William John Wither, MFA 2024
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.
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Susan Sechrist, MFA 2024
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.
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Paul Dhillon, MFA 2024
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?
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PJ Sarah Collins, MFA 2024
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.
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Emi Sasagawa, MFA 2024
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.
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Diana Gustafson, MFA 2024
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.
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Christina Nercessian, MFA 2024
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Christina Nercessian, MFA. Christina’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled Forget Me, Forget Me Not.
Christina is an Armenian writer living in Sweden, with parents from Canada born in Lebanon. While at UBC she turned to this rich cultural heritage for inspiration in her writing. Against these backdrops, mainly of Armenia, she explores human relationships with all their complexity, beauty, and power to heal. Her Armenian nonfiction piece “Life in the Armenian Minibuses,” published in Hraparak Magazine, portrays the warm and caring Armenian culture through the seemingly ordinary occurrences of a bus ride. Her poem “White Storks, Returning,” published in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, expresses a deep longing for her ancestors’ lost homeland.
Christina’s novel, Forget Me, Forget Me Not, centers around the friendship between a Swedish and an Armenian man. Due to their very different cultures and personalities, they are able to help each other overcome their greatest fear and claim their place in life. One finds himself pulled into community despite his fear of attachment and loss, while the other is encouraged to step out of community long enough to hear his own inner voice. However, when war breaks out in Armenia, it brings their worst nightmares to the forefront, putting their friendship and newfound convictions to the ultimate test.
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Dora Prieto, MFA 2024
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Dora Prieto, MFA. Dora’s graduate thesis is a collection of poetry entitled Girls of the Now.
Dora Prieto came to the program with plans to write a polyphonic novel spanning three generations of a Colombian-Canadian family, drawing from her family’s roots in rural Colombia. She then switched her genre to poetry, which proved odd, surprising, and capacious. She also discovered a love of comics and has published in Capilano Review, Catapult, GUTS magazine, and Maisonneuve. Her poem “the withholding map” won the 2022 Room Magazine Poetry Contest and she was shortlisted for the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. She considers poetry a social praxis, and gives community workshops and a series called El Mashup for Latinx youth in Vancouver.
Dora’s collection of poetry, Girls of the Now, is a process of inquiry that delves into authority, identity, eroticism, and gender, through a speaker brimming with longing, frustration, humour, and arrogance. Using both poetic verse and embroidery, the poems move associatively in monostich interspersed with Zuihitsu prose poems. Modified sonnets, reminiscent of the Seussian style, punctuate the sequence, imposing constraint amidst fluidity. The sequence moves through multilingual poems too, including a series of Spanish sonnets inverted on the page, gesturing toward the speaker’s Latin American heritage and welcoming bilingual readers.
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