With an interest in community-based writing and with the goal of offering students opportunities for growth in their storytelling abilities, creative writing prof Michael V. Smith has partnered up with Anna Kiernan from the University of Exeter to run a publishing opportunity for students from each campus.

This collaboration is made possible with funding from the UBC Okanagan-Exeter Excellence Initiator Grant.

“This research and development work seeks to identify the potential for exploring transatlantic (small town) stories through a range of multimedia and immersive technologies,” explains Smith.

Kiernan reached out to Smith to invite him to be part of organizing a cross-Atlantic issue of Exeter’s online magazine The Lit. She was looking for someone to collaborate with at UBCO, and liked that he is a creative writer that had digital media experience.

“I also liked the kinds of work she is involved in that is community focused. I’m interested in building community, and culture, and I’m also interested in diversity and alternative forms. Those are aligned with my interests,” he says.

Smith is interested in media as a low-barrier storytelling tool – as well as storytelling that grows out of a specific place, so their theme issue of “Small-Town Stories” will feature videopoems (experimental films) generated by UBCO students, featured alongside writing by Exeter students. This is a unique opportunity for students from both campuses to connect from different locations across the Atlantic. Opportunities like this opens up new possibilities for students.

“I think there is a shared cultural value and aesthetic between us and England. And these cross-cultural elements can also show students that there are different ways of being, which can help influence and inform their writing,” Smith says.

In the creative writing classes here at UBC Okanagan, he notes that his courses offer readings mostly in a Canadian perspective, so this project is a great way to introduce them to a broader literary tradition and cannon.

This also offers exposure to other ways of doing things. “In our creative writing program, we teach students not only how to make art but to use creative tools to find work in other disciplines. We don’t want to have students graduate and only publish their work, but to be performers, work in film, or find a career in advertising or therapy,” he says.

The hope of this course is that it will open up doors to show our students what else is possible by learning from people in other places in the world.

Kiernan and Smith will showcase their work when visiting each other’s campus in the Spring, to build the relationship across their campuses, and to find other shared projects, such as site-specific work, or collaborative making. If this grows in the right direction, there may be possibilities for an exchange so that our students visit University of Exeter and theirs come here, for an across-the-pond dialogue.

About Ana Kiernan and Michael V. Smith

Anna Kiernan

Anna’s research focuses on questions of participation, identity, community and creativity in relation to writing culture and cultural value and book publishing. Her most recent book is Writing Cultures and Literary Media: Publishing and Reception in a Digital Age, published by Palgrave in 2021.

Michael V. Smith

Michael V. Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, working as a writer, filmmaker, and performance artist. His most recent book is Bad Ideas, published by Nightwood Editions in 2017. He has recently finished a feature documentary, The Floating Man, to be released in 2023.

Nasim Pirhadi pictured here with the award

Nasim Pirhadi, a second year Masters of Fine Arts student, was recently awarded the Audain Foundation Travel Award. The Audain Foundation supports the visual arts in British Columbia, offering awards to arts organizations, galleries and to individual artists.

Nasim was nominated by faculty members in the Visual Arts program at UBC Okanagan, noting that she is both an outstanding artist and scholar.

Nasim intends to travel to New York City in the spring 2023 to explore the history and practice of feminist art.  The concept of her artwork is constant fear, lack of independence and legal protection, and some of the toughest challenges facing Iranian women.

“I create a fragile network to represent women’s status in its vulnerability and fearfulness, “says Nasim.

While in New York, she will visit the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, a center within the Brooklyn Museum focuses exclusively on explicitly feminist art. This trip provides her with a great opportunity to meet Dr. Globarg Bashi, an Iranian-Swedish feminist who graduated from Columbia University, and now lives and works in New York.

The Audain Foundation Travel Award was established in 2019 for BFA or MFA students at five major institutions in the province, University of British Columbia Okanagan, University of British Columbia Vancouver, Emily Carr University or Art and Design, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Victoria.

The award is for $7500 to one student per university to allow them to travel to destinations of their choice to view artworks and projects that will foster their practice and research.

