Bob Wakulich received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in 1999. He also holds a BFA in Writing with a Film Studies Minor from the University of Victoria (1996), a BA in Sociology from Lakehead University (1977), and he attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Summer Writing Workshop in 1979 and 1980. His short stories, poems, and commentaries have appeared in a number of journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies in Canada, the US, and Europe, as well as on CBC Radio and in cyberspace. He currently lives in Cranbrook, British Columbia.
Keri Korteling is a writer, editor and teacher with an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her work appears in Red Rock Review 38. She lives with her family in Vancouver, B.C.
A prolific writer, Aaron Bushkowsky is a Vancouver-based playwright, film-writer, poet, novelist, and educator. His plays have been produced across Canada, the US, and Europe, and have received 9 Jessie Richardson Theatre nominations, more than any other Canadian playwright, winning two for Outstanding Original Play. He has been a resident playwright at The Vancouver Playhouse, Rumble Theatre, and Touchstone Theatre. Aaron has written over 20 plays and received almost as many professional productions across Canada, the US, and Europe. Aaron also spent a year at the Tarragon Theatre playwrights unit in Toronto and is a graduate of the prestigious Canadian Film Centre in film-writing. His film-scripts have received many options and he is currently working to complete The Ancients, a feature about down-on-their luck university Greek Literature professors and their stunningly beautiful daughters who get them into trouble. Aaron’s short film The Alley was nominated for five Leo awards and won the National Screen Institute’s Drama Prize. Aaron teaches writing at Vancouver’s highly regarded theatre school Studio 58, and at Kwantlen University, Langara College, and Vancouver Film School. He has several published works, including two books of poetry Mars is for Poems (Oolichan Books) and Ed and mabel go to the moon (Oolichan Books) which was nominated for a BC Book Award for Poetry. His published drama includes Strangers Among Us, The Waterhead and other plays, My Chernobyl, all published by Playwrights Canada Press. His first book of fiction was a collection of short stories The Vanishing Man, published by Cormorant in 2005. Curtains for Roy, his first novel, was published in 2014. It’s a dark comedy about the Vancouver theatre world which garnered rave reviews from critics and made two Top Ten Book (2014) lists for Vancouver novels and subsequently nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award,Canada’s oldest literary award and only award for humour writing. Aaron received his MFA in Creative Writing from UBC in 2002. Aaron also heads Solo Collective Theatre, a professional Vancouver theatre company and has been an influential dramaturge, mentor, and teacher to hundreds of new West Coast writers and students. Aaron is represented in theatre by Marquis Entertainment, Toronto.
Ken McGoogan has survived shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, chased the ghost of Lady Franklin from England to Tasmania, and placed a memorial plaque in the Arctic overlooking Rae Strait. He is the author of a dozen books, among them four bestsellers about Arctic exploration: Fatal Passage, Ancient Mariner, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, and Race to the Polar Sea (all HarperCollins Canada). His awards include the Writer’s Trust of Canada Biography Prize, the Canadian Author’s Association History Award, the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography, and the Pierre Berton Award for History. Ken made a cameo appearance in the prize-winning docudrama based on his book Fatal Passage, and he also turns up in Franklin’s Lost Ships. For two decades, Ken worked as a journalist, moving from The Toronto Star to The Montreal Star and The Calgary Herald, where he served as books editor and literary columnist. His recent books include How the Scots Invented Canada, Celtic Lightning, and 50 Canadians Who Changed the World, and an ebook edition of his novel Kerouac’s Ghost. Ken has served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, and is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Explorer’s Club. He has worked as a writer-in-residence in Fredericton, Dawson City, and Hobart, Tasmania, and he teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Toronto (Continuing Studies) and in the MFA program at University of King’s College in Halifax. Ken sails in the Northwest Passage as a resource historian with Adventure Canada. In 2017, he will publish Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of Arctic Discovery.
