by VINCENT TINGUELY

Mia Rose Brooks began appearing in spoken word venues a couple of years ago, a somewhat introspective-seeming figure spinning gently-paced yarns, usually supported by Stefan Christoff’s ambient guitar work. The writing started back when she was a kid, growing up in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. “Writing was what I liked to do,” Brooks reminisces. “Other than swimming or playing in trees or getting dirty, getting naked. I was definitely writing by the age of five.”

Brooks is struck by the similarities and differences between life in Montreal and life in the country. “The city is always there, there’s always a mass population around you,” Brooks muses. “It doesn’t seem like it’s encroaching on you - whereas in rural B.C., suburbia is always encroaching.”

While her childhood might have something to do with her poetry’s unhurried delivery, Brooks only discovered this rural voice when she began writing specifically for performance in Montreal. “I started to get back to the way my family particularly speaks,” she explains. “Which is uneducated, below high school education, with a lot of slang - the way most folks speak, which I’d lost over the years of getting schooling. Starting to write, I could hear my mother’s voice and my father’s voice in the back of my head. When I started to do that, I started to perform.”

That voice led to a slot in last February’s Voices of the Americas festival, a grant from the Canada Council to record a CD and a deal with Wired on Words and Cumulus Press. The result is throw the captain overboard!, a book and CD featuring drawings and poetry by Brooks, and eight of her pieces accompanied by Christoff, Anni Lawrence on cello and Peter Burton on stand-up bass. Brooks will be launching the book, with musicians and all, on Feb. 2 at Casa del Popolo (4873 St-Laurent). :