Seven undergraduates in the writing program will be placed in different units across campus, ranging from the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science to the Campus Community Garden
Illustration by Sabina Mendoza.
*Eden Conti is a volunteer member of the Martlet staff. She was not involved in any way with this article beyond the interview.
Writing is often seen as a solitary profession. The popular image of a writer is of one hunched in front of their keyboard, trying to weave sentences and stanzas together. However, like with every artistic field, there is a broader community that exists beyond that image. One that informs, inspires, and one with which the artist forms a reciprocal relationship.
This is one thing that the UVic Writing Department is exploring with its brand new writers-in-residence program for undergraduate students.
In an email statement to the Martlet, Lee Henderson, the chair of the Writing Department, explained that a writer-in-residence is typically “offered a space to write, and in return they provide open hours for visitors to come meet them. They often deliver a public reading and other community programming, such as workshops and roundtables.”
Many libraries, colleges, and universities host visiting authors in this way. The structure itself varies, but the basic idea of a residency is to provide a space for a writer to write in collaboration with the host institution.
As this is a pilot program, Henderson is still figuring out if additional stipends or awards will be offered to undergraduate writers-in-residence in the future.
“I thought it would be a terrific experience for students to have a sense of what a writer in residency role looks like, some of the responsibilities that come with that. And I thought it would be a really great way for our students to connect with other people across campus and disciplines that are really different from our own.” Henderson said.
He said that he had never heard of another undergraduate writer-in-residence program that resembles this one. There is the UVic Fine Arts Ocean Networks Artist Residency, which is open to all kinds of student artists.
“It occurred to me that it would be great if more writing students had dedicated writing spaces on campus and a way to connect with students and faculty studying in other disciplines. It’s a kind of real-world experience to serve as a writer-in-residence.”
Henderson said he thought it would be a good experience for fourth year undergraduates specifically, as they are about to graduate, and are considering the next steps of their writing career, such as graduate school or attending the Banff Center for the Arts.
Partaking in a residency “can show that you’re not just a writer, but quite serious about community … and [can] give students a little extra opportunity of something they can take away from their degree, and hopefully give them a little extra experience.” Henderson said.
There are a total of seven undergraduate writers-in-residence, with each student paired up with a separate unit on campus. They will be provided space in their assigned unit, where they will have office hours in addition to the workspace. The writers-in-residence will be expected to organize a public event themed around the unit’s research and/or work.
Henderson said he planned the residences to be more self-directed for the writers, as the students get to plan their events and determine how to tie their writing to the unit’s research on their own.
The units involved are the Institute on Aging and Lifelong Health, the School of Environmental Studies, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the Campus Community Garden (CCG), the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS), and the Department of Anthropology.
The Martlet is also hosting a writer-in-residence, but has no other involvement in the program.
Henderson explained that he purposefully reached out to departments outside the Humanities and Fine Arts for unexpected results.
“Sometimes I think as writers, even though we don’t always want to be, we live in our heads.” Henderson said.
“We’re really stuck in our head and we sit at our little computers and type, and sometimes I think we forget about how much a change of setting can inspire us, and an introduction to new types of people can be inspiring.”
The residences are set to begin in September, with the exception of the CCG residency, which began on June 2.
Josephine Mills, the writer-in-residence at the CCG, has already hosted an open mic event, which took place on June 2.
“We had a pretty decent turnout, all the readers were amazing, and there was such a variety of work read,” said Mills.
Mills is also starting a community library in the garden for anyone to put their original writing in. Her office is B020 in the Student Union Building, with office hours on Tuesdays 11 a.m. – 12 p.m., and is open for people to drop off their work for the library.
She has a second open mic planned on July 7 at 6 p.m., also in the CCG.
While most of the residences have yet to begin, the writers-in-residence are already making plans for what their residences will look like.
“I think [writing profiles] would be a more engaging way to interact,” said Eden Conti*, the writer-in-residence with the Institute of Aging and Lifelong Health.
“I want to align my writing with what they’re researching, [bringing] … human faces to the front, because I think that’s what is so often lost in research, and all that jargon — what does it all mean and what is the impact, so I think, just putting faces to things is nice,” she said.
