Sabrina Benaim live at Urban Abbey in Thunder Bay, 18 April 2019

The Slumber Party Tour asked people to bring pillows. The invitation attached to Sabrina Benaim’s run through North America was to bring a blanket, get comfortable and settle in for poems about anxiety and depression, pitched as a sleepover where friends talk about their feelings. On Thursday 18 April 2019 it reached Thunder Bay.

The room was Urban Abbey, at 308 Red River Road. It is a community and worship space, not a bar or a club, and it stands on the same street as Crocks at NV, which operated at number 228. Tickets were C$20 in the promoter’s online shop.

The poet

Benaim was born in Toronto on 30 November 1987 and came up through the slam circuit there. She was on the 2014 Toronto Poetry Slam team that won the Canadian championship, and in 2015 she represented the city at the Women of the World Poetry Slam. Those are competitive credentials, and the training shows in a delivery that leans on rhythm and breath.

A slam poem runs to about three minutes and is judged by people picked from the room. It rewards a poet who can hold a crowd quickly, which is a useful skill when the crowd is sitting on the floor with a blanket.

What most people know is a video. Button Poetry posted Explaining My Depression to My Mother, a poem about trying to explain depression to a parent, and it spread far beyond the slam scene. The publisher’s site now puts it above five million views.

Her first book, Depression & Other Magic Tricks, followed from Button Poetry in 2017. It was a runner-up in the Goodreads Choice Awards for poetry that year, a category where the winners are picked by readers, not by a jury.

The work reaches beyond the stage. Benaim has written for ESPNW and for the Government of Canada, and she made her Canadian television debut with Sport Chek, in its #WhatItTakes series of Olympic manifesto videos. She also works as a teaching artist, running workshops as well as performing.

A show built for a floor of cushions

A slumber party, taken literally, is a seating plan. People sit low and close together, without the usual distance between a stage and the back of a bar. A spoken word show works best that way, since a poem read at the volume of a conversation needs quiet more than it needs a sound system.

Slam audiences have their own manners, too, snapping fingers in the middle of a poem instead of clapping over it, and a small room hears every snap.

That makes Urban Abbey a sensible choice, and that is a judgement about the fit, not a reason anyone gave. On 15 April, three days earlier, the same tour played The Exchange in Regina with the poet Clementine von Radics billed as special guest. Who shared the Thunder Bay bill is not stated.

Two ways to spend 18 April

The same date carried a second event in the city. An 80s Hair Metal Party with Steel Beaver and Ozbourne was listed for 18 April, and the two could hardly have been further apart in taste. One asked for quiet and attention. The other, a night of 1980s hair metal, asked for volume.

Easter Sunday fell on 21 April that year, so 18 April was the Thursday before Good Friday, a statutory holiday in Ontario. Later dates on the calendar were of a different kind: Dizzy Mystics brought a Soundgarden and Tool tribute on 26 April, and Chris Webby played Crocks at NV on 8 May.

The price

Across the fourteen priced shows of 2019 in the record, prices ran from C$10 to C$45, and Benaim’s ticket sat in the lower half. It cost less than half of the year’s top price, and double the year’s cheapest.

The other public events of the season are on the shows page. Benaim’s second book, I Love You, Call Me Back, arrived in 2021, well after the tour had gone home.