Awful Splendour in the the Visualization and Emerging Media Studio (VEMS) at UBCO

What: Awful Splendour, Immersive slideshow
Who:  Andreas Rutkauskas
When: Thursday, November 17th 11:30am – 2:30pm (drop in); Saturday, December 10th 1-2:30pm (includes formal artist presentation)
Where: Visualization and Emerging Media Studio (COM 107), UBC Okanagan

Join us on November 17th and December 10th to see the work of visual arts lecturer Andreas Rutkauskas in the Visualization and Emerging Media Studio (VEMS).

The immersive slideshow titled Awful Splendour, in tribute to the work of scientist Stephen J. Pyne, allows visitors to experience the aftermath and regeneration following wildfire in the Okanagan through stereoscopic immersive visualization. Working with a high-resolution camera outfitted with six lenses, the artist captures scenes from a range of fires that took place between 2003 and 2020. Visitors use passive 3D glasses to experience dynamic imagery on Canada’s highest-resolution, 3D, VR-ready video wall in the VEMS. Awful Splendour reminds residents and visitors alike that the Okanagan is a fire-adapted ecosystem, where fire has a longstanding and complex history of shaping the land.

This experience is being presented in conjunction with Rutkauskas’ exhibition Living Through Wildfire on display at the Vernon Public Art Gallery until December 21, 2022.

Andreas Rutkauskas has been making photographs of landscapes for over twenty years, four of which have been dedicated to the aftermath and regeneration following wildfire. Andreas was the inaugural artist in residence at the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment (2020), a Research Fellow with the Canadian Photography Institute (2018), and currently teaches photography at UBC’s Okanagan campus, on the unceded traditional territory of the Syilx.

Mihai Covaser in his podcast studio

Mihai Covaser has worked for a number of years with a variety of Canadian organizations related to inclusion and accessibility for youths with disabilities. In the summer of 2021, he received a grant through the #RisingYouth Initiative, presented by the not-for-profit group Every Canadian Counts, to promote social change in his local community.

With this grant, Covaser started a podcast talking to people about the limitations in public schools for people with varying disabilities. Covaser has cerebral palsy, and with this project, his goal is to raise awareness on how schools can be more inclusive and accessible to people with disabilities, using his own lived experience as the basis.

The podcast, entitled Help Teach, brings forward the lived experiences of interviewees, concrete action items for educators, and additional resources in hopes of supporting teachers in their efforts to make their classes more accessible.

Covaser is currently a second-year student working on his Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in French and Economics, Political Science and Philosophy. In his first year, he took a Digital Humanities (DIHU 220) course that was based around digital audio media and podcasting.

“In that class, we did a podcasting assignment, and after seeing this grant opportunity, I decided, ‘Why not run a podcast on my own’?”

He was able to use the grant money to purchase professional equipment and support for recording, editing, and production. Then in a third year Communications and Rhetoric course (CORH 321), Covaser decided to continue to produce his podcast and use that as his final project, which was to be centered around community service learning.

He explains that the podcast is a collaboration between the grant, the initial project idea, and the class expectations that ended up being really beneficial for him.

“I am able to use skills from the class that I was learning and implement them in the project.” He adds that the podcast is interview based. “My stories and the stories of my interviewees are sort of the evidence and the lived experience that comes forward to drive home the messages.”

Covaser says that the communication and rhetoric class was very interesting to him, being about interpersonal communication and professional and personal identity. The focus was about how we communicate with others, the tools we use to communicate, and how that influences the comprehension of the information that ultimately gets out to people.

“Being part of the class gave me a really unique opportunity to explore a variety of media. It helped me to solidify my choices in the podcast, giving me an opportunity to use my voice exclusively, showing how we can be conscious of the experiences of others when we are communicating.”

He points out that the difficult part about advocating for change like this is that many people work from the bottom up, with individual teachers or students making changes in the classroom for inclusivity. While that may trickle out to other classrooms, his ultimate vision is to work from the top down.

“My ultimate vision is to get the curriculum of educators changed to include more information about accessibility and a variety of disabilities so that teachers come into the classroom already more prepared to accommodate a variety of disabilities.”

The podcast aims to have a variety of perspectives come together to identify the obstacles or the challenges that are most present, and most problematic, and then provide ways of working together towards some solutions. The pilot episodes of Help Teach featured youth leaders from the Rick Hansen Foundation, with whom Covaser works closely to produce this project and others

In an episode released this October, Covaser spoke with a specialist educator, who works with gifted students and students with emotional, mental, and academic challenges.

