Vancouver Manuscript Intensive mentors are respected, published authors in their field. Second only to the writing process itself is their passion for sharing skills and ideas, and embarking on a successful learning process with VMI writers.
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Creative Nonfiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Mixed-Genre Narratives
Betsy is the founder and program director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She designed and directed The Writer’s Studio at S.F.U. from 2001-2012; and has been a TWS Mentor or on TWS faculty for many of the past twenty years. She has also been on faculty as Sage Hill Writing Experience (SK), as well as U.B.C.’s Booming Ground, Metchosin International Summer School of the Art, and Smithers Rural Writers Retreat (all in B.C.).
Betsy has been a manuscript consultant and editor for more than 30 years and has published 14 books of creative nonfiction, poetry and mixed genre. Her best-selling book of 24 essays on writing, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant Books, 2010), has received critical acclaim. Writers and authors she has mentored have gone on to publish books and win, or be shortlisted for, numerous major awards.
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Rachel Rose (VMI Co-Associate Director) is the author of four collections of poetry, including Marry & Burn, which received a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for a Governor General’s Award. Her memoir, The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops, was shortlisted for the 2018 Arthur Ellis award for best non-fiction crime book. A former fellow at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, she is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Vancouver and has taught creative writing at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio (TWS), Simon Fraser University’s Continuing Education Program, Washington State’s Poets in the Schools, the University of British Columbia, Kwantlen University, and, at present, Vancouver Manuscript Intensive (VMI). Recent fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Antioch Review, The New Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review and Joyland. http://rachelsprose.weebly.com/
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Poetry and Creative Nonfiction (VMI solo)
Elee Kraljii Gardiner (VMI Co-Associate Director) is a creative mentor, editor and poet with a decade of experience leading workshops and facilitating writing projects. Elee founded Thursdays Writing Collective, a non-profit, low-barrier program of creative writing classes with more than 150 writers from the Downtown Eastside, and is the editor and publisher of nine of the Collective’s anthologies.
Her first book of poems, serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016), was nominated for the 2017 Raymond Souster Award and named twice to The Walrus Magazine’s “Best of 2016” list. Her second book, the long poem memoir Trauma Head (Anvil Press, 2019), won the Fred Cogswell Award, and was nominated for the Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and the Raymon Souster Award. She is coeditor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), an open-genre anthology which was shortlisted for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award. In 2019 Anvil Press published Against Death: 35 Essays on Living, an anthology collecting creative non fiction from people who have come close to death. Against Death was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and the runner-up in the Short Story/Anthology category of the Hoffer Awards in the US and is one of BookWarehouse’s Best Books of 2019. Elee is the recipient of CV2’s Lina Chartrand Award for Social Justice and is the recipient of the 2015 Pandora’s Collective BC Writer Mentor Award. A frequent collaborator, she holds an MA in Hispanic Literature from UBC and an MFA in Poetry from the Institute for American Indian Arts. She is originally from Boston.
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Claudia has written three novels: The Reconstruction, a best-seller, published by Penguin Canada and in the UK, US, and Germany; The Continuation of Love by Other Means, also published by Penguin and short-listed for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; and most recently, The Mercy Journals, published by Arsenal Pulp Press and winner of the 2017 Phillip K. Dick Award for distinguished science-fiction. She has also written creative non-fiction (Event Magazine, Geist, Lit-Hub, Globe and Mail, Dropped Threads etc.), book reviews for the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun, and is currently collaborating on France/Canada feature film adaptation of her first novel. She has taught as a sessional at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and appeared at the 2017 Iceland Writer’s Retreat, and most recently the Pasadena LitFest. She will be the Whistler writer-in-residence for 2018. She has been a mentor with VMI for 9 years.
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Cathleen’s first book, skids (Arsenal Pulp, 2006), about street kids on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, was short-listed for a Relit Award. Among her many adventures, Cathleen has worked at a camp for disabled kids in Squamish, and in Hawaii and Australia. She served as a drama educator in Kathmandu, a caregiver at Mother Teresa’s Home in Calcutta, a teacher to former sex trade kids in Cambodia, and as a teacher in Inuvik, NT, and Seoul, Korea. Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison (winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award), is her first novel. She was proud to be in the City of Vancouver short-listed anthology V6A: Writing from the Downtown Eastside (Arsenal 2013).
