MacEwan Press
Since the first days of our Bachelor of Applied Communications Degree in Professional Writing, we’ve hoped for a way to showcase the work of our students and faculty. We knew we had exciting writers and skilled editors, and we also knew that we had the creative resources of a progressive Design Studies program. And when all of these talents were brought together in the School of Communications, the opportunities for publishing seemed tantalizingly close. And so we began.

In the last two years we’ve started publishing work under the name MacEwan Press, first with magazines such as Pop City and now with our first book-length work, Blood Opera.

A Collaboration of Teaching Minds
Experience Blood Opera: The Raven Tango Poems

The School of Communications is proud to announce our first published collaboration by two faculty members, an innovative book of photo-illustrated poetry.

Jannie Edwards, an instructor in both the English and Professional Writing programs along with Paul Saturley, an instructor in the Design and Photography major, Design Studies program, have collaborated to bring this book to fruition. Blood Opera: The Raven Tango Poems is Jannie’s second book of poetry. Both MacEwan faculty members have developed a beautiful mesh of illustration combined with the power of words to create poetic justice.

Jannie states, “In this book you will find various tangos: the intense dances of intimacy; the dances of individuals and their angels and demons: desire, ideology, ambition; and interspersed you’ll read Raven’s laconic one-liners on the mysteries of human existence.”

In 2001, while attending the five-week writing studio at the Banff Centre, Jannie Edwards was working on a manuscript of poems that used the tango as a central metaphor. She had always been fascinated by the tango, due to her mother sharing stories of dancing the tango with her father in France in the late 1930s. Jannie was researching the history of the Argentine tango, which was born in the late 1800s in Buenos Aires in a unique confluence of events, and became fascinated by the way in which the tango combines elements of the old and the new worlds.

Jannie also states, “As I was researching, I kept glancing out my window, distracted by the aerial machismo of the ravens. Somehow, the old trickster insisted himself into my tango poems. These poems are yet another confluence that the tango seems to invite: this time a confluence of North and South, and a confluence of the ancient mythology of the Raven and the passionate, sometimes dangerous mythology of the Argentine tango.”

Blood Opera: The Raven Tango Poems is now on sale in person or online at all MacEwan bookstores. The book can also be purchased in person at Tix on the Square, 9930-102 Avenue; Greenwoods' BOOKSHOPPE, 7925 - 104 Street; Chapters, 9952-170 Street; and Chapters located at West Edmonton Mall.

Three programs are currently housed in the School of Communications, and each has its own website where you can find more detailed information:

Bachelor of Applied Communications in Professional Writing

Journalism

Design Studies