Writing 2520A: Write Now! - Writers on Writing

Learn about writing from writers

Interested in creative writing, in learning about different genres and styles of writing, and in getting insights into the business and craft of writing from working writers? Consider taking .

Write Now! is organized around a series of lectures by writers. Every week, a new writer visits the class to read from their work, talk about their writing and their career, and answer questions. The writers booked for this year include novelists, poets, playwrights, podcasters, graphic novelists, comic book writers, young adult authors, etc. Lectures cover topics such as inspiration, overcoming creative blocks, revision, publishing and literary citizenship.

This course offers students a unique opportunity to learn from a wide variety of writers about the craft of writing and the creative life while improving their own writing.

2024 Creative Writers Speaker Series
Wednesdays | 4:00 pm | UCC, Room 56

Guest lectures are open to all students, staff and faculty.

Presented by Writing 2520A, the Department of English and Writing Studies & the Creative Writers Speaker Series at 澳门六合彩开奖预测, everyone is invited to hear some of Canada’s best established and emerging writers read from their work and talk about their craft. 

September 11: Cody Caetano

Cody Caetano is a writer. His debut memoir, Half-Bads in White Regalia, came out through Penguin Canada’s Hamish Hamilton imprint and was a national bestseller. It won the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award for Best Published Prose, made the shortlist for the 2023 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and made the longlist for the 2023 Toronto Book Award, the 2023 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and Canada Reads 2023.

September 18: Katherina Vermette

katherena vermette (she/her/hers) is a Michif (Red River Métis) writer from Treaty 1 territory, the heart of the Métis Nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. In 2013, her first book, North End Love Songs (Muses’ Company) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Since then, her work has garnered awards and critical accolades across genres. Her novels The Break (House of Anansi) and The Strangers and The Circle (Hamish Hamilton) were all national best sellers and won multiple literary awards. Her fourth novel, real ones (Hamish Hamilton) will be released in fall 2024. katherena lives with her kids – fur and human - in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.

September 25: PLEASE JOIN US IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 3110 (CONRON HALL)

Saeed Teebi (writer-in-residence)

Saeed Teebi is a writer and lawyer based in Toronto. His debut collection of short stories, Her First Palestinian, published in 2022, was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award. His short story "Her First Palestinian" was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Award. His next book will be a work of personal non-fiction titled You Will Not Kill Our Imagination. He is also working on a novel.

Jules Lee (student writer-in-residence)

Jules Lee is a writer from rural Ontario with a passion for short fiction and prose poetry. She is pursuing an Honours Specialization in English Language and Literature along with a minor in Environmental Geography. Her work explores the unreliability of memory, transience, and the interconnections of everyday life. She is the creative director of ICONOCLAST Collective. Some of her works have appeared in Symposium, SNAPS, and Huron’s Grubstreet. When she’s not reading or writing, Jules enjoys making specialty coffees, discovering new music, and taking photos with her 35mm camera.

October 2: Marta Balcewicz

Marta Balcewicz is a Toronto-based writer and the author of Big Shadow (Book*hug Press). Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Catapult, Hazlitt, Tin House online, PRISM international, and the anthology Tiny Crimes (Catapult), amongst other places. She was named a Tin House Scholar in 2022 and is at work on her second novel.

October 9: Terri Favro

Terri Favro’s writing is inspired by a lifelong obsession with science fiction, comic books, robots, steampunk and Greek and Roman myths. Terri is the author of four novels, including “The Sisters Sputnik” (2022, ECW) and “Sputnik’s Children” (2017, ECW), a Globe & Mail 100 Book, a Quill & Quire recommended book, a CBC Books Top 10 Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Sunburst Prize for Excellence in Canada Literature of the Fantastic and longlisted for CBC Canada Reads. She is also the author of the popular science book, “Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact, and Speculation" (Skyhorse, 2018, revised 2020) and co-creator with Ron Edding of a series of comic books, most recently a true-crime graphic novel, “Cold City” (Coxwell Station Comics). A finalist for the CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction, Terri’s essays and short fiction have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Clockwork Canada Steampunk Fiction, On Spec, The Quarantine Review, Prism, Broken Pencil, Grain, Room, Humber Literary Review, Hamilton Review of Books, Riddle Fence, Untethered and Voices from the FOLD, the publication of the Festival of Literary Diversity. In 2025, her horror story, Rubber Road, will be published in “Devouring Tomorrow”, a cli-fi anthology from Dundurn Press. Raised in the Niagara region, Terri now lives in Toronto and blogs at terrifavro.ca.

October 23:

Luke Hathaway

Luke Hathaway is a poet, librettist/lyricist, and performer, who collaborates with artists and ensembles near and far in the work of collective storytelling, bringing mythopoeic word-worlds to page, screen, and stage. He is particularly passionate about telling the trans and queer stories that are close to his heart. Recent projects of note include Caeneus, a new work of music theatre (with James Rolfe, composer, and ANIMA); Eurydice Fragments, an XR opera (with re:naissance opera, Vancouver), and The Sign of Jonas (with Arkora, Toronto).

