The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate James Lord Parker, MFA. James’s graduate thesis is an collection of poetry entitled Fat Heart Goes Pop.
James Lord Parker is a Scarborough-born writer and vocalist for the pop duo, Keep in Touch. His work has appeared in Scarborough Fair, Sewer Lid, SickNotWeak and other journals, as well as the Canadian anthologies, Feel Ways and Release any Words Stuck Inside You II. His debut EP, Scrapbook I, can be found on all streaming services.
Fat Heart Goes Pop is a collection of poetry which explores the ways that our upbringing and inherited traits influence who we are and who we become. This collection is made up of three parts which explore the different facets of this process: what we experience, how it impacts us, and who we eventually become. Scattered throughout the poems are moments of absurdity and humour to offset the darker tone of the subject matter, act as palate cleansers, and highlight that even in the bleaker moments of our lives, there is peace to be found.
Contact
Request more information about James’ thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li, MFA. Vivian’s graduate thesis is an experimental slipstream novel entitled To You, in the Waves of the Future.
Vivian (@vivianlicreates) is a queer and neurodivergent Chinese-Canadian writer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist. She explores mental health, Chinese Philosophy, liminal identity in her slipstream and fantasy writing. She was Longlisted for The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize, a Finalist for The Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, and the author of Someday I Promise, I’ll Love You (845 Press). A Banff Centre alumnus and former PRISM international Prose Editor, she is the writer and director of three short films that have premiered internationally. Read her writing in The New Quarterly, QWERTY, The Fiddlehead, and Uncanny, among others.
To You, in the Waves of the Future is a slipstream novel about two sisters trying to save each other through time, with letters from the past, present, and future. The work engages with Chinese philosophical themes and literature as a magical system as well as experimental formatting to explore the wave-like and fragmentary nature of memory, depression, and childhood trauma. Gliding between timelines, the novel explores the potential of how an ambiguous utopia for people Othered by society could begin to be built, ultimately proposing how home, body, and voice can be communicated across intergenerational barriers, borders, and time.
Video: Vivian reads an excerpt of her novel
Contact
Request more information about Vivian’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate William John Wither, MFA. William’s graduate thesis is a post-obliteration novel entitled I guess this is death.
William came to the School of Creative Writing to work through form as an act of triangulation. How does the poetic frame the heat of our lives? How can the thin veil of fiction moor the reader, allowing them to accept new realities? How can the nodes of an essay offer an accumulation of being? With a background in futures consulting, ludology and design, William looks to how the visual can operate as scaffolding for the textual. To date, his work has been published in The Puritan, Exile Quarterly, Tales to Terrify, antilang, and has been a finalist for the CVC Short Fiction Competition while being nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
William’s thesis is a post-obliteration novel entitled I guess this is death. In it, an unnamed narrator attempts to codify their existence through a book given to them by an old colleague—that of the fictive Photos of Grass by Amelia Walsh. The narrator flails towards being, wondering whether life can enact ‘a happening,’ as they travel from Brighton to Mexico to an open-air gallery situated in the space between dreaming and waking. I guess this is death is for fans of Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hiroko Oyamada.
Contact
Request more information about William’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Susan Sechrist, MFA. Susan’s graduate thesis is a memoir entitled For Lack of Better: Thought Experiments in Grief, Memory, and Identity.
After a career as a technical writer, Susan came to UBC to study mathematical and scientific metaphor in fiction. She used geometry, botany, and astronomy to build the world in her fantasy novel instead of inventing a magical system and wrote a coming-of-age novel about bathymetry by way of a girl and a bottomless pond. Her thesis project is part memoir, part phenology – a reflection on her father’s death during the COVID pandemic. Susan wrote a feature column, Go Figure, for the literary blog Bloom, celebrating mathematics in literature, and published her short story, A Desirable Middle, in the eclectic Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
Susan’s memoir, For Lack of Better, is built from seven iterative personal essays that reflect on her father’s death from COVID in 2021. It examines grief during the pandemic, a traumatic time when comforting rites and rituals, sources of social support, and expectations of mourning were shaken. From riven traditions emerge a new reconciliation of the sudden death of her beloved and last remaining parent. The project explores how memory incited by loss can be conflated by wish fulfillment and coping mechanism, and how the line between fantasy and reality is especially blurred by the act of recollection in service of meaning and identity.
