My doctoral dissertation, which I defended in the fall of 2015, focused on mid-twentieth-century Canadian poetry. I studied five major authors from that era—P.K. Page, Phyllis Webb, Leonard Cohen, Anne Marriott, and John Newlove—who all shared the painful and transformative experience of “poetic silence” in the middle of their careers. These “silences” were lengthy and frustrating phases, lasting anywhere between six and twenty-six years, during which the poets struggled to produce any full poems that they were willing to share with an audience. And yet they were “middle,” not “final” silences: all five writers eventually re-emerged not only with new work, but with a whole new understanding of the creative process.  I set out to discover why mid-career periods of silence were so prevalent among twentieth-century Canadian poets, and what they meant within Page, Webb, Cohen, Marriott, and Newlove’s evolutionary arcs.

I had a lot of help throughout the writing process…

One of the most stimulating aspects of this project was visiting special collections libraries across the country to peruse the writers’ archives. I spent long days in chilly (climate-controlled) reading rooms searching for evidence of just what goes on during a period of poetic silence. I sifted through everything from recipes and phone numbers to postcards and Christmas cards to journal entries, letters, speeches, radio scripts, unpublished novels, and many, many poem drafts. I deeply enjoyed the process of becoming intimately acquainted with the material record of the writers whose work I admired.

As well, having been a writer at heart for as long as I can remember, I was thoroughly gratified by the experience of sculpting my research into an articulate and compelling story. Portions of my doctoral work have been published in the academic journals Canadian Literature and Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews. You can also read more about it here.

The experience of researching and writing a dissertation taught me about far more than just the history of Canadian literature and the details of five poets’ biographies and creative careers. It even afforded more than just an opportunity to refine my ability to think critically and write clearly—though I certainly became a more insightful and confident reader and writer over my ten years of postsecondary education. But beyond that, I learned how to carry out an extended independent project—how to set deadlines, how to cope and adjust on the occasion(s) that they seemed, as Douglas Adams would have put it, in danger of “whooshing” by me; how to break down a seemingly impossible task into manageable pieces (racing Ironman triathlons cultivated this skill as well); how to accommodate new ideas as they materialized on the fringes of a plan or draft; and how to present my work to a wide variety of different audiences.

It is a privilege and a delight to explore the avenues that this experience has opened for me. At present I am pursuing a number of new writing projects in diverse genres—and I am also keen to take on more! If you would be interested in writing together, please get in touch.