Douglas Walbourne-Gough | Fall 2023 Writer-in-Residence

 

Photo Credit: Kaila Mintz

The Department of English and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences are delighted to welcome Douglas Walbourne-Gough as Memorial University’s 2023 Writer-in-Residence. He will be in residence throughout the fall term. 

 

The Department of English will be hosting a welcome event on Friday, September 29, 2023, in Arts 1043, starting at 3:30 pm. All are welcome to attend. 

 

Walbourne-Gough will be conducting small, focused workshops on poetry throughout the fall term, and will be available for consultation by members of the St. John’s community. See below for details on how to join the workshop (a portfolio submission is required).

 

Described by reviewers as “deft in telling detail and anecdote”* and “charged with palpability and texture,”** Walbourne-Gough’s debut poetry collection Crow Gulch (2019) won the 2021 E. J. Pratt Poetry Award. His second collection, Island, is forthcoming in the fall of 2024 from Goose Lane Editions. He recently defended his dissertation, Island: Decolonizing Newfoundland History to Understand Current Qalipu Mi’kmaq Realities, which he completed at UNB, Fredericton, under the supervision of Drs. Sue Sinclair and Edith Snook.

* Trainor, Kim. Prism International, 19 Dec. 2019.

** Skov-Nielsen, Emily. Antigonish Review, 8 Jan. 2021.

 

Fall 2023 Intermediate Poetry Workshop, with Douglas Walbourne-Gough

The workshop will be weekly, three hours long, and have a cap of 5-6 participants to ensure that everyone’s work is thoroughly attended to each week. The workshop will run for 6 weeks, with exact dates TBD.

Meetings will be held on Wednesdays, with the room, start date, and time-of-day also TBD.

 

Admission to the workshop will be based on sending a 5-to-10-page portfolio of poetry, for review prior to admission, due to the low number of participant spaces.

 

I want to welcome poetics other than my own and to learn from workshop participants as much as I hope to be able to facilitate the workshop as a generative space. This is an exchange of poems and poetic approaches; it is not a top-down model of the workshop facilitator telling the writer the “right” way to approach poetry.

Additionally, I will hold office hours, by appointment, on Thursdays from 11 am–2 pm (tentative, subject to change).

I’ll work to accommodate virtual office hours (video call or an email exchange, etc.) if need be, due to course conflicts, school closure for weather, extenuating circumstances, etc.

 

Email me at dwalbournego@mun.ca and attempt to give 48 hours’ notice to schedule an office hour appointment, so I can give your work and/or your question proper consideration. To ensure I can be available to as many writers as possible during office hours, individual appointments will be capped at 30 minutes.

 

A few quotes from texts I’ve been reading when considering my approach:

“Teaching is reciprocal... Teacher and student are partners, jointly responsible for knowledge construction” – Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom, p. 52.

“Could you have sympathetic feelings in more than one direction? And can you think at the same time?” – Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Selected Lectures, p. 45.

“WE ARE MAKING BIRDS, NOT BIRDCAGES” – Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, p. 47.

 

Send portfolio of poems, or questions, to dwalbournego@mun.ca

My office is in room A3027, Arts and Administration Building.