Owen Laukkanen is the author of the bestselling Stevens and Windermere series of FBI thrillers, the fifth of which, The Watcher in the Wall, was published in 2016 to critical acclaim. He also publishes obnoxious YA fiction under the pseudonym “Owen Matthews.” A former commercial fisherman and poker journalist, Laukkanen lives in Vancouver with his girlfriend and his rescue pit bull, Lucy.
Tara’s first teen novella, Size of a Fist, was published in 2015 and nominated for two 2016 Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her debut novel, Saltus, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in spring 2021.
What are your most recent awards?
Her writing has been published in several Canadian literary magazines, and won Event Magazine’s 14th Annual Creative Non-fiction Competition, and the City of Regina Writing Award in 2016 and 2019. In 2017, she was a laureate of a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award from The Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2017.
Are you connected to any creative writing communities you’d like to mention (UBC alums, film and theatre communities, etc)?
Tara is a member of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Writers’ Circle Inc.
What year did you graduate from the Creative Writing Program?
2001
Is there anything else about your writing career you’d like to share?
Tara also has an MA in Professional Communications from Royal Roads University, and was the recipient of the Gabriel Dumont and Napoleon LaFontaine Graduate Scholarships from the Gabriel Dumont Institute. Her thesis, which explores her Métis heritage and identity, won the Public Ethnography Award from the Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Public Ethnography. An article based on her thesis was published in Briarpatch magazine.
From the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan, Tara spent her childhood years in Fort Qu’Appelle, her teen years in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and much of her adult life in Vancouver, B.C., before returning to her home on the prairie. She currently lives in Regina on Treaty 4 territory and homeland of the Métis.
American Suzanne Kamata lives in the prefecture of Tokushima in Japan. She is the author of the novels Losing Kei, Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible, and Screaming Divas, as well as the short story collection The Beautiful One Has Come. She has also edited three anthologies including Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs. She is currently a lecturer at Tokushima University.
Gillian Wigmore is the author of three books of poems, including Orient, published by Brick Books, Dirt of Ages, published by Nightwood Editions, and soft geography, published by Caitlin Press, which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay award and won the 2008 Relit award. She has also written a novella, Grayling, published by MotherTongue Publishing in 2014 and has a novel forthcoming in Fall 2017 with Invisible Publishing. Her work has been published in magazines and anthologized. She lives in Prince George, BC, where she is the coordinator of the Nechako Branch of the Prince George Public Library. Her work has been published in magazines in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Jordan Hall is an emerging artist whose work has been dubbed “stellar, insightful”by Plank Magazine, “thoughtful” by CBC Radio, and “vivid, memorable” by NOW. Her first full-length play, Kayak, won Samuel French’s 2010 Canadian Playwrights Competition, and has been produced to critical acclaim across North America. An Associate at Playwrights Theatre Centre from 2010-2013, she is currently Touchstone Theatre’s 2016 Flying Start playwright, and her most recent play, How to Survive an Apocalypse, will premiere with Touchstone in 2016. As a screenwriter, Jordan co-created the CSA-nominated Carmilla: The Series for SmokeBomb Entertainment. She has also been a finalist in both the LA Comedy Fest and Beverly Hills Short Screenplay Competitions, as well as a winner of the Crazy8s Short Film Production Competition. As a dramaturg, Jordan worked on The Hearing of Jeremy Hinzman at the 2012 Summerworks Festival, and spent five years as a mentor for UBC’s Booming Ground program.
Betty Jane Hegerat is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of creative non-fiction. She graduated from the MFA Creative Writing Low-Residency Program.
Hi, I’m Betty Jane Hegerat. I applied to the UBC Creative Writing program with the particular intention of exploring the possibilities of creative non-fiction. I had a challenging work in progress at the time. The program was a gift. The novel I completed as my thesis, Delivery, was published in 2009, the year after I graduated. The challenging book became The Boy and was published in 2011, and I’ve just launched a YA novel, Odd One Out, that I began in Glen Huser’s summer course, Writing for Children. I am referring to this threesome as my UBC hat trick. I’m a born and raised Alberta writer and have lived in Calgary for the past 45 years. I graduated just a few days short of my 60th birthday and I am a vocal advocate of lifelong learning.
