If, in a delirious fit of anthropocentrism, we were to attribute to Heslop (b.1992), as if 'he' were the author of anything, a decade of organizing open mics in 'his' hometown and the appearance of a first book of poems, the correct fury of your why is a mountain (Gordon Hill Press, 2021), we might add that he curated social documentary-photographer Derek Boswell installations six feet | between us (McIntosh Gallery, 2022) and in medias res (Westland Gallery, 2023); founded an indie film company, Astoria Pictures; edited a tetra-lingual (ASL/LSQ/FR/EN) anthology, featuring work of Paola Ferrante, Brandon Wint, Shane Neilson, Arleen Paré, Catriona Wright, and eight more leading 'Canadian' poets; directed and produced that anthology's internationally award-winning adaptation to the screen; wrote a handful of art criticism for Centred Magazine; and left Canada for successive artist residencies in Serbia, Finland, France, Brazil, Denmark, and Japan.
Along the way, he published in-depth dialogues with artists—Karen Houle, John Nyman, Camille Intson, David Pisani, Ben Robinson, Arleen Paré, Marcelo Guimarães Lima, Tara McGowan-Ross, Nina Dunic, Sarah Burgoyne, Guta Galli, Simon Watson, Roxanna Bennett, Jeremy Luke Hill, Michelle Wilson, Khashayar Mohammadi, John Wall Barger, Tina Do, David White, Lily Wang, Terese Mason Pierre, Sam Wilde, James Nowak, Nina Dunic, David Drummond and more to come—via The Devil's Artisan, The Miramichi Reader, The Seaboard Review, The /tƐmz/ Review, and Parrot Art, forthcoming in two volumes as Craft, Consciousness: Dialogues about the Arts (Guernica Editions, 2027 & '28).
Together with collaborative work soon or recently appearing with The Fiddlehead, Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice, Baseline Press, Rose Garden Press, The Canadian Repair Convention, The Miramichi Reader, Parrot Art, The Alcuin Society, The Seaboard Review, and The American Haiku Society, Heslop's next book will be The Writing on the Wind's Wall: Dialogues about 'Medical Assistance in Dying' (The Porcupine's Quill, 2025).
An autodidactic, pantheistic animist of lay-Buddhist practice born Canadian to Celtic and Danish ancestry currently writing 'his' debut feature film from São Paulo, Brazil while in residency with Teatro Oficina, Heslop continues to serve his community from abroad through his eighth year with the Board of Directors at Changing Ways, a gender-based violence-disrupting non-profit currently accepting donations here.