creative writing

The course, taught by poet and U of T Mississauga lecturer Andrea Thompson, aims to cultivate students' skill in the "empowering art form," Thompson says.

Andrea Thompson

“The goal is to create a transformative experience that changes students’ lives.”

The students in the third-year course are set to show off what they learned at a showcase at the MiST Theatre on April 11.

Thompson had previously taught spoken word at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies, but the U of T Mississauga class – offered as a special topics in creative writing course – is the first credit course in spoken word offered at that campus.

“There aren’t a lot of spoken-word courses being taught [anywhere] as credit courses,” Thompson says. “I was really excited about this, and so were the students.”

Sumyia Hashmi, who will be performing at the showcase, says the course has enhanced her writing and poetry skills.

“I hope it’s a recurring course at the university,” says Hashmi, a fourth-year student studying English with a minor in creative writing.

Hashmi had been writing short stories and prose since Grade 9, but didn't become interested in poetry until coming to U of T Mississauga. After taking a series of courses on poetry and literature, including Thompson's spoken-word class, Hashmi says she's "come out of her shell."

The course taught her not just how to write poetry and recite it, she notes, but also to collaborate with other students, develop critical thinking and articulate her ideas.

Instead of a typical lecture format, Thompson gives her students weekly assignments and writing prompts, encouraging them to work interactively and share their work in open discussions before they perform their poetry.

“A lot of us were nervous at first,” Hashmi says, adding that after hearing Thompson read from her own work and inviting discussion, the students became more comfortable with spoken word as an art form.

A spoken-word performance involves much more than reading words on a page, Thompson says. There is a dramatic element to reciting the poem that involves body language, word choice, pauses, gestures and more.

“You want to use everything in your physicality,” she says. “You use stance breaks, line breaks, word choice – all these tools."

Thompson, who recently released her own spoken-word album, The Good Word, says she's excited to see her students' takes on performing the work they developed in the course.

"Your voice is the number-one tool to take what’s in your head and heart – and on the page – and make that come alive.”

U of T's Randy Boyagoda discusses his new novel, inspired by Dante and set in small-town Indiana

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 14:40:48 +0000

U of T's Randy Boyagoda discusses his new novel, inspired by Dante and set in small-town Indiana

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 09/20/2021 - 10:40

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(Photo by Derek Shapton)

Sean McNeely

Topic

Our Community

creative writing

Department of English

Faculty of Arts & Science

Jackman Humanities Institute

Though 700 years have passed since the death of the great Medieval poet Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy, Randy Boyagoda believes the poem still has the power to connect with anyone who has lost their way.

Dante's Indiana is Boyagoda's second book in a planned trilogy following Original Prin, a satirical novel published in 2018. "It's a loose trilogy,” says Boyagoda, a professor in the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science and vice dean, undergraduate.

“Readers can come to this book not knowing about its predecessor and be totally fine, and just engage with this story.”

The trilogy loosely mirrors the three parts of The Divine Comedy: Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory) and Paradiso (heaven), charting Dante’s path to God.

Prin, the main character in Dante’s Indiana is an English professor who consults on a Dante-themed amusement park.

Original Prin was in a sense Inferno. Dante’s Indiana is Purgatorio, “and then we'll see what happens when I write the third novel in terms of Paradiso,” Boyagoda says.

In Dante’s Indiana, Prin is a middle-aged Sri Lankan-Canadian professor of English from Toronto who finds himself in a type of personal purgatory. He’s stuck, distanced physically and emotionally from his wife and kids, and in need of work, money and purpose.

He accepts an offer to consult on a Christian amusement park in Terre Haute, a rust belt Indiana city. The park is the retirement project of a wealthy packaging company owner and the only profitable business in town.

Prin quickly becomes involved in the complicated lives of his co-workers and in the wider struggles of their opioid-ravaged community while trying to reconcile with his family and his own religious beliefs.

Boyagoda says he still finds time to write despite having a busy academic career.

“Since graduate school, people have been telling me I can't do both, that I can't have this creative life alongside my academic life,” he says. “But I’m very fortunate, in that I've always been able to do it.”

