I am not teaching in the fall of 2026. My next course offerings are in the Winter of 2027.
ENGL671/4/A Creative Writing: Prose Workshop: The Novella
Tuesday 12.00-14.15
In Italian the word novella means ‘new little thing.’ At somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 words a novella can seem like a very long short story, an extended poem or a marvellously condensed novel. We’ll look at the terms of the form through the work of James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Annie Dillard, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Denis Johnson, James Joyce, Claire Keegan, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Smart. The class will spend the first six weeks reading, discussing, and working out a plan for your project. The rest of the semester will be workshopping drafts.
ENGL429/4/A Creative Writing: Advanced Topics: Hybrid Forms
Thursday 14.45-17.30
Hybrid writing takes root in the cracks of genre, and it cannot be separated from the spaces we inhabit. “The forms of our institutional—educational, intellectual, monetary, conjugal, civic, judicial—increasingly are being determined by a political economy seeking total power to reproduce only itself” writes Lisa Robertson in “Notes on Form and Belief.” Maybe hybridity is another way of resisting that? This workshop is aimed at developing the practice of hybrid writing across genres. We will begin by discussing hybridity in the work of Billy Ray Belcourt, Annie Ernaux, Renee Gladman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jamaica Kincaid, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, and Ali Smith. There will be time in our schedule for three weeks of proposing and shaping projects followed by extensive workshopping of drafts.
Here are my Concordia University 2025-2026 Courses (in process!)
English 342 Advanced Prose (Full year)
In this full year advanced prose workshop students will spend the first six weeks working on writing assignments in class and on their own, while reading several stories and craft essays every week.
English 347 Creative Non-Fiction (Fall 2025 semester)
Students will work directly with a text book for the first six to eight weeks of this course, doing exerices, reading responses, and developing a creative non-fiction project. This is open to writers across genres who are interested in working within the framework of “non-fiction.” The final four to six weeks will be spent workshopping drafts of student projects. We will read together Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit, Deborah Levy, Christina Sharpe, Vivek Shraya, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Janet Malcolm, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry Tempest-Williams.
2024-2025 Courses
English 348 Advanced Poetry
Students of this advanced poetry workshop will be required to produce writing on a weekly basis. We will spend the bulk of our time reading and discussing student generated work, as well as–in the first half particularly–in class writing exercises. Students will develop tools for a sustainable creative practice, engage in writing experiments and learn to present our work in print and performance. The first semester will focus on experiments and creative play, how to access archives and use research material. The second semester will be spent working on an extended project. Poets will be required to attend literary events over the year. Reading list will include a course pack and authors including, but not limited to: Canisia Lubrin, Sue Goyette, Claudia Rankine, Franny Choi, CA Conrad, Dionne Brand, George Abraham, Iman Mersal, Terrance Hayes, Wanda Coleman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Diane Seuss as well as The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and several literary journals including The Capilano Review, The Malahat Review, The London Review of Books.
English 672 Graduate Prose Workshop
Tuesdays 13:15-15:30
While grounding ourselves in a range of aesthetics and approaches to contemporary prose, we will focus our discussion on identifying, illuminating and amplifying the most original and vibrant aspects of each other’s writing. Students will develop strategies for generating content, as well as thinking through constraints and forms, building scenes, working with characters, questions of authorial voice and style, creating the grand vision.
This is primarily a workshop for student work, and the focus will be on creating a body of work that is presentable and publishable. However, since literature is multi-faceted and contains many ways of engaging and responding, I will expect each of you to do a 10-minute presentation each semester. The fall semester will focus on texts about writing: either on craft, or creativity. Your presentation should provide an engaging account of the most intriguing or persuasive aspects of the text while offering fellow students an overview of the text. In the winter your presentation will be on a novel or collection of stories. Aside from these presentations, students will prepare a brief (3 to 5 minute) introduction to one student submission each semester.
Because of time, we must limit the submissions to 10-12 pages.
GRADING:
Class Participation: 40%
Presentations: 10%
Portfolio: 50%
RECOMMENDED & For General Discussion, a list in progress.
Most of these titles are available through course reserves!
Brand, Dionne Theory, Penguin Randomhouse 2018
Belcourt, Billy-Ray, A Minor Chorus 2021
Bennet, Claire-Louise, Pond
Burroway, Writing Fiction
Cusk, Rachel, Outline,
Davis, Lydia, Collected Stories
Dillon, Brian, Suppose a Sentence
Dillon, Brian, Essaysism: On Form Feeling & non-Fiction
Fish, Stanley, Suppose a Sentence
Gallant, Mavis, Montreal Stories
Gilbert, Elizabeth, Big Magic
Gladman, Renee, Houses of Ravicka, Dorothy 2015
Gladman, Renee, My Lesbian Novel, Dorothy 2024
Goldberg, Nathalie, Writing Down the Bones
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, M Archive, Duke 2018
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, 2022 (Visiting Concordia November 11, 2024)
Hong, Cathy Park, Minor Feelings
Ives, Lucy, Life is Everywhere
Kincaid, Jamaica, Annie John
Kincaid, Jamaica, My Brother
Lamott, Ann, Bird by Bird
Leguin, Ursula, Steering the Craft
Lerner, Ben Leaving the Atocha Station, Granta 2013
Lubrin Canisia, Code Noir, Randomhouse 2024
McCarthy, Tom, Remainder
Patchett, Ann, These Precious Days, 2021
Pressfield, Steven The War of Art
Questlove, Creative Quest
Robinson, Eden, Monkey Beach, 2001
Robinson, Eden, Trickster Drift, 2018
Robinson, Eden, Son of a Trickster, 2020
Tharp, Twyla The Creative Habit
Salessess Matthew, Craft In the Real World
Smith, Ali, Companion Piece, 2023
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929