Friday, October 19, 2007

Creative Writing at Capilano: Spring 2008


Spring 2008 Creative Writing Courses will be registering soon -- here is some course information:



English 191-01
Creative Writing II - Crystal Hurdle
When is a poem really a story? When should you leave a draft alone? Through in-class writing, weekly homework assignments, and personal projects, you will write up a storm in a number of genres. You’ll be introduced to professional writers, from Lorna Crozier to bp Nichol, from Thomas King to Gabriel Garcia Márquez, all in aid of developing your own style.


Required Texts:
  • Gary Geddes, ed. 20th-Century Poetry & Poetics
  • Gary Geddes, ed. The Art of Short Fiction
  • The Capilano College issue of TCR (Winter/Spring 2007)


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English 191-02 Creative Writing II - Ryan Knighton
In English 191 we will continue to develop our skills by asking how writing can be made, not what it might mean. Specifically, we will further engage with questions of poetry, microfiction, and so-called creative non-fiction, as directed by their form and history. Our workshops, however, are neither roundtable editing sessions, nor, worse, copyediting boot camps. Rather, we will share draft examples of our own work in order to further our discussions, to expose new questions, and to seek the effects of craft. Some case examples from published works may be provided in class, but our own writing will serve as the primary texts. So will Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, which is pretty damned fine. By the final class, students should have at least one reworked submission of writing ready for a magazine or periodical. To that end we will survey some of the nuts-and-bolts of pitching and publishing, too.


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English 191-03 Creative Writing II - Reg Johanson
This course will focus on poetry and fiction. Our interests in fiction will be on the sub-genre of “biofiction.” Our interests in poetry will be very broad, including the sonnet, the “social,” documentary forms, aleatorics, and work inspired by “language” poetics. We will also be attending the OpenText reading series sponsored by the College and the Canada Council. We will read as much as we write, finding out what we can about the work and methods of the writers we read.


Required Texts:

  • Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill.
  • Farr, Roger. Surplus.
  • The Capilano College issue of TCR (Winter/Spring 2007)

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English 290-01
- Creative Writing (Poetry) – Roger Farr
Poetry and Poetics of the Small Press: The small press revolutionized poetry in the second half of the twentieth century by shifting attention away from an earlier obsession with “the well-wrought urn, or “the perfect poem,” and focusing instead on the poem as the interface between a writer’s process, the process of print production, and a literary community. In this spirit, ENGL 290 will give students practice in both the writing of poetry and in small press production, in both print and digital forms. Thus, in addition to our class discussions and practice with poetic forms and techniques, we will consider the material and visual aspects of poetry: the page, the book, fonts, layout, paper, the fold, etc., and how these aspects contribute to our sense of what a poem is, or can be. We will attend readings by poets visiting the campus as part of the Open Text Series and discuss their work with them; and, to familiarize ourselves with the printing process, we will tour a print-shop which uses the latest “print on demand” technology to produce small runs of high-quality books. Finally, if we can muster sufficient resources, we might experiment with this technology by publishing a collection of our own poems in book form.


Required Texts:

  • Farr, Roger ed. The Open Text Reader: Fall 2007.
  • Other small-press texts will be available from the instructor in-class.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

OPEN TEXT READING SERIES: LISSA WOLSAK

Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts
& the
Creative Writing Concentration at Capilano College

The FALL 2007 OPEN TEXT series at Capilano College continues on October 18th, 2007 with a reading by Lissa Wolsak.

October 18th
Library 195 @ 12:30
Capilano College
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver


LISSA WOLSAK lives in Vancouver, British Columbia where she works as an energy/thought-field therapist and as a goldsmith. A poet and essayist, she has has authored several long poem sequences including: Pen Chants or nth or 12 spirit-like impermanences (Roof, 2000), An Heuristic Prolusion (Documents in Poetics, 2000), The Garcia Family Co-Mercy (Tsunami, 1994), A Defence of Being, and THRALL. Squeezed Light: Collected Works 1995 - 2007 is forthcoming from Station Hill Press.


from its desto, adualurescence

from its hair-space, azimuth

confessional yields

victims winched to a tortoise

spreadeaglism.. posture-sur-

faces escape into the cloth,

dress-groups inter-marry....

so throve close-woven


Come, vapour-bath, come.


-- from Pen Chants

For info:
Roger Farr
rfarr@capcollege.bc.ca
604.986.1911 (2554)


http://capilanocreativewriting.blogspot.com