Luke teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, and mentors emerging lyricists through the Amadeus Choir’s Choral Creation Lab. With Daniel Cabena, he directs ANIMA, an ad hoc collective devoted to the (re)queering of early European textual and musical sources.

His work has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Arts Centre Creation Fund, and has been recognized by Arc Poetry Magazine (Confederation Poets’ Prize and Critic’s Desk awards), the Hamilton Arts Awards, the NL Arts & Letters Awards, and the New York Festivals Radio Drama Awards; he has performed his work at venues and festivals across Canada.

Daniel Cabena

Daniel Cabena sings, plays, writes, and teaches. He is also a curator of texts and music; and with Luke Hathaway he shares the artistic direction of ANIMA Early Music. Together they program concerts, commission new works of text and music, and create new works for the ear and for the stage.

To his work of curation and creation, Daniel brings a background in early music and liturgical music scholarship; an interest in how music functions in different performance contexts and traditions; and a curiosity about the ‘why’ of music, as well as its ‘how’.

Daniel teaches singing and historically-inspired performance at the Laurier Academy of Music & Arts (LAMA), where he also leads the Community Consort, a multi-instrumental, multidisciplinary community of practice and inquiry.

Daniel’s music-making and teaching are informed by the Alexander Technique, in which field he is a teacher. He also makes music with his hands, playing modern and Baroque violin, as well as vièle, viola da gamba, and recorders.

Daniel holds an Honours Bachelor of Music from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Doctorate of Music from l’Université de Montréal. He is a past recipient of the Bernard Diamant and Virginia Parker Prizes from the Canada Council for the Arts, and he holds a Master in Specialized Early Music Performance from the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland.

October 30: David Huebert

A settler writer, educator, and critic from Kjipuktuk (Halifax), David Huebert’s fiction has won the CBC Short Story Prize, been a Journey Prize finalist, and twice been a National Magazine Award nominee. David’s latest book, , (Biblioasis 2021), won the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction and was nominated for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the ReLit Award, and the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature. His debut novel, Oil People, will be published by McClelland & Stewart in August 2024.

November 13: Jess Taylor

Jess Taylor is a writer and poet who works on the traditional lands of the the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat peoples and the Missaussagas of the Credit, in the city now called Toronto. Her second collection, Just Pervs, was released by Book*hug in Canada in September 2019. Recently, Just Pervs was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction. A short story from that collection, "Two Sex Addicts Fall in Love", was long-listed for The Journey Prize. The title story from her first collection, Pauls (Book*hug Press, 2015), "Paul," received the 2013 Gold Fiction National Magazine Award. Play is her first novel.

November 20: Moez Surani

Moez Surani's writing has been published internationally, including in Harper’s Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Best Canadian Poetry (2013 & 2014), and the Globe and Mail. He has received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, which supported research in India and East Africa, and he has been an artist-in-residence in Finland, Italy, Latvia, Myanmar, Switzerland, Taiwan, the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and at MacDowell in the United States. His visual and performance works have been shown in Toronto at Theatre Passe Muraille, Nuit Blanche, Videofag, Red Head Gallery, Gallery 44, and YYZ Artists' Outlet, and internationally at WhiteBox in New York, the Cross Gallery in Taipei, the New Zero Arts Space in Yangon, and Palazzolo Acreide’s city hall in Italy. He is the author of four poetry books: Reticent Bodies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2009), Floating Life (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012), Operations (Book*hug, 2016), which is comprised of the names of military operations, and reveals a globe-spanning inventory of the contemporary rhetoric of violence, and Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real (Book*hug, 2019). Most recently, he has been working on Heresies, a collaboration with Canadian artist Nina Leo, and a group of international perfumers, to produce a line of custom scents that operate as lyric poems and express diverse and suppressed subjectivities. Heresies was part of a winter 2018 exhibition (curated by Lisa Deanne Smith) at the Onsite Gallery in Toronto. In an investigation of mediation, image and contemporary politics, he is currently collaborating with Nina Leo on a collection of installation work, which includes Lullabies for a Waning Empire and Summa. His debut novel, The Legend of Baraffo, was published by Book*hug in 2023.

November 27: Rebecca Campbell

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer of weird speculative fiction. Her work has appeared widely in American, Canadian, and British magazines, and reprinted in  many anthologies that promise to collect the year’s best science fiction or fantasy; it’s also been translated into Japanese, Polish, and Czech. Her story, “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest,” won the Sunburst award for short fiction in 2020. In 2021, her novelette “An Important Failure” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In 2022 she published two novellas, The Talosite (Undertow Publications) and Arboreality (Stelliform Press). Arboreality was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and won the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

Contact

Dr. Aaron Schneider
aschnei4@uwo.ca