Toronto, Canada
Fiction
I am enrolled in Sabina Murray’s fiction master class to work on a novel that builds from the oral history of loggers in the 1930s and 40s on BC’s West Coast. I write fiction from oral history and have interviewed members of my family for this project—my father grew up in a logging camp and his whole family worked in the industry. Beyond fiction, I also write lyric essays and hybrid academic projects that weave narrative, psychoanalysis and philosophy. I read more poetry that I do any other genre. Before pursuing graduate school I worked for a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside—as a rape crisis counselor and then as a coordinator of literacy programs. I moved to New York to complete an MFA at Columbia University then to the UK to complete a PhD at the University of East Anglia. I returned to Canada to accept a position as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto where I have taught creative writing, literature and psychoanalysis, and literature and human rights. With my current projects and my community commitments, I am particularly interested in the bonds between Indigenous studies, Black studies and Mad studies: how these fields speak with each other and how they enable us to imagine and create collective liberation. I aim to draw from my own tradition of Jewish ethics as well as from Indigenous law to help redress my nation’s atrocities and understand what it means to live in right relation with First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples—and with animals and plant life, the land, the ocean, the air. I spend my summers where I grew up as a child, in the BC mountains, where we have bear traffic.