Hi !

Happy July!  But this newsletter is all about JUNE-- my favourite month. In Montreal, the weather finally turns to Real Spring and then Actual Summer. The garden starts to thrive. And it's my birthday! I'm officially "my order of compression socks arrived with a free pair of gardening gloves" years old. 

Keep reading for cute but destructive groundhogs, my King's CNF MFA residency recap, some news, and links to stuff I really like.

On the home front, this year we expanded our sprawl of above-ground planters, just in time for the local groundhog population to explode. In addition to the usual tomatoes, peppers, herbs, rampaging mints and raspberries, we planted Montreal melon, squash, borage, broccoli, kale, spinach, arugula, marshmallow and echinacea, only to have a family of SIX groundhogs move in next door and eat ALL the new specimens right down to the dirt (except for the arugula).

The groundhogs are extremely cute, and we can't stay mad at them. They also like to brood around local cemeteries, and mess up the tracks at the F1 circuit. Love the attitude.

Bill Murray drives with a groundhog in his lap, in Groundhog Day.

King's MFA Residency

For the first week and a half of June, I left the microfarm and all its fauna, to attend my second and final residency for my MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of King's College in Halifax.

King's is an independent university that shares resources with Dalhousie University, and I stayed at one of Dal's newer dorms, with an excellent roommate, the illustrious, Regina-based Ugandan journalist and novelist Iryn Tushabe. Iryn was generous, both sharing her breakfast bananas and sitting down for a Context Switch interview, which I'll feature in the coming months.

The Days are Packed

The schedule of these residencies is no joke.  Saturday to Tuesday, and Thursday to Sunday, we had morning lectures on topics ranging from structure (with Carol Shaben), to dialogue (Adrienne Gruber) , to comedy (Zoe Whittall), to niche topics like writing about garbage (David Hubert). That one was a personal fav.

I have the exact same difficulty not getting distracted or becoming distracting in class, as I've experienced in every kind of school ever. For this residency, I handled it by practicing my cursive, almost all day every day. It looked like I was taking notes, meant I could actually listen because my hands were busy, and as a bonus, my terrible handwriting is actually pretty good now!

Generative Writing

Most sessions included a live writing exercise. We're never forced to share our scribbles, but I often did, prompting peers to notice that I work pretty fast. I'll share my secret: fifteen years of writing for video games. Almost every day of my working life since 2011, I've responded to a new request, motivated by a highly specific game need, that required brainstorming on-the-spot or rapid iteration for a surprise deadline. The work is loose, and un-precious, and I've learned to count on the ideas that come while my fingers are already typing.

Here's the result of a short exercise from Sonja Boon's workshop on sentences, in which we were asked to write a paragraph-long sentence without punctuation, for a hurried, breathless feeling. (I cheated here and added one colon.)

"The residency ran on and on for nine days with just one day off in the middle that honestly felt more like a taunt than a rest with all its laundry and phone calls and walking from place to place to place in search of food or friends or pens to use as sustenance to fill the breath before the next day of classes and workshops and prompts written in notebooks on desks covered in the graffiti of decades of earnest and mischievous undergrads that both reminded you of youth and made you wonder if you had ever been young enough yourself to scrawl a mark into a desktop reading simply: HELP ME."

Some more undergrad graffiti.

Mentor Workshops

Each afternoon we met with our mentors-- the people who will be coaching us (and grading us) on our manuscript submissions throughout the fall semester. This session, I'm working with Lori A. May, and hoping that what I perceive as her scrappy, entrepreneurial approach will help get me in gear to submit shorter pieces more often.

Hot Library Nights

Most evenings we attended readings at the Halifax Central Library, from this year's writer-in-residence, Amanda Le Duc, fiction and non-fiction alumni, and many of the faculty. We also had Class of 2027 readings, on campus, and I shared a short piece from my tartan book. People laughed in the right places and I was happy.

Summer Camp Vibes

Probably the best part of residency week is just getting to see all my classmates. There are fewer than 30 of us in my nonfiction cohort, and the low-residency aspect means we can either get to know each other very well or not at all, depending on our interests and what mentor groups we get assigned to.

It can be hard to keep socializing at meals after spending the whole day surrounded by people, but that's what most of us did, most days.

A distinct highlight was definitely the cozy dinner my mentor from last year, Sonja Boon, hosted in her home for her groups from this year and last year. Not only did I get to mingle with more of my classmates, but a well-balanced home-cooked meal gave me the energy to close out the week.

They Have an Olympic-Sized Saltwater Pool

Both years, a highlight of the residency experience has been waking up too early (not by choice. I am simply aging out of sleep. See above: birthday.) to work out or swim at Dalplex, Dalhousie University's gleaming palace of fitness, access to which is included for free with a stay at any of their residences.

Church.

