Parallel Careers

“If you're going to walk into any room and do any kind of presentation, you just want to assume that people are really happy that you're there. You bring more of yourself. You're less focused on your content and more interested in who's in the room and what they might need. You go from rigid to fluid.” 

Farzana Doctor discusses how her career as a psychotherapist informs her writing and teaching practices. In this episode, she discusses:

• 02:14 | The lightning bolt of inspiration that helped her revise her novel All Inclusive
• 03:53 | Being respectful when writing about real-world events, such as the Air India bombing
• 06:40 | How her activism sparked her most recent novel, Seven, a multi-generational story dealing with the impact of khatna in the Dawoodi Bohra community
• 08:54 | Self-care for writers both while creating new work and while promoting it
• 13:05 | Techniques for silencing your inner critic
• 15:20 | Facilitating constructive peer feedback

Guest Bio:

Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and psychotherapist. From 2009-18, she curated the Brockton Writers Series and has been a volunteer with The Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Trust. She currently volunteers with WeSpeakOut, a global group that is working to ban female genital cutting in her Dawoodi Bohra community.

She has been writing all of her life but it became a more regular practice around 2000, when she began writing her first novel, Stealing Nasreen, which was published by Inanna in 2007.  Her second novel, Six Metres of Pavement, won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award and was short-listed for the 2012 Toronto Book Award. In 2017 it was voted the One Book One Brampton 2017 winner. Her third novel, All Inclusive was a Kobo 2015 and National Post Best Book of the Year.

She's just completed a novel, Seven (August 2020, Dundurn), and a poetry collection, You Still Look the Same. She is currently at work on a YA novel.

About the Podcast:

Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.

Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.

Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.

Credits:

Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.

Access more free writing and teaching tips from Farzana Doctor at:

tnq.ca/parallel

“I think the idea of an emerging writer only being someone barely emerged from puberty is a problem. Some 25% of Canada is over 65. Where are our first time senior writers? The only senior writers we see are people who have had a long career. Who started in their thirties. And some of that is fueled by capitalism. I've had agents look me in the eye and say, ‘You know, you're a fabulous writer. You're as good a writer as anyone I represent, but I'm just not going to take you on because I don't think you have five books left in you.’”

Dorothy Ellen Palmer shares her thoughts on the opportunities that the pandemic presents for advancing disability justice. In this episode, she discusses:

• 00:01 | Ageism in Can Lit
• 03:35 | Sensitivity readings…and how to kill someone with a walker
• 05:05 | Ethical representation of disabled characters by abled authors
• 10:27 | What inspired her books When Fenlon Falls and Falling for Myself: A Memoir
• 13:48 | How to teach character development with her exercise “Pass the Pudding”
• 15:35 | The importance of combining activism with an artistic practice

Guest Bio:

Dorothy Ellen Palmer is a disabled senior writer, accessibility consultant, and retired high school drama teacher and union activist. For three decades, she worked in three provinces as a high school English/Drama teacher, teaching on a Mennonite Colony, a four-room schoolhouse, an adult learning centre attached to a prison and a highly diverse new high school in Pickering. Elected to her union executive each year for fifteen years, she created staff and student workshops to fight bullying, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and homophobia.

Dorothy sits on the Accessibility Advisory Board of the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) and is an executive board member for the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs (CCWWP) where she writes a monthly column on disability in CanLit for the newsletter.

Her work has appeared in: REFUSE, Wordgathering, Alt-Minds, All Lit Up, Don't Talk to Me About Love, Little Fiction Big Truths, 49th Shelf and Open Book. Her first novel, When Fenelon Falls, features a disabled teen protagonist in the Woodstock-Moonwalk summer of 1969. She lives in Burlington, Ontario, and can always be found tweeting @depalm.

About the Podcast:

Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.

Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.

Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.

Credits:

Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.

Access more writing and teaching tips from Dorothy Ellen Palmer at:

tnq.ca/parallel

“When someone commits to being an artist of any kind, they are also committing to a lifelong process of learning. I want to always be a student of the craft of writing, even when my job is to teach it. As Mr. Miyagi told Daniel in The Karate Kid, someone always knows more karate. And I want to learn all the karate I can when it comes to writing poetry.”

Paul Vermeersch discusses how, to become an artist, you must commit to a life-long process of learning. In this episode, he discusses:

• 00:40 | His recent collection Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020
• 02:08 | The optimism of the atomic age and our current fixation with dystopia
• 08:26 | Helping students expand their work past preconceived boundaries of poetic form
• 11:44 | Ekphrastic poetry and its pitfalls
• 13:38 | Teaching a course on Self-Publishing at Sheridan College 
• 17:10 | How literature can help shape the future

Guest Bio:

Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, creative writing professor, and literary editor. He is the author of several poetry collections, including the Trillium–award nominated The Reinvention of the Human Hand and, most recently, Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General's Gold Medal. He teaches in the Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College and is the founding editor of Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd. He lives in Toronto.

About the Podcast:

Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.

Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.

Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.

Credits:

Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.

Access more writing and teaching tips from Paul Vermeerch at:

tnq.ca/parallel

“Am I doing enough? I mean, with the new generations of students, everybody's plugged in and knowledge is out there. So in the classroom, what are they actually coming to learn from me? What am I giving them?”

Lamees Al Ethari questions how to know when you’re doing enough as a teacher and a writer. In this episode, she discusses:

• 00:30 | Developing diverse course reading lists and the impact of representation on students 
• 02:39 | The development of her memoir Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir and her poetry collection, From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris
• 05:13 | Writing about the trauma of war and the challenges of an audience that has no experience with it 
• 08:26 | Using constraints in group work and preparing students to give feedback
• 09:20 | Her experience working on The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop and helping writers find their voice in a second language
• 10:43 | How who she writes for has shifted over time

Guest Bio:

Lamees Al Ethari holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Waterloo, where she has been teaching creative and academic writing since 2015. She has published a collection of poems titled From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris (2018) and, more recently, a memoir titled Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir (2019). Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, The New Quarterly, The Malpais Review, and the anthology Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. She is a Nonfiction Editor with The New Quarterly and a co-coordinator for The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop for Refugee and Immigrant Women.


About the Podcast:

Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.

Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.

Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.

Credits:

Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.

Access more writing and teaching tips from Lamees Al Ethari at:

tnq.ca/episode-1-lamees-al-ethari

About the Podcast:

Parallel Careers is a monthly podcast about the dual lives of writers who teach.

Few writers make their living from publication alone; many fill the gaps with teaching in both academic and community settings. Much of the work is precarious, and there are few opportunities for professional development.

Parallel Careers features writers with diverse practices and points of view—writers who are at the top of their game in both craft and pedagogy. Tune in to hear the big ideas and practical tips they take into their classrooms. Take their insights into your own class or craft.

Credits:

Parallel Careers is produced by Claire Tacon, in partnership with The New Quarterly magazine. Erin MacIndoe Sproule is our Technical Producer and Story Editor. Music composed by Amadeo Ventura. Financial and in-kind support provided by the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, St. Jerome’s University, and the Government of Canada.

Learn more about the podcast at:

tnq.ca/parallel