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Screenwriting and Long-form Fiction
Aren X. Tulchinsky, the writer formerly known as Karen X. Tulchinsky, is an award-winning screenwriter, story editor, novelist and director. He’s the author of The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, winner of the One Book One Vancouver Prize in 2008, was a Toronto Book Award Finalist and was recently named one of the Top Ten Books about Toronto by the Toronto Star. He’s the author of Love Ruins Everything, Love and Other Ruins and In Her Nature, which won the Vancity Book Prize. He’s written seven feature screenplays, several in development, including I Shot the Sheriff for acclaimed director Clement Virgo (Book of Negroes). He’s story edited numerous screenplays, working with screenwriters from across Canada to develop their scripts. He has worked as story editor, writer and director on many television series, including The Guard, Robson Arms, Kink, The Bachelor Canada, Timber Kings and CBC’s The Nature of Things. He directed Ms. Thing, which has screened at over 50 film festivals internationally, including screenings in Paris, London, San Francisco, New York, Sicily, Hamburg and Mumbai. It won Audience Choice Award at Queerfruits Australia. He teaches screen and television writing at UBC’s Writing Centre and is a graduate of the prestigious Canadian Film Centre, the National Screen Institute, Praxis Centre for Screenwriters and Women in the Director’s Chair at the Banff Centre.
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Poetry and Creative Nonfiction
Evelyn Lau is a Vancouver writer who has published twelve books, including seven volumes of poetry. Her first book, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (HarperCollins, 1989), published when she was 18, was a bestseller and made into a CBC film starring Sandra Oh in her first movie role. Evelyn’s short stories and novel have been translated into a dozen languages; her poetry has received the Milton Acorn Award, the Pat Lowther Award, a National Magazine Award, a BC Book Prize nomination and a Governor-General’s nomination. Evelyn served as 2011-2014 Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.
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Jónína Kirton is a Métis/Icelandic poet/author and facilitator. Born in Treaty One (Portage la Prairie, Manitoba) she currently lives in the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh. A Room Magazine editorial board member she is one of the co-founders of their new reading series, Indigenous Brilliance, an exciting new partnership between Room and Massy Books. She is also the curator of their new online poetry series, Turtle Island Responds. Kirton received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. She was sixty when she published her first collection of poetry with Talonbooks in 2015. Much to her delight, page as bone ~ ink as blood, has received critical acclaim. Two years later she brought us her second collection, An Honest Woman, again with Talonbooks. The book was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Betsy Warland had this to say about An Honest Woman: “Kirton picks over how she was raised familially and culturally like a crime scene.” Apparently, all that dreaming about being a Nancy Drew when she grew up did come to fruition. Just not the way she thought it would as a child.
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry for Port of Being, forthcoming with Invisible Publishing in fall 2018. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Awards and Alberta Magazine Awards. Her fiction has been longlisted for the Fiddlehead’s fiction prize and received an honourable mention for The Humber Literary Review’s Emerging Writers Fiction Contest, judged by Cherie Dimaline and Ayelet Tsabari. Her fiction is forthcoming in The Humber Literary Review, her poetry is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2018, and her writing has appeared in venues such as Quill & Quire, Vallum, Metatron’s OMEGA and ALPHA, The Puritan, CV2, Room, The Capilano Review, Canadian Literature. Shazia has offered publishing consultations and worked as an editor for various presses and magazines across Canada. She is currently an editor for the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts and Metatron Press. In April 2018, she founded the Intersections Reading Group, a monthly series dedicated to discussing race, gender, class, and ability in writing and in life. Prosopopoeia (Anstruther Press, 2017) is her first chapbook. Shazia lives in East Van.
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Essays, memoir, hybrid work and other CNF
Susan Olding writes essays, poetry, fiction, and less easily classifiable things. Her writing has won a National Magazine Award, the TNQ’s Edna Staebler Essay Award, the Prairie FireContest, and two EventCreative Nonfiction contests, and appears widely in literary journals and anthologies throughout Canada and the US. Her first book, Pathologies: A Life in Essays,has become a popular teaching text. A second book of essays is forthcoming from Freehand Books in 2021. Currently, Susan’s a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, where her dissertation project is a hybrid work about transracial adoption.
With decades as a professional teacher, mentor, and editor in settings ranging from community literacy centres to secondary school English classrooms to graduate-level seminars, Susan also serves as a private instructor and manuscript consultant to individuals and literary presses. She especially loves writing that blurs generic boundaries and engages the mind and heart in unexpected ways.
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