The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate RJ McDaniel, MFA. RJ’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled Transubstantiation.
RJ’s essays on baseball and other topics have been featured at Catapult, VICE Sports, Baseball Prospectus, and FanGraphs, among others. They were the inaugural Writer in Residence at the Upstart & Crow Literary Arts Studio. Their debut novel, ALL THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN, is forthcoming in April 2024 from ECW Press.
Transubstantiation follows the relationship between gay trans couple Van and James. Four years into their relationship, Van and James seemed to have settled into a dynamic that is comfortable for both of them. But after a chance encounter with a Catholic saint when he stands at the very brink of despair, James becomes powerfully drawn toward the Catholic Church — a journey he hides from Van, who remains alienated from his family and his culture due to trauma around his Catholic upbringing. Van and James must try to find balance between pursuing their own needs and maintaining their trust and connection with each other.
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The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Sabyasachi Nag, MFA. Sabyasachi’s graduate thesis is a literary novel entitled The Basis of Claim.
Sabyasachi’s fiction and poetry have appeared in over thirty journals and anthologies worldwide including Canadian Literature, Grain, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Windsor Review, and The Guardian among other places. He is the author of three collections of poetry including Uncharted (Mansfield Press, 2021). While at UBC he published Hands Like Trees, a story collection, (Ronsdale Press, 2023) and earned a Master’s scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). An alumnus of the Banff Centre Literary Arts Program, he is the founding editor of The Artisanal Writer.
When Danish Maz, an immigrant student from Calcutta gets embroiled in a random crime and is sent to prison he meets a shaman who takes him under surrogacy and leads him to a place he has never been before. What is this place – the utopia of his dreams that he must do everything in his power to inhabit for the rest of his life or the hell he must escape? The novel situated in Toronto’s Black Creek deals with three key thematic strands: how do we deal with our past? And what do we do with freedom? And how much hope is good? Other secondary themes interrogate constructs of power and adjustment in double-conscious, diasporic families.
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The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Page Getz Ellinger, MFA. Page’s graduate thesis is a television series entitled KRAK Radio.
Page Getz Ellinger is a journalist and activist from Kansas and California. She’s reported for the Los Angeles Times, Pacifica Radio, FSRN and NPR. Her work appears in Tidal Basin Review, Vermillion, Spectrum, Whistling Fire and forthcoming issues of Apricity Magazine and Atlanta Review, as a 2022 International Poetry Contest finalist. At UBC she served as a New Shoots anthology co-editor and mentor. An alumni of UCLA’s Screenwriting Professional Program, her pilot, Stardrift Road, was a quarter-finalist in the 2023 Shore Scripts Pilot Competition. Her epistolary novel, Goodnight, Kansas, is slated for release by Sourcebooks in Spring 2025.
Page’s TV series, KRAK Radio, is a Sorkin-paced political dramedy inspired by real events and real delusion. Addis Maxfield, an idealistic reporter trying to escape addiction, volunteers at a tree-hugging community radio station in Hollywood, convinced she can stop the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As she tries to prove herself in the newsroom she finds community among the wingnut staff, but they face fledging fund drives, spook infiltration and a hippie-hating manager determined to downsize. KRAK Radio is the unheard West Wing of working class radicals at a moment that mirrors today’s ideological war. It’s funny and it’s not funny, but it’s funny.
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The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate T. Eleanor Fuller, MFA. Eleanor’s graduate thesis is a collection of stories entitled Annex Mixtape: Stories.
Although Eleanor’s current project is a family saga treating three generations of Irish diaspora, the MFA fully confirmed her devotion to the short story, its capaciousness. Her stories appear in The Moth, The Manchester Review, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. Winner of The Malahat Review’s 2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction, she is also grateful for support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Eleanor volunteers on the Editorial Board at Prism International. She lives in Toronto.
Annex Mixtape is a collection of stories inspired by a Toronto neighbourhood. Place becomes a symbolic anchor in stories that question what it means to belong and what happens when our sense of belonging is ruptured by loss. The collection situates traditional literary realism alongside boldly genre-facing stories and formal experimentation. Like most urban neighbourhoods, it features an eclectic mix of characters: lovers, fortune tellers, sisters, jazz drummers, jocks, poets, philandering philosophy professors, a grumpy Latin teacher, even Death in the frozen pizza aisle. As in the best mixtapes, love and heartache resonate throughout.
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The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Erin Steel, MFA. Erin’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!.
Prior to studying at the School of Creative Writing, Erin worked as a K-12 French and Social Studies teacher in BC and Alberta, and as a reporter and field producer for ATV News in Halifax. While at UBC, she received a Faculty of Arts Graduate Award and the Iser Steiman Memorial Scholarship in Translation. She also volunteered as a reader for PRISM international. Her first published short story appeared in subTerrain magazine and received an honourable mention in their Lush Triumphant Contest. Originally from Greater Vancouver, she currently resides in Calgary where she continues to work on her fiction, poetry, and translation.
In You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!, the year is 1989 and young women are being told they can have everything. Maeve Morrissey leaves her dysfunctional family in the West for her first year of university in Ottawa where she adjusts to campus life. Maeve’s academic advisor introduces her to Rob, a man whose career is rising on Parliament Hill. The world is opening up for Maeve, or so she thinks, until tragic events like the Montreal Massacre unfold. In this subversion of the traditional Bildungsroman, Maeve begins a journey inside herself, coming to grips with the bewilderment of first love and the precariousness of life as a woman.
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The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Sofia Osborne, MFA. Sofia’s graduate thesis is a television series entitled Tiger Girls.
Sofia came to the School of Creative Writing with a background in environmental journalism and podcasting. Her award-winning journalism, personal essays, and fiction have been published in Maisonneuve, the Narwhal, the Tyee, the Dodge, and more. This summer, she also participated in the prestigious literary journalism residency at the Banff Centre, where she worked on a literary journalism project about the first Asian North American writer, Edith Eaton. In her time at UBC, she was able to dive into new genres and realized that television was the perfect medium to explore her own family’s story, one she had been trying to capture for years.
Sofia’s thesis, Tiger Girls, is a one-hour original television series following three generations of women in a Singaporean-Canadian family. Based on the experiences of her grandmother, her mother, and herself, Tiger Girls explores themes of diaspora, what it means to be a “good” girl, and the enduring and dangerous stereotypes surrounding Asian women. At the heart of Tiger Girls is the relationship between these women, all born in the “inauspicious” year of the tiger. As their stories unfurl, the viewer comes to understand this lineage of tiger women through the pasts that have shaped them and the things they are trying to escape.
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