Unlike some writers, Boyagoda says he doesn't require much sleep or structure to write. It’s not uncommon for him to wake at 4 or 5 in the morning and write before the school day begins. He also doesn't need to stick to a specific routine to be creative.

“Whatever I’m doing in my life and work as a university administrator and professor,” he says, “I’m also, somewhere inside, always still imagining, still writing, still telling a story.”

The inspiration for Boyagoda's trilogy came to him unexpectedly – while cleaning his car.

“I was vacuuming potato chips out of our car on a September morning in 2016 and I was listening to a BBC Radio adaptation of The Divine Comedy,” he says. “I’ve studied and read and taught it, but I wouldn’t say it had a significant relevance to my life and work before that moment.”

Listening to that broadcast, Boyagoda was struck by the narrator’s heavy breathing while reading the Inferno, portraying Dante as he made his way down through hell, traveling down an inverted mountain, passing over boulders and lakes of fire.

“I took for granted the physicality of the poem,” says Boyagoda. “That’s when I realized, ‘You know what we all need? A hiker’s guide to Dante.”

He proposed this idea as a Scholars-in-Residence project at the Jackman Humanities Institute. The following year, he worked with five Arts & Science students who joined Boyagoda in poring over old manuscripts and early visualizations. The result was a map of Inferno unlike any other, with detailed locations and descriptions of Dante’s journey.

“But then at some point, the hustling novelist in me took over from the respectable scholar,” says Boyagoda. “And I thought, ‘imagine this is a theme park.’”

As a professor of American literature, Boyagoda spends a lot of time thinking about modern and contemporary American literature, culture and public life. “And Dante’s vision of human experience, in ordinary and ultimate ways together, seemed like a perfect way in to write about America right now,” he says.

That examination of American life focuses on the town’s opioid crisis paired with economic struggles.

In Dante’s Indiana, the son of the packaging company’s owner realizes there’s only one way to keep the family business afloat: By packaging opioids for local distribution, although many of the families who work there have opioid-addicted children or have lost children to overdoses.

“It's a perfect business plan, a high-demand product that keeps everybody employed,” Boyagoda says. “It also seems like a perfect ‘Dantean situation'. The premise and ensuing problems let me explore all of the genuine and very serious human struggles of the novel’s characters.

“The big question of the novel then becomes, which one is going to save this town? The Dante theme park or the opioid-packaging local company? And how does Prin help the people around him, either way, and at the same time find his way home to his family?”

When readers find the answers to these questions, Boyagoda hopes they are able to identify with the story, like they do with The Divine Comedy.

“One of the great things about Dante is that no matter who you are, you can find yourself in the poem,” Boyagoda says. “It famously begins, ‘In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood where the direct way was lost.’”

“You've likely had that moment of feeling lost in the middle of your life, and you look for help – we all do,” Boyagoda says.

“My novel is very much informed by Dante, but it isn’t an homage to Dante. Instead, it’s part of a larger writing project of mine which, in this case, is very much about what it means to find yourself in a story where you weren't expecting to find yourself. With Dante’s Indiana, I hope readers find themselves in this story in ways they didn't expect.”

U of T creative writing team wins improv competition by combining laughs with storytelling

ullahnor — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 17:52:42 +0000

U of T creative writing team wins improv competition by combining laughs with storytelling

ullahnor Wed, 02/08/2017 - 12:52

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From left to right, U of T Scarborough students Cassandra MacDonald, Trevon Smith and Janet Monk are winners of the International Festival of Authors' Lit Jam (photo by Ken Jones)

Heather Beaumont

Author legacy

Heather Beaumont

Topic

Three talented creative writing students from U of T are winners of the International Festival of Authors’ inaugural Lit Jam – a timed, improvisational contest that matches storytelling teams against each other.

Lit Jam asks student teams to create a story entirely on the spot based on an opening phrase. Each team is given three minutes to develop their story backstage, then has to alternate improvising and developing their story onstage for another five minutes.

“Lit Jam is like Chopped, the cooking competition on TV,” says Trevon Smith, a fourth-year student in U of T Scarborough’s journalism program. “We’re given ingredients on the spot and then tasked with making something out of them.”