“Our discussion was fantastic. She talks about being authentic and being intentional.”

He adds that if he could leave one message about this podcast, it would be for educators to think about how they’re being authentic, and how they’re being intentional in their approach to inclusiveness.

Each episode of the podcast ends with a “key takeaway”, which is a concrete action item that an educator could implement in the classroom immediately to help make it more accessible and inclusive for people that may be facing a variety of obstacles to their educational journey.

So far, Covaser has released 10 episodes, with his intended audience being educators in Canadian primary and secondary schools. The education system is under provincial jurisdiction so he has focused the first episodes on his experience in BC, but says he is hoping to generate tools that are useful to all educators.

Listen to the “Help Teach” Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Transistor.

Jim Tanner at his retirement party, December 2013

By Carolyn MacHardy, Professor Emerita (Art History), UBC Okanagan

Jim Tanner, who died on September 18, 2022, was a highly respected teacher, colleague and friend. He taught painting and drawing at OUC, and then at UBCO from 1983 to 2014, when he retired. He is survived by his wife, Dianne, and their children Aria and Mark.

Jim’s years at OUC and UBCO involved teaching, a lot of committee work, and administration, including serving as Department Chair of Fine Arts from 1998 to 2001.  He was a sought-after adviser for the intensive fourth year B.F.A studio course, and both students and colleagues valued his astute comments and his ability to encourage students to push through on their ideas.

Jim had a broad range of interests: in his paintings he drew from Romantic poetry as in his Keatsian On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer, and from the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio in Interruption. He read widely, often sharing favourite books with others:  Sid Marty’s Men for the Mountains and Tim Cope’s On the Trail of Ghenghis Khan open windows onto Jim’s love for all things to do with mountains and traveling. Jim’s passion for the mountains was apparent in everything he did: they appear in many of his paintings and they prompted many extended hikes throughout BC and beyond with friends and family. Jim’s knowledge of alpinism in Canada was both personal and professional, and he was a life time member of the Alpine Club of Canada.

Jim was a sincere and gentle man who had great integrity.  I always thought that his creative space was the wider world beyond the confines of his studio: it was the mountains, the seacoast, and his own backyard where he delighted in being a “watcher of the skies”.

Carolyn MacHardy
Professor Emerita (Art History)

Jim Tanner (right), along with his wife, Dianne Tanner (left), and BFA alumnus Kyle Miller (centre) at Jim’s retirement party, December 2013.

Dr. Kelly Doyle

Dr. Kelly Doyle earned an Interdisciplinary PhD from UBCO in 2015. She is a member of the International Gothic Association, the Popular Culture Association of the South, and The Society for Cinema and Media Studies. A faculty member in Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU)’s English department, she teaches horror fiction and film, critical theory, and university writing, and she chairs the search committee. She is an advisory board member, reviewer, author, and lead copyeditor for KPU’s official film studies publication, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration. In her spare time, she can be found weightlifting, practicing calisthenics, or watching horror films!

We met up with Kelly to talk to her about her time here at UBC Okanagan and what she is doing now.

Tell us a bit about your dissertation.

Shortly after 9/11, there was a zombie renaissance in film and I became interested in understanding why. Using posthuman philosophy I explored how the figure of the zombie in horror films from 2001 to 2012 exposes and challenges the discursive formulation of what it means to be human in the context of historical events like 9/11: who can be othered, and to what end. I argued that exploring the limits of the human prompts a consideration of the human capacity for ethics and social justice since if boundaries do not hold between races, sexes, and species, it becomes impossible to justify sexism, speciesism, and racism in the world outside the screen. In films from 28 Days Later to Resident Evil to World War Z, there are mediations on American Exceptionalism, 9/11, genocide, and other touchstone societal anxieties that deserve close critical scrutiny.

Tell us about the road to earning your UBC degree and some highlights of your time here.

I chose to come because of Jodey Castricano. There was simply nobody else I wanted to work with who I felt could help me do my project justice. Tempering expectations living in a smaller place was difficult at first, but I wouldn’t trade the experience. I overcame challenges by seeking support from my supervisor and my new grad school friends. Nobody has the mental fortitude to get through grad studies alone! Highlights would be the long hours with friends in the grad student office, alternating serious work with serious silliness. Organizing the graduate student conference. The day I won a teaching award, and the day I successfully defended my dissertation with the support of my committee. FCCS faculty and friends in the defense room and outside of it. Social events with classmates and professors, and interesting but challenging classes.

