For Möe Clark, it started with sound waves. On the verge of launching her debut spoken word CD, Circle of She: Story and Song, Clark was dazed and thrilled with the recording process. “At points, it was soul-wrenching,” she laughs. “I hadn’t seen the light of day in a week, and I felt like I was losing my voice. I didn’t know if I was just being a hypochondriac, but I had these epiphanies while I watched Lorrie [Matheson] do the mixing, zooming in and out on sound waves, these incredible little lines.”

Clark’s spoken word debut arrived unexpectedly during her stint as a design student at the Alberta College of Art and Design, when she tackled a visual project involving sound waves. “I went into the Polyjesters’ recording studio, wanting to record the sound waves of my typewriter, but they said, ‘Typewriter waves are just lines. Why don’t you read the stuff you’ve been writing out loud?’ It turned into a poem, and I played it for Sheri-D [Wilson], and she invited me to perform at her festival.”

At the second annual Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, Clark took the stage in Emerging Voices, a showcase of up-and-coming talent. From there, she leapt into a series of poetic performances, including International Women’s Day, Liberate the Voice and the Calgary Stroll of Poets. She eventually found a regular home at the Calgary Poetry Slam, where she won the prestigious CBC Poetry Face-Off and then sped off to Halifax to compete as part of the 2007 Calgary Slam Team.

This year, Clark is part of the Calgary festival’s headline event, Big Bang Poetry and Music, bringing her full circle from her 2005 festival debut. Ticket sales for the event have skyrocketed — fortunately, she’s no stranger to crowds. “Young Canadians gave me my balls!” she says. “Performing in front of, what, 15,000 people a night from the ages of 11 to 16? Totally crazy! My final year, I did a Shania Twain solo, singing ‘Rock This Country’ in my cowboy hat and boots.”

Clark performs at Big Bang Poetry and Music alongside fellow poets Genni Gunn, Clifton Joseph, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Sarah Murphy, accompanied by musicians Chris Dadge and Scott Munro, both of whom appear on her CD. The event takes place at the Arrata Opera Centre (1315 7 St. S.W.) on April 25, 8 p.m., $10 admission.

Shone Abet, one of Clark’s teammates on the 2007 Calgary Slam Team, is also showcased at this year’s festival, in a women-centred event called Story Circle/Woman Song. Her spoken word career began in Vancouver, when she first heard Alix Olson’s “Cute for a Girl.” “I was absolutely enamoured by the piece,” she remembers. “I memorized it instantly and walked around spouting it to myself everywhere — in the grocery store, Shoppers Drug Mart, ridiculous places.”

She soon moved to San Diego, where she saw Olson perform live. “They have a huge poetry slam scene there, so off I went to my very first slam in a little coffee shop,” says Abet. “It was über-competitve, high-energy and I loved it. I didn’t win, but I did OK, and after that I started writing feverishly.”

Upon moving to Calgary, Abet felt the loss of a booming slam scene. “I just assumed that Calgary didn’t have a spoken word community, so I started going down to open mics at the Ship and Anchor and performing poems like ‘Queer Girl,’” she says. “People didn’t know what to make of me, and I didn’t know what to make of the experience except that I had a compulsion to do it. Then I saw that the Calgary Poetry Slam was starting up, and things snowballed from there.”

Abet, one of the main organizers of this year’s Femme Fatale Carnivale and the subsequent production of The Vagina Monologues (which not-so-coincidentally featured Clark), enjoys the opportunity to perform in a women-focused environment. “In a shared space, when women express personal tragedy or sexual empowerment, there can be a backlash,” she says. “For every person who comes up to say, ‘You were speaking for me today,’ there are 10 people who are like, ‘Oh my God, I just can’t listen to this!’ A space created specifically for women — or men, for that matter — creates safety, encouragement and a soft place to land.”

Story Circle/Woman Song, featuring Abet, M.A.C. Farrant, Dale Lee Kwong, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Wendy Morton and Orunamamu, takes place in the Arrata Opera Centre on April 27, 11 a.m., $8 admission.