U of T Scarborough’s team, which competed against the University of Guelph, Ryerson University and the Humber School of Creative and Performing Arts, consisted of Smith and fellow students Janet Monk and Cassandra MacDonald. The competition was judged by a panel of published authors.

“I was sweating bullets before I went onstage,” says Smith. “Then everything clicked when I got up to the mic. I looked out at the audience. The lights were so bright. I couldn’t see faces, but I knew friends, family and professors were in the audience, and I knew they were rooting for us.”

Immediately after selecting the story prompt, “What’s with the soap?” the team exchanged knowing looks. They recognized the potential of a generic prompt and began developing an intriguing story arc about two inept killers before going back onstage. Their story had the audience in stitches.

“We’re starting to turn heads,” says Andrew Westoll, assistant professor, teaching stream from U of T Scarborough's department of English. “This is an important moment in the development and evolution of our creative writing program.”

Established three years ago, there are currently 50 students in the program at U of T Scarborough, which is unique for being the only program at U of T that allows students to earn a minor in creative writing. Westoll says he proud of the team, and the students' efforts reflect the talent coming out of the creative writing program.

In addition to winning $1,500, there are plans for the team to be interviewed for CBC Radio’s Here and Now, and a polished version of their improv story is to be published in NOW Toronto.

“The real prize is getting published and getting our names out there,” says Monk, a third-year major in music and culture. “The whole thing is absolutely mind-blowing. We were up against published people, people with awards.”

Smith, Monk and MacDonald first met in Westoll’s fiction class but really got to know each other and their different storytelling styles during weeks of one-hour practices before the Lit Jam competition.

At first, they weren’t sure how to hand the story off to each other to keep the flow going so they developed a finger-snapping strategy. When a teammate snapped his or her fingers, it was a signal to help out, explains Monk.

“The person who is not talking is saying, ‘I have an idea. Let me in, or I’ll lose it.’”

With each practice, the trio became more aware of their individual strengths, adds Monk

MacDonald, a third-year mental health studies student, calls Smith, “Left Turn Man” because Smith “enjoys taking stories in another direction to keep things exciting.”

“After a while we could read each other well enough to know when to step in,” MacDonald says. “Trust was our greatest strength as a team.”

From primatologist to novelist: Andrew Westoll’s creative writing journey

lavende4 — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 19:12:28 +0000

From primatologist to novelist: Andrew Westoll’s creative writing journey

lavende4 Wed, 08/24/2016 - 15:12

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Andrew Westoll teaching creative writing at the ��Ƶ Scarborough (Ken Jones photo)

Don Campbell

Author legacy

Don Campbell

Topic

Andrew Westoll has always been fascinated by stories about the natural world. As a child he would escape to the far reaches of the globe through the articles about Jane Goodall in the pages of National Geographic.

Westoll, who teaches creative writing at ��Ƶ Scarborough, started out as a primatologist. He spent a year in Suriname studying capuchin monkeys and it was there that he realized his true calling to become a writer. The experience inspired his first book The Riverbones: Stumbling After Eden in the Jungles of Suriname. He followed that up with The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, a biography of a family of chimps who were rescued from a research laboratory to live in an animal sanctuary near Montreal that earned him the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary non-fiction.

His new book The Jungle South of the Mountain (HarperCollins) marks his first foray into fiction. Writer Don Campbell spoke to Westoll about the novel and the inspiration for the protagonist Stanley, a researcher who has clearly been living alone in the bush for far too long.

What inspired you to try fiction?

It goes back to when I first started writing seriously because I started out wanting to write fiction. I was an aspiring fiction writer before I really knew about non-fiction. When I took a non-fiction course as an undergrad my mind was blown open by the possibilities, so I forgot about fiction for a while. Two years after The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary came out I was looking around for my next project and I had a couple of non-fiction ideas, but then this character Stanley, a monkey researcher, occurred to me. Once Stanley appeared in my mind and I understood what his predicament was, it was too compelling not to follow through with it.

What’s the most satisfying part of writing a novel compared to non-fiction?

