, Peggy Roffey. The fest’s 2025 James Reaney Memorial Lecture, in the spirit of metaphor, steps to the side and shows the “she” beside the “he”: Jamie’s wife, poet Colleen Thibaudeau (1925-2012).
The James Reaney Memorial Lecture 2025
Peggy Roffey: “Colleen Thibaudeau’s Big Sea Vision”
29 November 2025, 1PM
London Public Library (Lawson Room)
251 Dundas St, London, ON
Register here:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/peggy-roffey-colleen-thibaudeaus-big-sea-vision-tickets-1802841450309?aff=oddtdtcreator
Our event will be hybrid: you can join us onsite at the London Public Library or online via Zoom Webinar! Your registration here is good for either an online or onsite ticket. Tickets are free!
In a combination of photo images, presentation, and readings, Peggy Roffey and readers from London’s poetry community will explore Colleen’s unique voice, sensibility, and metaphor-making artistry at the LPL Central Library on November 29.
Colleen’s ‘Big Sea Vision’ helps us enter the very nature of metaphor, illuminating the connectedness of things, people, times and places, showing the as-yet unseen inside something else. Her big sea vision is all over her poems like fingerprints, a vision worth holding in a fragmenting world.
Words Festival’s Josh Lambier is back once again to helm the Lecture’s livestream.
It was Colleen Thibaudeau who delivered the first Reaney Memorial Lecture in 2010 at a grassroots event in Stratford. Since the Lecture was welcomed to London under the Words festival banner and with support from the London Public Library in 2016, performances of her poems and short stories have inspired several of its iterations.
The 2025 Lecture is the first one devoted to her words and life. It marks a peak ending to Colleening 2025, a year-long celebration of her centenary. Colleen Thibaudeau was born December 29, 1925, and Colleening 2025 events began on the Words YouTube channel to mark what would have been her 99th birthday.
This year’s lecturer 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.
The 2025 Lecture is the second at the LPL Central Library. The 2016-2023 Lectures were at Museum London. The annual Lecture’s organizers are Colleen and Jamie’s children Susan Reaney of Galiano Island, BC, & James Stewart Reaney of London. Susan Reaney helms the websites colleenthibaudeau.com & jamesreaney.com devoted to Colleen & Jamie’s literary legacies.
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