Is there a professor that stands out as someone who made a difference and helped you along the way? 

My supervisor, Dr. Castricano was pivotal to my success. They believed in my project from the first email I sent and modelled professionalism, confidence, and success. Working with Dr. Stouck was also key to getting me where I am today. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Dr. Grinnell, as well as Dr. Francisco Pena. Dr. Daniel Keyes helped me to refine my approach to film and forwarded me conferences and calls for papers that might be of interest.

It’s been seven years since you completed your dissertation, what are you doing now and what are your future plans?

As a faculty member in KPU, I’ve developed four courses that center around horror film, fiction, and transmedia, with another upper-level course on horror film in development. I am also working with the Vancouver Horror Show Film Festival as a guest judge for their Table Read series, a horror film script competition. One of my film studies assignments offers the option to make a short horror film to the VHS. In the future, I have some exciting ideas for collaboration with other institutions and departments at KPU, field trips for film students, more publishing, research, and conferences in my areas of interest, and a revising of my film course on the evolution of the zombie in horror film.

Lastly, what advice would you have for a student who is contemplating currently pursuing their graduate degree at UBCO?

First, take care of yourself. I struggled mentally and physically near the end of my degree as I packed on weight and sustained back and wrist issues. If I could go back, I would insist on treating my nutrition and fitness as a priority. Second, you are going to struggle. Make friends with your classmates; you’ll need to laugh and commiserate. Third, advocate for yourself. Apply to conferences and scholarships, and if your relationship with your committee or supervisor isn’t working, change it. Fourth, plan for the future: keep your CV updated throughout your program and seek out advice about job interviews and how to be a successful candidate. Finally, when you convocated, take some time to enjoy what you’ve accomplished instead of worrying about what comes next.

Hummingbird flag installed in the courtyard at UBC Okanagan

Students and faculty from UBCO came together for a series of workshops to carve a hummingbird relief print in honour of the children (little spirits) who never came home and to remember the unmarked graves at residential schools across Canada. Offered by Indigenous Faculty Tania Willard (Secwepemc and settler), Assistant Professor in Visual Arts, the project featuring hundreds of flags installed in the courtyard at UBCO the installation, with dozens of uniquely carved hummingbird images, will grow each year as we gather and take action to as we continue to demand justice for Indigenous communities and realise the impact on all of us.

Special thanks to all of the contributing artists:

• Alex Basaraba
• Autumn  Beehley
• Renay Egami
• Tessa Gough
• Liz Hilliard
• Mei Henderson
• Asahna (Casey) Hughes
• Tess Lea
• Astrida Neimanis
• Dante Nieuwold
• Shauna Oddieifson
• Julia Pearson
• Katherine Pickering
• Nasim Pirhadi
• Alisha Salim
• Madison Tardif
• Carrie Terbrasket
• Odelle Walthers
• Tania Willard
• Holly Anne Yacynuk

The flags were installed at UBC Okanagan in the courtyard from September 29 to Oct. 3, 2022. See photos of the process of creating, printing and installing the flags.

Katherine Pickering and Liz Hillard creating their humming bird images on the lino blocks

Carrie Terbrasket, Tess Lea and Astrida Neimanis creating their hummingbird designs on the lino blocks

Some of the completed lino blocks

Students Dante Nieuwold and Nasim Pirhadi printing the lino blocks onto the orange fabric

Some of the completed printed flags

Installing the flags in the courtyard

Tania Willard with the installed flags

Dr. Nikhita Obeegadoo

Nikhita Obeegadoo joined UBC Okanagan in July 2022 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and World Literatures. She is originally from Mauritius, an African archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Nikhita holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, as well as undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Comparative Literature from Stanford University. Her research focuses on oceans and archipelagoes as spaces of intertwined cultural and ecological legacies.

At UBCO, she currently teaches courses on the environmental and medical humanities, as well as on francophone women’s writings. As part of her commitment to decolonizing knowledge, Nikhita’s courses foreground texts and theories emerging from various regions of Africa, South Asia and Latin America, as well as from archipelagic spaces across the world.

Dr. Obeegadoo shared some insights on her teaching and research practices.