Contact
Request more information about Susan’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Paul Dhillon, MFA. Paul’s graduate thesis is a multi-genre fiction collection entitled Floods Rise To Meet Us.
Paul Dhillon (he/him) is a second-generation Punjabi Canadian and his work has appeared the The Malahat Review and Prairie Fire. His work has been a finalist at the National Magazine Awards. He currently lives on the unceded and ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. He is a high school English teacher.
Floods Rise To Meet Us is a collection of stories that follows Punjabi Canadian characters in Vancouver. Characters confront the constraints of their environments, familial histories, and cultural expectations. New immigrants seek acceptance, a chef reckons with their lineage of taking, an artist creates a memorial and confronts her parents’ conditional love, a heartbroken boy understands faiths role in the ruins of tragedy, and brothers wrestle with the final rights concerning their parents’ ashes in a smoke-blanketed Vancouver. These stories investigate boundaries between self and other, striving to answer the question: Who am I?
Contact
Request more information about Paul’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate PJ Sarah Collins, MFA. Sarah’s thesis is a speculative war novel entitled Berlin Again.
Sarah is an Okanagan teacher. She’s grateful for the flexibility in the Optional-Residency program which allowed her to study at night (rather than move to UBC with five chickens, four dependents, three bookshelves, two dogs, and one cat). Prior to grad school, she had published two books for children and two online courses for Queen’s University, but craved an understanding of story structure and the confidence to write for any audience. Sarah studied CNF, Fiction, and Screenwriting in her MFA, graduating with a war novel, two short stories, and three screenplays.
Three generations meet in Berlin after the fall of the Wall in July, 1990. One lives for contrition; the other has been groomed to usher in the Fourth Reich. The third, her father, is hell-bent to see it done. Eve Dressler has been brainwashed to revere Hitler, who was only trying to give Germany back what it had at the turn of the century, plus interest. But Grandfather isn’t just a history fanatic with an agenda, he’s an escaped Nazi war criminal… and not her grandfather. Berlin Again contains alternating chapters of Eve’s journey to Berlin and those of her lost grandmother. Interspersed are Eve’s memories of her fanatic family.
Contact
Request more information about Sarah’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Emi Sasagawa, MFA. Emi’s graduate thesis is a graphic memoir entitled Cachos: a graphic memoir about hair, heritage and identity.
Emi is a settler, immigrant and queer woman of colour, who came to the program with a background in journalism. Though she hadn’t drawn since middle school, the MFA became an opportunity to rekindle a love for graphic forms, and eventually she decided to create her thesis in the genre. Also while in the program, Emi continued to develop a book-length project that had emerged during her time at SFU’s Writer’s Studio. Her debut novel Atomweight, published in 2023 by Tidewater Press, explores identity and belonging through the lenses of mixedness, queerness, oppression and privilege, inviting reflection on the space we take up in the world.
Starting a family can be fraught. For those of in queer, transracial relationships, choices like determining a sperm donor raise important questions about identity. Emi’s graphic memoir, Cachos, examines the genetic and cultural gift we present to our children as parents struggling with articulating who we are. Framed as a letter to her unborn child, the graphic memoir uses hair to explore gender, race and queerness, how our notions of identity and belonging influence decisions about what parts of ourselves to pass down to our children, and ultimately how these decisions are interwoven in our ideas about self-worth, belonging and community.
Contact
Request more information about Emi’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Diana Gustafson, MFA. Diana’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled The Unkindness of Ravens.
Diana L. Gustafson is a women’s health researcher who has published extensively on mothering and health-related social justice issues. Her modest success with publishing flash fiction can be attributed to the support of faculty and students at the UBC School of Creative Writing. She earned an honourable mention in an Offtopic Publishing contest and her first curio fiction appears in a 2024 collection entitled Tales I Was Told. She lives and writes in Toronto where she has an embarrassingly large collection of corrective eyeglasses–none rose-coloured.
Annika Wallin grows up playing street hockey in a working-class Winnipeg family and listening to her grandfather’s tales about Odin’s ravens. At twenty, she stands six foot-two in skates and is the image of Freyja, the fierce warrior princess, brandishing a hockey stick instead of a sword. When she finds herself unintentionally pregnant by a man she doesn’t love, she must choose between respecting her family’s strict Lutheran values and her promising future on the Canadian Olympic team. This family portrait marked by drug misuse, violence, shame, and forgiveness reveals how belief systems can structure or destroy a young woman’s life.
Contact
Request more information about Diana’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