This year, I connected with a workout buddy, Saskatoon-based journalist Angela Hill, and we proceeded to mostly not work out at the same time, and text each other to coordinate not going to the gym together. Sometimes it's just nice to know there are others like you, out there.

Aside: Contrary to how it might appear in this newsletter, most of the Kings' MFA students are not from Saskatchewan. There were several Halifax locals, and many students from Ontario and BC, one from the North West Territories, one from the Yukon, at least one American, and a couple of people who flew in from Korea or Australia, as if trying to prove how remote the programme can truly be. I haven't met anyone else there from Quebec yet.

The Goal

I'm often asked what my MFA thesis is. Guess what: there isn't one. We're graded on course work. We create book proposals, and work towards writing a final, publishable manuscript, but the sheer volume of research involved in nonfiction writing means that for most people, the time it takes to write a whole book is longer than the time in the MFA.

And the writing is different from that of other academic programmes. In the nonfiction MFA we can't submit "academic" writing. No "reports" or "papers." Every piece must be a literary work with scenes, characters, dialogue, hooks, personal reflection, interiority, a story structure, etc... Even our marketing and craft assignments have to read like something you'd could submit to a magazine.

It's loooong to write that way, y'all.

Why Am I Doing This?

I'm often asked why I'm pursuing an MFA if I'm already a professional writer. I ask myself the same question sometimes--for example when I'm writing a newsletter in which I identify the sportsplex and going to dinner as highlights. But there are serious answers, too:

1. I have long been haunted by thoughts of going to grad school
2. After nearly-not-quite getting hired by three universities, I think the credential could help me teach a wider range of topics than just game writing.
3. I'm writing in a different genre than I have before. It requires me to think harder and work differently, and be uncomfortable in a healthy way.
4. Even for a crusty, stubborn, know-it-all hermit such as myself, mentorship and the support of peers is valuable and once in a while, enjoyable! I'm glad to have these great people along with me to do this new thing.

Just two semesters to go. Wish me luck!

Just a coupla starlings sharing food, with foggy Halifax in the background.

News & Updates

Game Poems

I submitted a short memoir game to the first issue of Game Poems Magazine: "a playable literary magazine dedicated to exploring the artistic and poetic potential of short-form videogames."

Alas, my game was not selected, BUT Game Poems founder Jordan Magnusson did bring the game along to showcase at the Winchester Poetry Festival in the UK.

The game is called The Forest and the Trees and it's about digging deep to figure out how to complete the creative work that calls you, despite internal and external distractions. I made it from the bones of an earlier Bitsy game I loved but never finished, that was supposed to be about the great Maple Syrup cartel and heist. So this is like a nonfiction memoir with fictional illustrations, showcased as a poetic videogame. Take that, entire concept of genre!

You can play it in your browser, via Itch.io. Running time is about five minutes.

Fall Workshops in Montreal

This fall, I'll be leading an 8-week workshop in Writing for Games and Interactive Storytelling, for the Quebec Writers' Federation. If you want to join the QWF (which I wholeheartedly recommend, they even have PWYC and "friends" tiers of membership), you can receive their members' newsletter, and find out directly when their workshops are announced, and also receive some tons of info about upcoming submission calls and writing events.

Wishlist Rollergirl

I've been working with Pushing Vertices on Rollergirl, in which you play as Naomi, a teenager in a small town in the mid-2000s, skating around, trying to raise money to fix her car. It's full of quirky characters, a small town mystery, and a little queer romance. If you'd like to help the game out for free, you can wishlist Rollergirl on Steam.

Reading, Listening, Watching, Playing, Posting

Playing: Perfect Tides: Station to Station

A little on the nose, video game.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station, is a narrative videogame about which Lit Hub asked, "Is This the Most Literary Video Game of All Time?" The question is unanswerable, like is this cake the most pie? Created by graphic novelist and game maker, Meredith Gran, you play as a creative writing student. You work in a library, collect and read books, and must "write" papers, go to readings, talk to people, and experience life. The more you live the more you have to write about. Playing it during the third semester of my MFA this winter made me feel like an 48-year-old 18-year-old.

Reading: Trash! : A Garbageman's Story

Speaking of writing about garbage, last winter I read this incredible memoir of a Montreal garbage collector in French, and hooray, there's now an English translation. It's about class, labour, climate change, sustainability; a funny, sometimes angry, closely observed look into an overlooked but highly necessary profession.

Posting: #TartanTuesday

Every* Tuesday on Bluesky, I post a freshly-registered tartan from the Scottish Register of Tartans. A recent highlight was this one: for the general concept of mathematics. Follow me there for more unusual tartans.

*admittedly it was spotty all June

That's all for today.

Thanks for reading!

- Jill >-[}

PS: Do you have any interesting projects underway this summer? Ideas about how to make friends with the local wildlife? Reply and let me know!

Designed and written by Jill, using human hands, knowledge, effort, and mistakes.