Professional Description
I am a writer and teacher who, although born in Ottawa Valley in
Ontario, has lived much of my life in British Columbia. I hold a BA in
Honours English from the University of British Columbia, where I won
the English Honours Medal and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship;
subsequently, I obtained a Master of Fine Arts in English and writing
from the University of California at Irvine. I have published more than
a dozen collections of my poems since 1973, besides two books of my
cultural and critical essays, and have edited several poetry
anthologies. A consistent focus of my attention has been a accurate
depiction of daily employment, and the ways a job affects people's
lives in the hours both on and off work. Most recently I have been
concentrating on fiction, publishing a collection of stories and a
collection of novellas in 2007. I have a particular interest in
creative writing pedagogy, and have also been instrumental in the
founding of three alternate, arts-based writing programs: the Vancouver
centre of the Kootenay School of Writing, the Kootenay School of the
arts in Nelson, B.C., and the Nelson Fine Arts Centre. I have also been
writer-in-residence at a number of institutions, including the
University of Windsor, University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University
and the University of Toronto. I was the Fulbright Visiting Chair in
creative writing at Arizona State University in winter 2007. When not
teaching, I am the Squire of "Appledore", my estate in the Selkirk
Mountains of southeastern B.C., where I raise vegetables and flowers.