Conti said she enjoys a public facing role. “The idea of having a more public facing role, although intimidating, it’s still exciting, because it’s definitely something I want to do more of, probably in my future, who knows.”
“I think it’s an exciting opportunity to fill a role I have no experience in, and I’m trying to stay focused on that excitement and not the overwhelm of it.”
Alex Mishenko, the writer-in-residence with ECS, is thinking of a potential game jam: an event where participants make a video game from scratch either in teams or individually in an allotted time limit.
“I think that’s where a lot of the strength of Computer Science, Engineering and the Arts in general [is], there’s a lot of cool multi-media projects out there.” Mishenko said, citing 17776 by Jon Bois as “one of the best sort of applications of both computer engineering and in general, computers as a form and the internet as a form being able to be combined with narrative and fiction.”
kit-xgwélemc kennedy, of the St’uxwtews Secwépemc First Nation — a writer-in-residence with the School of Environmental Studies — expressed an interest in working with non-writing students. As a double major in English and Writing, Kennedy has seen people who are interested in writing, but who are often nervous about accepting feedback, unlike Writing students, who regularly receive peer feedback as part of workshops.
“I’m hoping I can figure out a way to hopefully get a couple people to be like ‘Let’s try creative writing as well.’”
Kennedy spoke to me online from the Bamfield Marine Science Centre, where he was taking the course, In Pursuit of the Whale, as offered by the Centre to English students. He shared something his professor told him, “It’s very apparent what we have to gain from [the sciences]…. Learning more about the world around us and how it works, you can see how a creative person gets to make these connections to their own work, but it can feel hard on the other side of this cultural exchange, like, what are we offering to them?”
Kennedy said that whether from the humanities or the fine arts perspective, a lot can be offered to the sciences in, as his professor said, this cultural exchange.
Similarly, Henderson hopes the program will help the units involved see themselves as more public facing as a result of their collaboration.
Henderson, who has both a BFA and MFA in writing from UBC, drew on his own experience studying writing to create the new writer-in-residence program. During his undergrad at UBC, he said, the writing department there regularly hosted working writers who would meet with students informally and hold office hours to talk about writing. Libraries across Canada are also frequent hosts to writers-in-residence, he said.
When he completed his undergraduate degree, Henderson said he realized that it was time for him to start helping to create the culture he had previously been in the audience for.
“Not just to be an audience member, but an active participant in the creation of events, because if someone’s not doing it, no one is.… We’ve all got to put in our part, we can’t just be passively entertained. We sometimes need to decide ‘Well now it’s my turn to start organizing.’”
Having spoken to four out of the seven writers-in-residence, it is evident that these students are excited by their upcoming roles not only for the ways they will impact their writing, but for how they will impact the communities they will be working with as well.
“I feel lucky that they trusted me to be one of the first ones,” said Conti, “I’m also really excited to see how everybody else handles it. I mean, I don’t know how closely I’ll get to work with other people during the residencies, how much of a cohort we will become, but I am excited,”
Mishenko said he was interested to have the opportunity to offer his sort of perspective as an Arts student to STEM students, and be informed by theirs, as they collaborate.
“[The] information exchange [aspect] is very exciting,” said Kennedy, “I feel like every faculty, every department has something to learn from each other, and like, allowing students to step outside their usual paths of thinking is only a good thing.”
And Mills, whose residency has begun, said that the more she connects with the community, the more she is inspired to write.
“It’s been very inspiring for my writing process to be able to have support from the community, and being able to then share it back to the community, it’s just so rewarding, and it’s definitely been really inspiring.
“It’s really made me want to write more to that community, and kind of consider nature and food security, and community in my poetry.”
“It’s a big change,”Henderson said. “I think in terms of your psychology as an emerging writer when you realize that you just can’t be passive about everything, you have to sometimes be the active agent of creation, not just for writing, but an art or activities, places to congregate, places for people to meet.
“It transforms your surroundings to be a contributor like that, and you just never know what opportunities are going to come from that.”
