Tag: writing
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The Writing (and Reading) Life
Photo of the University of King’s College Arts and Administrative Building by Robert Alfers, used with permission under CC license. I’ve recently returned from an intense (exhausting, exhilarating) 10-day MFA residency in Creative Nonfiction. I spent my evenings and our one day off keeping up with my online students, who quite reasonably still needed timely…
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The Helplessness of Grief and the Trauma of Academia: Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct
As I was reading Adelmann’s campus novel, I was thinking about one of the most brilliant and personable labour organizers I’ve ever met, the late Miranda Merklein. I miss her. Like this novel’s protagonist, Merklein had realistic expectations of a middle-class life as a college teacher: not a cossetted existence, but decent health insurance and…
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Vancouver Crime Fiction’s Sense of Place and a May 21 Event
Several years ago, as I was starting a Creative Writing program at U of T, I took a crime fiction course with Vancouver writer Sam Wiebe; I’d taken a previous course on mystery writing with Gail Bowen. The two courses were completely different in delivery mode and approach, but both were terrific–and transformative. They made…
