Marilyn Lerch

Marilyn Lerch (born May 26, 1936) is a Canadian poet, teacher, journalist and activist. She is the author of five collections of poetry that explore the rough edges of love and betrayal, healing and hurt. Her poems combine keen observations of nature's beauty with sharp, and sometimes despairing, commentary on its destruction. In the words of one reviewer, her poetry "often unites the green universe of the garden with the red-and-black world of politics and war." Her work also probes, sometimes with mordant humour, the accelerating effects of technologies propelling humanity toward planetary catastrophe. "I began to have an image of myself as a poet who was standing in a very indefinite, immense space, and I'm pointing at things that I think we need to pay attention to," Lerch told an interviewer in 2014 after publishing her fourth book of poetry.

In 2022, Lerch published Disharmonies, a poetic conversation with Geordie Miller in which the two poets condemn capitalism as a system organized around plunder and profit and instead imagine a world that is dedicated to satisfying human needs.

From 2006 to 2010, Lerch served as the President of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick and from 2014 to 2018, as poet laureate for the Town of Sackville, New Brunswick where she lives.

Several of Lerch's poems have been set to music. She collaborated with Canadian composer Lloyd Burritt on the song cycles "We Move Homeward" and "Moon Loves Its Light," first performed in 2011 at Songfire, a music festival sponsored by the Vancouver International Song Institute. Burritt also set her poetry to music in his works "Triptych Three Songs on Three Abstract Paintings" and "Quintessence." Canadian soprano Allison Angelo recorded four Burritt/Lerch songs in her 2015 debut album Moon Loves Its Light. Nicholas Piper's choral composition "The Trees on the Edge," commissioned by the Ottawa Bach Choir, took Lerch's poem "New Orleans Obliquely" as its text. Alasdair MacLean used Lerch's poem "We Move Homeward" in his choral and orchestral composition of the same name, first performed in Halifax, Nova Scotia on March 7, 2000.

Career
Marilyn Lerch was born in East Chicago, Indiana, which she has described as "a little industrial town snug up against the Illinois border." After graduating from Indiana University, she taught high school English in Gary, Indiana before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1967 where she continued her teaching career while also working with activist groups opposed to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Lerch dropped out of teaching for almost two years to work full time organizing demonstrations against the war.

In 1992, she earned a master's degree in holistic education from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Her thesis was based on a year she spent teaching English to about a dozen, mainly African-American, Grade 11 students in a poverty-stricken and violence-prone neighbourhood in Washington, D.C. Lerch developed an integrative learning model designed, in part, to lead her students to become aware of the forces and relationships shaping their lives; develop trust in themselves; regain the joy of learning and learn to express kindness toward themselves and others. A key part of the method involved a Council or talking circle adapted from Indigenous American custom in which students would speak as they held a talking stick that was passed clockwise around the circle. At the end of the school year, Lerch judged the integrative model an overall success based on student academic performance in reading, writing and communications skills; student evaluations of the class; her own assessment and administrators' interviews with students.

After retiring from teaching, Lerch moved, in 1996, to Sackville, New Brunswick, a small town she had visited during summer vacations. She began writing poetry and became active in movements for peace and social justice. She also campaigned against the extraction of shale gas and supported measures to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Lerch has also been an active member of PFLAG Canada, an organization that supports the rights of members of the LGBTQ community.

In addition to her activism, she taught creative writing at Westmorland, Springhill, and Dorchester prisons as well as the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, Nova Scotia. She served four-year terms as President of the New Brunswick Writers' Federation (2006-2010) and as poet laureate for the town of Sackville (2014-2018). As poet laureate, Lerch wrote poetry for commemorative events, organized readings by local poets, sponsored literary contests and in her own words, inspired "young and old to love what only poetry can do."

Lerch also formed the Sackville Writers' Group and Roving Poets. In 2007, she took part in a national campaign funded by the Canada Council for the Arts called "Random Acts of Poetry" in which she dropped by classrooms, offices, the local hospital and theatre to recite from her work.

Poetry
Marilyn Lerch has published five collections of poetry (2001-2018).

Literacy project
In 2007, while Marilyn Lerch was serving as President of the Writers Federation of New Brunswick, she was asked to help promote literacy in New Brunswick, a province with one of the lowest literacy rates in Canada. She recruited members of the Federation to interview 17 adult learners, from ages 19 to 71, and tell the stories of how they struggled to overcome their problems with reading, writing and basic math skills. The project resulted in the 2009 book Breaking the Word Barrier: Stories of Adults Learning to Read that Lerch co-edited with Angela Ranson.

Lerch said she hoped the book would overcome the stigma suffered by people with low literacy skills. "All who participated hope that it will encourage thousands of adults to seize opportunities readily available and will draw the public's attention to the serious literacy deficit in New Brunswick," she told a newspaper interviewer. The book lists several literacy programs and services in New Brunswick and across Canada.