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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Gabriela Halas, MFA 2024
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Gabriela Halas, MFA. Gabriela’s graduate thesis is a collection of essays entitled Helix Songs: Essays on Ethics and Embeddedness.
Gabriela immigrated to Canada in the early 1980s, grew up in northern Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in B.C. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including The Antigonish Review, Cider Press Review, Inlandia, About Place Journal, Prairie Fire, december magazine, Rock & Sling, The Hopper, among others; fiction in Room Magazine, Ruminate, The Hopper, subTerrain, Broken Pencil, among others; and nonfiction in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Whitefish Review, Grain, Pilgrimage, and High Country News. She lives and writes on Wetʼsuwetʼen Nation land.
Helix Songs: Essays on Ethics and Embeddedness is a creative nonfiction essay collection which explores complexity, implicatedness, and how to live an ethical life, while grappling with inherited or chosen forms, such as being a settler/immigrant, a woman, and a mother. The collection thematically links a variety of topics, such as infertility, hunting, immigration, family and home, land acknowledgments, and the political social realm of being a researcher in post-secondary and government employment, written from the perspective of a woman born in Eastern Europe and raised in Canada.
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Ariane Anantaputri, MFA 2024
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Ariane Anantaputri, MFA. Ariane’s graduate thesis is a television series entitled Yellow Fever.
Ariane came to the program with a background in stand-up comedy and filmmaking. After working as a freelance producer and performing comedy for over seven years in the UK and Indonesia, she decided it was time for a change in scenery — the mountains and oceans of British Columbia to develop her writing skills in other genres and hone her screenwriting craft. While in the program, she served as Managing Editor of PRISM international and Associate Editor at Young Adulting Magazine.
Ariane’s television series, Yellow Fever, blends the murderous offbeat antiheroism of HBO’s Barry with the simmering Asian rage of Netflix’s BEEF with a zillenial twist. It highlights the absurdities of compulsory heterosexuality, Vancouver’s infrastructure, the city’s culture of cold friendliness, and a new and unhinged take on Indonesian girlhood, true crime, and the role of neocolonialism and racism in modern romance. It follows waitress Melati Wardhani, Vancouver’s first Asian woman serial killer targeting white men, gaining accidental viral stardom and a copycat killer.
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