Ellen Tallman

Ellen Tallman (née King; 1927-2008) was born in Berkeley, California, and passed away in Vancouver, British Columbia. Together with her then husband, Warren Tallman, Ellen Tallman played a pivotal community-making role in the Vancouver and larger west coast literary scene, hosting writers and students at their home, and helping to generate a creative ethos that led to the organization of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference—the significance of this conference cannot be overstated as it introduced the U.S. and Canadian west coast scenes to one another, and impacted overlapping generations of literary practitioners. In The Globe & Mail’s obituary of 30 August 2008, Noreen Shanahan writes that “[t]he West Coast poetry movement in Canada owes its life to Ellen Tallman.” While Tallman initially worked as a professor of literature at the University of British Columbia, she later shifted careers, retraining and running a private psychotherapy practice for over three decades. She came out as queer, and lived openly as a feminist and lesbian role model.