What brought you to UBCO?

When I first saw the job posting for an Assistant Professorship in Francophone and Transcultural African Studies at UBCO, I was immediately compelled: While most of the world, including elite academic institutions, continues to view Africa as a monolith, here was a job that had the transcultural aspects of Africa embedded in its very title! It was impossible for me not to apply. Although I had never heard of the Okanagan or UBCO before, I was excited to move to a completely new part of the world, and to contribute to a young university that is still very much growing and defining itself. So, here I am!

Tell us about your research interests

My research explores how contemporary writers from the Indian Ocean and Caribbean (re)imagine the ocean as a space of simultaneously threatened cultural memory and multispecies ecology. In many literary texts, the ocean functions as an archive, that holds within itself traces of intergenerational trauma from the Middle Passage, the Kala Pani crossing, and clandestine migrations. At the same time, it is a space of rising tides and plastic pollution, that chokes out the bodies of dead dolphins on beaches only accessible to tourists. How can literature help us work through the complex ways in which past colonial violence and present environmental challenges are linked? How can it help us give shape to the various feelings, from climate anxiety to survivor’s guilt, that one might associate with the sea? And finally, how can it better equip us to respond to pressing intertwined challenges of our time, including climate change and calls for reparations?

What kind of learning experiences do offer your students?

My courses are highly interactive: We read lots of great contemporary literature about topics that are very hard to deal with, such as enslavement and incurable diseases, and we talk about and engage with these themes in a variety of ways. If students are to take away one skill from my courses, it is the ability to hold conversations about difficult and interlinked topics such as race, colonialism, gender, climate change and global health in a highly rigorous and yet deeply culturally sensitive and respectful manner. Imagine what a different place the world might be, if we did not tiptoe uncomfortably around these topics or brush them under the carpet, but instead were equipped with the tools to engage them in intellectually and ethically productive ways!

What most excites you about your field of work? 

At this particular moment in history, conversations about past injustices are gaining momentum both within and beyond academia, and I am excited by literature’s potential to help us explore important questions around identity and our relationship to others. One question that frequently comes up in both my teaching and research is the following: What does it mean to “compare” experiences across different cultures? For example, multiple literary texts attempt to foster empathy for enslaved subjects by comparing their trauma to that encountered by WWII prisoners in concentration camps. How can that kind of comparison be problematic, even if it is borne from the best intentions? The classroom is a great safe space to foster these kinds of discussions, which then find their way into the real world.

Tell us about any recent awards

Last year, I was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which allowed me the time and freedom to conduct essential fieldwork and finish writing my dissertation. One of the most precious experiences of that time was the ability to travel to San Basilio de Palenque in northern Colombia. The Palenque began as a settlement of maroon slaves during the seventeenth century, and continues to preserve its distinct cultural and linguistic heritage, including palenquero, a Spanish-based creole. Visiting the Palenque reframed my research in an important way, from legacies of colonialism (which can be depressing to focus on) to more empowering legacies of resilience, creativity and joie de vivre in the face of all odds that enslaved peoples have bequeathed our generation. At the same time, the visit reminded me of the need to keep fighting for history to be preserved: one of the community members explained that palenquero is slowly vanishing, as people move away from the Palenque to big cities for work.

What: Workshop: Indigenizing the Japanese Language Curriculum: Lessons and Perspectives from Indigenous Voices
Location: Online via Zoom
When: Friday, October 14 from 12:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m (PDT)

Many foreign language instructors are undertaking the important work of indigenizing the language learning curriculum, and are looking for theoretical frameworks and real-life examples of how Indigenization can be applied in our field. This workshop will borrow the case of the Ainu, the Indigenous peoples of Japan, as the example for indigenizing a foreign language course of study, but teachers of any foreign languages related to colonized peoples will benefit from the discussions of theory, pedagogy, and practical applications. The workshop will be conducted in English with translation provided where necessary. The first half of the workshop will address theoretical questions regarding Indigenization, Decolonization and the particular case of the Ainu. The second half will focus on hearing the experience and methodologies of instructors involved in teaching Indigenous languages both within formal academic institutions and in community settings.

Schedule

12:30 Welcome

12:45  What does it Mean to be Ainu in the 21^st Century?

