SETS professors Pablo Ramirez and Michelle Elleray discuss the new initiative
The University of Guelph recently announced that it will be offering a new creative writing minor starting in the fall 2017 semester.
A Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program is offered through the Guelph-Humber campus in Toronto, but undergraduate students have had limited creative writing course options until now.
A number of brand new creative writing workshops, as well as reinvigorated courses, will start to roll out throughout the next academic year, thanks to the efforts of faculty from the School of English and Theatre Studies (SETS), including Pablo Ramirez, Michelle Elleray, Dionne Brand, Ann Wilson, Sofie Lachapelle, and Alan Filewod, as well as the coordinator of the Guelph-Humber MFA program, Catherine Bush.
The Ontarion had the opportunity to sit down for an interview with Prof. Ramirez, as well as coordinate a separate interview with Prof. Elleray through e-mail.
Karen K. Tran: What motivated you to put together the creative writing minor?
Pablo Ramirez: Michelle (Elleray) was volunteering at the Parkdale Project which takes MFA students and brings them to the local high school and elementary school to help teach them creative writing. So she was volunteering there and she thought it would be a great idea to somehow create a closer connection between SETS and the Guelph-Humber MFA program. I have served on admissions committees for the Guelph-Humber programs and as a secondary reader for MFA theses and I think they’re an incredibly talented group, so I was all for creating a closer relationship between us and Guelph-Humber.
As I was reading the admissions portfolios, I also realized that, although older applicants had a distinct advantage over the younger applicants, I found that the younger applicants had particularly strong portfolios because they had come out of a creative writing minor or major and that our own students—even though they were quite talented, because we didn’t have that kind of minor—were at a disadvantage if they were to apply straight out of university. So I felt that there was enough talent here both in the faculty and in the student body to create a really exciting creative writing minor.
Michelle Elleray: A creative writing minor (and hopefully one day, major) seemed like a missing link: we have professors in SETS who are creative writers, SETS regularly hosts a writer-in-residence, and we have a great Master’s program in creative writing, but there was nothing formally established for our undergraduate students. Now they can be taught skills in creating compelling narratives, then have those skills recognized on their transcript.
KT: How long has this project been in the works? Have there been any complications?
PR: Creating a minor is a very lengthy project. We began back in late 2014, early 2015 and we worked in the summer consulting with various members of the Guelph writing MFA program—with Dionne Brand as well. It took about a year-and-a-half for us to complete the proposal.
There were a few complications in terms of how to create a minor that would actually help students create a polished portfolio. We needed to convince the University that we needed a fourth-year capstone seminar, which is unusual for a minor. So we’re asking our minors to complete a full credit, 4000-level workshop which will function as a capstone experience. They’ll write about 7000 words and hopefully, by the end of that seminar, not only will it be the culmination of all the training they’ve received in the other workshops, but also produce a portfolio that they can use for admission into an MFA program.Who else has been involved with the establishment of the creative writing minor?
ME: The four SETS faculty who first met in a café and brainstormed what the minor should look like were Dionne Brand, Catherine Bush, Pablo Ramirez, and myself. Since then, Lawrence Hill has joined the faculty and has been doing wonderful work teaching creative writing at the undergraduate level and establishing the common reading project.
KT: What are some of the new courses being offered under the new minor?
PR: Right now, we have ENGL 2920 (Creative Writing: Fiction) and ENGL 2940 (Creative Writing: Poetry), and they’re both lecture-format. The major change we’re doing is going from the lecture format to a focus on a workshop experience, with a limit of 20 to 25 students.
ENGL 2920 remains the same, while ENGL 2940 is being deleted and turned into a third-year poetry workshop.
So there’s ENGL 2920, which everyone has to take, and students have to take two of the following creative writing workshops in fiction, poetry, special topics, screenwriting, or a playwriting workshop. We had to create the fiction, poetry, screenwriting, and special topics workshops—[those were the] four new workshop classes created. And we turned the 4000-level writing course into a full credit, which requires students to write a great deal more.
KT: Why is it important that the University start to offer this new minor?
PR: There’s a great need [and] a great demand for it. I’ve noticed as an advisor that whenever our creative writing workshops and courses were open for enrolment, they’d fill up in a day or two. I’d get dozens and dozens of emails from students wanting to take these courses, telling me that it was their last semester at Guelph and that they really wanted a creative writing workshop experience or at least some kind of exposure to creative writing and we weren’t able to accommodate them, unfortunately.
So, I realized there was a great demand for creative writing. I used to teach ENGL 2920 as a workshop and, because of demand, it turned into a lecture. I also realized that there’s a lot of talented University of Guelph students here and we weren’t able to really foster that talent to the full extent. I think that we can now.
ME: While the minor obviously benefits a student who wants to become a creative writer, it’s also helpful for anyone who needs to be able to tell a good story or convince an audience to see things a particular way. Marketing is one example—how do you create a narrative that makes your product seem more desirable than a competing product? Or take science—how do you explain the value and relevance of complex scientific research to the general public?
KT: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
PR: I think it’s a really exciting opportunity and I’m really thrilled that we’re finally making use of a great deal of our talents here—at least, much more fully than we used to. We have Dionne Brand, who is a noted poet and novelist. We also have Larry Hill and Judith Thompson, who has won the Governor General’s Award several times for drama. We also have Sky Gilbert and Stephen Henighan. We have all these writers on campus and I’m really hoping that the creative writing minor will help bring everyone together and form a really active and vibrant creative writing community here at Guelph.
Editors Note: These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Feature photo by Karen K. Tran.