Bevan Thomas, MFA 2023
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Bevan Thomas, MFA. Bevan’s graduate thesis is a fantasy novel entitled The Emperor of Nothing.
Whether it’s someone communing with a city’s soul or hunting a unicorn, Bevan loves to use the magical and the mythic to explore the human psyche, interpreting them as symbols for internal conflicts such as existential dilemmas and mental health crises. He has explored this through his UBC workshops, as well as stories in various anthologies. Bevan has also contributed to many of Cloudscape Comics’ graphic novels. He created the Epic Canadiana series, which won Cloudscape the Gene Day Award at the 2016 Joe Shuster Awards. Bevan teaches comics writing at Langara College, and lives in Vancouver with his wife, the artist Reetta Linjama.
Bevan’s fantasy novel, The Emperor of Nothing, uses a world of sorcery to explore its protagonist’s troubled psyche. Troyer is the mystic guardian of Victoria, BC, protecting it from every danger. He is secure in his power, feared by sorcerers and demons. However, Troyer’s confidence is shaken when Victoria is attacked by Mezteplek, the Emperor of Nothing. This demon forces Troyer to relive the most traumatic events of his life, making him battle parts of himself he has repressed for years. The Emperor of Nothing shows how our inner demons can be our worst enemies, seemingly unstoppable forces which cannot be escaped. They must be confronted.
Contact
Request more information about Bevan’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Anna Leventhal, MFA 2023
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Anna Leventhal, MFA. Anna’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled The Girl Cheese Diaries.
Anna’s short story collection Sweet Affliction (Invisible Publishing) won the 2014 Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was named a book of the year by CBC Books. A French translation by Daniel Grenier was published in 2015. Her writing has appeared in Geist, Maisonneuve, Lettres québécoises, carte blanche, The Puritan, and elsewhere. She was nominated for the Journey Prize and won a Quebec Writing Competition award. She was the 2021-2022 Writer-In-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. After many years in Montreal, Anna currently lives in Winnipeg, on Treaty 1 territory.
The Girl Cheese Diaries is a character-driven novel about a complex relationship between two women: one a young bartender and would-be artist, and the other a one-time cult cartoonist who left the art world after a dramatic falling out with her artist collective. The novel explores the dynamics of their relationship, which encompasses friendship, mentorship, admiration, obsession, and manipulation, and through which each woman’s values and commitments are tested. In off-kilter prose that’s often darkly comedic, it questions and disturbs our presumptions about what it means to be an artist today.
Contact
Request more information about Anna’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Meagan Black, MFA 2023
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Meagan Black, MFA. Meagan’s graduate thesis is a children’s novel entitled Lyle and Mouse.
Meagan is a versatile writer with a passion for teaching and for storytelling in all its forms. She is keenly interested in poetry, new media, and writing for children and young adults—but she is always seeking out new writing styles to try. She also has a love for hybrid genres and genre experimentation, and has even co-authored a script for a poetically apocalyptic graphic novel in verse. Meagan has worked with Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, and the Ottawa International Writers Festival, and she has been published by Arc, Carousel, and ottawater, among others.
Lyle and Mouse is a funny mystery for middle schoolers. Set at the eccentric ESESES boarding school, it follows Lyle and Mouse—a man and cat—while they do their best as the campus’s only security team to keep the school safe. But things take a puzzling turn when copies of the campus-wide master key are mailed anonymously to random students. Then things get worse. Joining them on a journey filled with humour, intrigue, and a touch of the unexpected are three child characters: Chloe, a narcoleptic fifth grader who believes in wild theories; her classmate Josh, the secretive Head’s son; and Atri, a clever, socially anxious fourth grader.
Contact
Request more information about Meagan’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Jasmine Ruff, MFA 2023
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Jasmine Ruff, MFA. Jasmine’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled Lorelei.
Jasmine Ruff is a queer writer who hails from the Unceded Traditional Territory of the K’ómoks First Nation. She came to the program after teaching English in South Korea for several years. During her MFA, she became the poetry editor at PRISM international and discovered a deep love of hybrid forms. She publishes her writing under the pseudonym “Clara Otto”. You can find her work in CRAFT Literary, The Ex-Puritan, just femme and dandy and elsewhere. Currently, Jasmine is working on a book of poetry and auto-theory about the colour pink, Legally Blonde, and the complicated legacies of Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
Lorelei is a new weird novel that asks how far a myth can bend before it breaks. The protagonist, Drew, returns to her hometown following the disappearance of her teenage cousin. Throughout the novel, Drew uncovers the history between her family and the town. By combining elements of horror and magic, Lorelei explores surveillance, perseverance, and relationships between women.
Contact
Request more information about Jasmine’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Owen Schaefer, MFA 2023
The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Owen Schaefer, MFA. Owen’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled In The Gyre.
After graduating from York University, Owen moved to Tokyo. There, he worked as a teacher, and later a writer and editor for a Japanese publisher. He also became Arts Editor for Tokyo Weekender magazine. Owen spent fifteen years in Japan, then another six in Hong Kong, before arriving in the U.K., where he lives today. He has had several audio-drama serials produced for Japanese listeners, and his play Artemis Seven was staged in London in January of 2023. Owen’s fiction and poetry have been published in a range of journals and anthologies, and his work often skews toward the speculative, exploring themes of alienation and belonging.
In The Gyre begins as bioengineer Mariel Riggs finds herself adrift on an island of genetically altered algae in the Pacific Ocean. The “berg” is a living landmass that Mariel herself helped design as both a tidal-surge barrier and experimental floating farm. Now, as she gets down to the business of surviving, she begins to realise that her own isolation started long before the tsunami. Is the berg the only place that Mariel truly belongs? A survival story of a different kind, this near-future speculative work explores issues of psychological abuse, depression, and grief, set against the backdrop of a spiralling climate crisis.
Contact
Request more information about Owen’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
RJ McDaniel, MFA 2023
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.
Contact
Request more information about RJ’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.
Sabyasachi Nag, MFA 2023
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.
Contact
Request more information about Sabyasachi’s thesis project using our Grad Showcase Contact Form.