CURRENT PROGRAMMING

Here at IWC, we are dedicated to providing a place for artists from all backgrounds and skill levels to put their work out into the world. By offering this wide variety of artistic opportunities, we create a dynamic art market in the Okanagan Valley between emerging and visiting professional artists and the local community. IWC exposes Kelowna to a breadth of artistic expression otherwise inaccessible to our mid-sized city. Our core programming includes an Open Mic, a podcast, the IWC Public Reading Series, yoothspohk, and much, much more! See below for details. For a list of all our upcoming events, see our calendar.

Open Mic

The fulcrum of IWC’s programming, our Open Mic has been offered for over eleven years now at various venues across the Okanagan. Typically on the first Thursday of every month from September to April, the Open Mic has long been a safe haven and testing ground for the many incredibly talented poets, musicians, and artists we have living in and visiting Kelowna. 

Our Open Mics have happened at a variety of venues over the years, including most recently the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, and currently, BNA Burger (in the BNA tasting room). BNA Burger offers a minor-friendly environment, with both food and drink served during our events. The space is wheelchair accessible and offers single user, gender neutral washrooms.

Fireweed Eco-Fest

Fireweed Eco-Fest is an annual eco-arts festival welcoming writers, comedians, visual artists, musicians, and performers from the Okanagan Valley and across Canada for three days of high-calibre performance alongside socially conscious artistic creation in local, public parks.

Taking fireweed as a symbol of (re)growth in the wake of climate crisis, how might art act as a conduit through which communities come together to connect, learn, and create change locally? Channeling the energy and abundance of the fireweed in scorched regions, we hope that this generative art exchange at the end of fire season will create new ways of relating and caring for ourselves, our communities, and our environment.

Podcast

In this podcast, hosts Shimshon Obadia & Emmett MacMillen bring all the excitement of the written and spoken words of Inspired Word Café home to your headphones! Whether you’ve been to one of our reading events, poetry slams, or workshops before — or even if this is your first time hearing about Inspired Word Café — we’ve got a little something to scratch your writerly-readerly-literary itches! Every month, we’ll be bringing you a well caffeinated dose of poetry, prose, and all the fresh brewed goodness of the written word. Here, we’ll be shining our coffee house spotlight on local writers from in and around the Okanagan Valley. Plus, stay tuned for our special episodes of Inspired Word Café LIVE events which we’ll be dropping while they’re hot! To listen and subscribe, click here!

Public Reading Series

For the past 3 seasons, IWC has partnered with UBC Okanagan to present the IWC Public Reading Series. Local and visiting authors are invited to read their work. Paired with a short open mic and local authors reading their own work, the event ends with the host interviewing the authors and taking questions from the audience. This series helps to develop Kelowna’s literary community by allowing local, emerging poets to engage with and learn from visiting professional Canadian poets.

Team Slam Fundraiser

Inspired Word Café has brought the slam to the Okanagan! What is a poetry slam? A slam is a competition form of poetry that sees poets perform their work and compete against each other, typically in a tournament-style single-knockout competition judged by random people pulled from the audience. Originally created by Marc Smith in the bar scene in Chicago in the 1980s, the slam has grown into a worldwide phenomena, with slams now running from Amsterdam to Egypt, to, well, Kelowna! 

For the past 5 years, we have offered our own unique take on the poetry slam as both a monthly ‘open slam’ and as larger events, namely our annual Team Slam Fundraiser in the spring of our season. Each year is a different theme, and features poets from the IWC Collective and the Kelowna community. Though the slam is a competition, IWC works hard to create a supportive and inclusive atmosphere.

yoothspohk Mentorship Program

yoothspohk is a youth spoken word mentorship program which launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. This program began as a way to connect Kelowna youth during a disconnected time, and aims to do so through the arts by fostering skills and knowledge in contemporary performance poetry.

Each year, local poets, performers, writers, and Syilx storytellers will deliver workshops to students, youth, and community members across the Okanagan, culminating in the “yoothspohk Youth Showcase,” a final event which will give participants the opportunity to read their work to an audience of friends, family, and peers.

Since 2021, the program has engaged over 400 students, teachers, and local artists, and continues to grow each year. This program is sponsored generously by Valley First, a Division of First West Credit Union and funded through the Art Starts program.

IWZine

The IWZine is an ongoing program for Inspired Word Café, in which we endeavour to create a community driven zine, published and distributed for free each year. Zines are self-published booklets that are made through a process of cutting, pasting, gluing, and binding together various types of art (poems, images, QR codes, etc). They are made as a form of self expression and creativity beyond profit-based book making and printing. This is just another way for IWC to engage with our community and help to put creative work to the page for sharing!