With her characteristic fearlessness Catherine Owen examines what drives her to write and the influences that shape her writing. From her childhood memories in suburban Vancouver to her willingness to risk all for a glimpse of her muse, the essays in Catalysts allow readers unparalleled insight into Owen's creative life. A brilliantly honest collection, these essays should be read by every aspiring author.

Catherine Owen lives in New Westminster, BC. She is the author of ten collections of poetry, among them Designated Mourner (ECW, 2014), Trobairitz (Anvil Press 2012), Seeing Lessons (Wolsak & Wynn 2010) and Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009). Her poems are included in several recent anthologies such as Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC (Mothertongue Press, 2013) and This Place a Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone (Caitlin Press, 2014). Stories have appeared in Urban Graffiti, Memwear Magazine, Lit N Image (US) and Toronto Quarterly. Her collection of memoirs and essays is called Catalysts: Confrontations with the Muse (W & W, 2012). Frenzy won the Alberta Book Prize and other collections have been nominated for the BC Book Prize, ReLit, the CBC Prize, and the George Ryga Award. In 2015, Wolsak & Wynn published her compendium on the practices of writing called The Other 23 and a Half Hours or Everything You Wanted to Know That Your MFA Didn’t Teach You. She works in TV, plays metal bass and blogs at Marrow Reviews.

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"Catalysts abounds in inter-textual references that challenge us to abandon lingering perceptions of art as a pure or timeless aesthetic practice. What we have instead is a polyphonic 'mishmash' of 'language and rhythm,' a conversation rich in peculiarities." - Canadian Literature

"Best of all, Owen describes the essential tension between performance or spoken word poetry, and poems written for the printed page. Her advice to poets and performers in these distinct, but related genres, is the best I've ever heard." - Chronicle Herald

"Catalysts is a testament to a life immersed in poetic forms, a searching for truth through the prismatic (and often cruel) facets of circumstance and self." - Free Range Reading