I think the world-building that comes along with a novel. Not only the world you get to create but the character development as well. Those things are just as hard as they are satisfying. It also becomes a marathon of work, but when you get through it and discover the world you’ve created for these characters, it’s tremendously satisfying. There’s also satisfaction in developing a respectable plot. You need to have a plot where you can imagine it happening even if your story has elements of fantasy in it.

An interest in the natural world, and of primates in particular, is a familiar thread in your work. Where did that interest originate?

It’s hard to discount the influence Jane Goodall and National Geographic had on me. I grew up in Oakville and had a fairly suburban childhood. I wasn’t that adventurous. I certainly wasn’t going out hiking and camping every weekend, but I had a lot of adventures in my mind. When I could read National Geographic’s coverage of Jane Goodall I became engrossed by those stories. It’s that arm-chair travelling to the far-reaches of the globe where these extraordinary animals are living in full societies that just astounded me.

I also can’t discount my family’s history because my grandfather was a fairly well known paleontologist who taught at Harvard. My dad is also a geologist. Science has always been in my family and early on I had an aptitude for science.

Tell us about Stanley. Did you draw on any of your experience working as a primatologist in developing him?

Stanley’s a primatologist who has been living alone in the bush for far too long. The only thing he’s been doing for the past seven years has been studying and living among capuchin monkeys. The reason being is that seven years ago he and his wife split. His wife used to be there with him but they suffered a profound loss together in the forest. And their boss, Professor Collymore, suffered a breakdown and disappeared in the bush. He also has to start dealing with the trauma of his monkeys dying. They’re being killed off one by one and it triggers a whole bunch of turmoil from what he’s suffered in the past that he now has to deal with. So he starts out on an epic quest to figure out what’s happening to his monkeys.

The setting of the novel is a fictional country but it’s heavily based on my experiences in the jungles of Suriname. The site where Stanley does his research is heavily based in Raleighvallen, where I lived for a year in Suriname. The setting is certainly autobiographical but that’s where it ends. Stanley has suffered a great trauma, and I certainly didn’t when I was there, but I can appreciate and understand what it might be like psychologically to have some of these things happen to you while alone in the bush.

It seems like Stanley is obsessed with his work. Does that speak to a certain level of commitment unique among field researchers, that they can become so immersed in their work at the expense of other things?

Stanley is 100 per cent obsessed with his own work for a number reasons, mainly because it’s a form of escapism. I’ve noticed an interesting similarity among the people I know who have spent a lot of time alone in the bush doing science. Many are not the most socially adjusted people. They’re not always the people who love being surrounded by others, going to parties and playing the social game. They’re usually solitary and almost always idiosyncratic, to put it lightly.

Is the inner turmoil Stanley is grappling with something you’ve experienced in your own life, either as a writer or a scientist?

Stanley has always been obsessed with collecting data and he’s a highly rational thinker. In many ways the novel explores rationalism and what we believe to be true about the world. About halfway through the novel the story takes a turn into the magically real. Stanley has to start dealing with another way of looking at the world and this is a source of real trauma for him. The stuff Stanley eventually has to grapple with is similar to the stuff I grappled with as a young scientist when I discovered I wanted to be a writer. I came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life “unraveling the rainbow” as Richard Dawkins would say. What I prefer to do is tell stories about the world and try to uncover certain truths through narrative rather than do it through the collection and analysis of data.

I’ve always had the science and the arts battling for space in my mind. These are two at times opposite ways of looking at the world, but the power of narrative and storytelling has always affected me. When I was a young scientist in the bush in Suriname I wasn’t strictly doing science – I was writing a story. I was sitting out there scribbling character sketches in my data paper. I had lost faith in science as something that could explain everything to me and I fell back on literature and storytelling. That’s the little personal battle I fought as a young man and it’s fundamental to this novel.

creative writing

Students from U of T Mississauga's first spoken-word course take the mic for live performance

U of T's Randy Boyagoda discusses his new novel, inspired by Dante and set in small-town Indiana

​U of T creative writing team wins improv competition by combining laughs with storytelling

From primatologist to novelist: Andrew Westoll’s creative writing journey

U of T creative writing team wins improv competition by combining laughs with storytelling