Could you tell us a little about your novel?
Odd One Out was published by Oolichan books in May 2016. Oolichan also published three other of my books — a novel, a collection of short fiction, and my strange hybrid of investigative journalism, memoir and fiction — and I’ve been proud to have my words between the covers of their beautiful design.
This new book has a 15 year old male narrator with a “perfect” twin sister, and 5 year old twin sibs each with their quirky personalities. The life of this very ordinary two parent Canadian middle-class family is turned upside by the arrival of a young woman from a Mennonite village in Mexico. The book is about the upset that can ensue when a new family member arrives on the doorstep.
What was the process of writing your novel?
I wrote Odd One Out almost as therapy, catharsis after I finished The Boy which led me into dark places I kept trying to avoid. I finished the first draft during the month of January 2011 while in residence at Wallace Stegner House in Eastend, Saskatchewan. I highly recommend this retreat to any writer seeking solitude. I set that draft aside to “cure” for almost a year and then returned to forge my way through another four drafts before I sent it Oolichan. After their acceptance, I was fortunate to have Gayle Friesen as my editor and with her help got to a final draft that was significantly stronger.
Why did you choose to write about what you did?
I am a social worker by profession, although retired since I decided almost 20 years ago that it was time to admit that the stories I needed to tell were getting old and so was I. In my last position with an adoption agency, I was responsible for adoption reunion, the intermediary between adopted children and birthparents seeking contact. Each one of my books has a thread spun out of the yarn of my years as a social worker. The adoption reunion theme was the starting point for Odd One Out, but I also have a strong predilection to write about pre-teen and teenaged boys — the result of a steady stream of teenagers in our home while out three children were growing up — of trying to fathom what goes on in those boy brains. As well, I have a fascination with Mennonite culture and in particular with the culture of Canadian Mennonites transplanted to Mexico on invitation from the Mexican government a few decades ago.
Where do you get your ideas for fiction from?
The seed of almost everything I’ve written has come from memory of a long ago incident, conversation overheard (I think all writers are hopelessly prone to eavesdropping), a character who flies in out of who-knows-where, lands on my shoulder and natters in my ear until I succumb and write the story he/she insists that I tell. I do not write about the people I’ve met during my social work years. I made a pledge to confidentiality that has become a promise to myself that I will never steal from the people in whose lives I was a necessary intruder. I do however, carry with me a strong of social justice and a flawed system and my characters are sometimes composites of the people I’ve met. Wherever the ideas come from, I know that life is too short to follow them all the their end.
What is one the most important lessons you’ve learned about writing?
First shattered illusion — there is no fortune involved in writing, and particular in writing fiction or poetry. Can you hear the Revenue Canada people laughing all the way from Winnipeg or Ottawa or wherever they keep them locked up? Neither is there a guarantee of fame, apart from the occasional nomination for an award. We do have “famous” authors in Canada and they are worthy of the recognition they receive, but there are far more of us who celebrate the pleasure of seeing our words in print and knowing that our stories have an audience.
For me, the discovery that delighted first was that while writing is a solitary activity, it brings with it ‚Äì if one chooses to be involved — a whole community. Our Alberta community of writers is vast, welcoming, supportive, and there are always people who will help celebrate success, or whine with us when things are not going well. Through retreats, courses ‚Äì those I’ve attended and those I’ve taught — I’ve come to know hundreds of other writers.. And I have made some close and dear friends in becoming part of this world.
How did the Creative Writing program help your writing practice?
The Creative Writing program gave me access to writers/mentors who filled in many gaps in my knowledge of the craft, who pushed me to break through ingrained habits of style and subject. It also gave me a new community of writers at all stages of their careers.
Francine Cunningham is the social media executive for the UBC Creative Writing Alumni Association. What does that mean exactly? She is on the Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads accounts and our blog, posting information about our alumni, events and news. She also runs this interview series Featured Alumni and loves being able to get to know the people who make this association what it is. For more information about Francine and her writing find her at www.francinecunningham.ca.
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