Dr. Kanako Uzawa, Artist, Activist and Affiliated Researcher at Hokkaido University

1:15  What Does it Mean to “Indigenize” the Curriculum?

Dr. Kerrie Charnley, English and Cultural Studies, UBC Okanagan

20 minute presentation followed by 5 minute Q&A

 1:45  What Does it Mean to “Decolonize” the Language-Learning Curriculum?

Dr. Ryuko Kubota, Professor, University of British Columbia Vancouver

Group discussions of speaker-suggested and related questions

3:15  Syilx Language House Model

Dr. Michele Johnson, Executive Director, and Instructor, Okanagan College

3:40  Sito Channel, Nibutani Ainu Language School and Te Ataarangi Model

Ms. Maya Sekine and Mr. Kenji Sekine

4:05   Other Indigenous Language Models – Mayan

Dr. Monica Good, University of British Columbia Okanagan

4:30  Demonstration of Sample Open Educational Resource

Ms. Nina Langton, University of British Columbia Okanagan

4:40  Group discussions about potential lesson plans, learning objects, applications of the theory and models

The workshop is free and open to all secondary and post-secondary foreign language instructors.

Indigenizing Curriculum presentations

The workshop is generously supported by the Japan Foundation Toronto, the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, and the Department of Languages and World Literatures.

Please contact Nina Langton at nina.langton@ubc.ca for more information.

Jon Vickery

Dr. Vickery joined UBCO in 2006 as a sessional instructor, and is now a full time Lecturer in the Department of English and Cultural studies. He is currently teaching first-year courses in literary genre, second year courses in historical literature, and a popular literature course in science fiction.

Dr. Vickery shared some insights on his research and teaching practices here at UBC Okanagan.

What brought you to UBCO?

My wife and I were living in downtown Toronto when we felt a strong tug to exchange the big city for big mountain views. Once I had completed the residency for my doctoral program at the University of Toronto, we moved to Kelowna where I wrote my dissertation while working as a sessional instructor (starting in 2006) at the newly minted UBC Okanagan. It was an important move for us and one that we’ve never regretted. Being part of UBCO since its early days, watching it grow and develop, has been a rich experience and I’m excited for good things to come.

Tell us about your research interests.

My research focuses on religious text in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, a period when Europe changed profoundly through the seismic activity of multiple reformations, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. These religious renewal movements affected society at every level and the literature of the period reflects the deep spirituality and the theological energies of the time. My own research looks to the complex phenomenon of English Puritanism which had a profound influence on such momentous literary figures as John Milton and John Bunyan. My writing considers Puritanism as an intellectual movement, looking to its sources and demonstrating, among other things, its dependence upon the philosophical wealth of medieval scholasticism. While some influential studies have characterized the Puritans as largely distrustful of and hostile to the larger Catholic tradition, I seek to situate some notable Puritan writers in a more intellectually generous and ecumenical stream.

How did you know you wanted to be a professor?

Not long before entering my BA program, I purchased a volume by the Oxford scholar, CS Lewis: his Preface to Paradise Lost. At the time, I was out of my depth, but Lewis’ influence upon me was and continues to be incalculable. When I entered the university as an undergraduate, I knew that I wanted, in some small way at least, to be like this Oxford writer. Happily, my first English professor turned out to be an admirer of Lewis as well, which mutual appreciation has been profoundly formative in its own way.

In the fourth year of my undergrad, I presented a paper to my fellow students on Hamlet and the Kierkegaardian concept of dread. The next day my Shakespeare professor stopped me in the hall and strongly recommended that I dedicate my life to this kind of teaching. It was a striking moment, and it underscores for me the significance of a professor’s influence outside the classroom. I’ve carried her words (and Kierkegaard’s concept) with me ever since.

What is your own process in writing?

I’ve learned over time to expect relatively little from myself in my first draft. It took a wise professor to persuade me that my first draft will usually be poor indeed (he used a scatological term) and that it’s the editorial process that transforms base elements into richer metals. Without the pressure of creating a brilliant first draft, writing is a much more enjoyable and far more fruitful enterprise. Martin Luther in the sixteenth century famously encouraged his readers to “sin boldly.” He has since been widely misunderstood, but, if I might apply his dictum in a literary direction, I think it’s good advice for the writer. Sin boldly in the draft. Get it out, with all its faults and defects. Editing takes what is weak and makes it strong.