MFA Newsletter Fall 2025
News about, from, and for students, staff, alumni, and friends of the University of King's College Writing & Publishing Program.
Photo: Becky Medel (FIC25)
King’s offers six online writing workshops this fall
Whether you’re working on a novel, a memoir, or journalistic piece, King’s non-credit four- and eight-week Writing Workshops offer something to appease various tastes and are open to writers at every stage of the process. Join a four-week workshop on Op-Eds and First-person Pieces with Tamara Baluja; or consider a course in Speculative Fiction or Romance Writing with King’s Fiction Mentor francesca ekwuyasi.
Eight-week workshops include: Introduction to Script Writing with Fiction Mentor Genevieve Scott; Writing Your Family Story with CNF Mentor Lezlie Lowe; and The Art of the Essay with Adrienne Gruber.
University of King’s College students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni receive a discount of $50 on 8-week courses and $25 off 4-week courses, with a limited number of bursaries available for students requiring financial assistance.
King’s MFA Author Talks: upcoming dates
Come celebrate the books of students and alumni from King’s MFA program as they read from their published work. Author Talks (formerly MFA Book Club) are open to the public and take place on the second floor of the Halifax Central Library, in the BMO room, at 7:00 pm.
For those in and around the Halifax area, mark your calendars for the remainder of this year’s dates:
September 24th: The Illogical Adventure by James MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba
October 29th: Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic by Michelle Hébert
November 26th: This Wasn’t on the Syllabus by Emma Kuzmyk
Post-MFA Mentorships: work with your favourite mentors (again)
You asked, we listened. After you finish your degree, you wish you could have just one more term with a mentor. Maybe that’s to get your proposal in shape, or perhaps it’s those three chapters you wrote after graduation that no one reviewed.
Much like your mentorship in the program, with a Post-MFA Mentorship you’ll choose from a list of mentors to work with, send them excerpts of your work, and they’ll provide feedback.
MFA Graduates in CNF and Fiction from any year may participate, and you can work on any part of any project — a novel if you're a CNF grad; the middle chapters of your manuscript; your book proposal, etc.
Stay tuned this November for an email with sign-up details to register for winter 2026!
Three King’s MFA students make CBC’s Nonfiction Prize longlist
Diana Bayko (CNF25), Antoinette Bekker (FIC25), and Michelle Hebert (CNF24) are among 28 writers from across Canada to be named to this year’s CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for their respective stories: “I Married a Spy. The Secrecy Broke My Heart,” “The Sensibilities of Dogs,” and “A Mother's Guide to Urban Gardening.”The winner will receive $6,000, a writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and have their work published on CBC Books.
Nancy Forde wins $27,000 SSHRC grant for her MFA research on preservation
“Letting go is an act of preservation”
by Philip Moscovitch (CNF19)
On April 1, 2025, Nancy Forde phoned her sibling with great news: she had just learned she’d won a $10,000 award for emerging writers. Her sibling was thrilled for her — a sentiment that quickly turned to a cheeky “I hate you,” Forde said, when her sibling learned it was an April Fool’s joke.
But the joke was on Forde. Two days after that call, she learned she had earned a much-coveted Canada Graduate Research Scholarship (CGS-M), a grant awarded to a Master’s student from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Forde is a second-year student in the King’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction, and the grant is for research to complete her work-in-progress during the final year of her MFA. Her WIP is on preservation of our planet and our species, in which she examines earth as a deep-time photo album that preserves memory.
Over the course of two hours, during a late summer morning at a Halifax café, Forde discussed her writing and photography, her MFA project, and the SSHRC grant. She is an engrossing conversationalist with an endlessly curious mind. She wove in discussions on peat bogs, the decomposition of human bodies, the poetry of Seamus Heaney (she has excerpts tattooed on her arms), photography as a catalyst for the environmental movement and for personal healing, and what she called “all the wonder that’s around us.”
Forde has long had an interest in the relationship between humanity and the environment: the way we are not only intertwined with our surroundings but also permeate each other — and how humans and the environment affect each other in life and in death.
That fascination originates in part from a bike ride Forde took on the southwest coast of Ireland in 1991, into what she has described in her newsletter as “a life-altering bank of fog.” It was an experience that left her questioning the distinction between us and our surroundings. “I could see the fog coming,” she recalled, “and all of a sudden I looked down and couldn’t see my body. And I was in it alone for eight hours... and I put the bike down and just sat in it.”
More than two decades later, she took up photography as a way to “tell stories through the lens, visually,” and in 2021 graduated with an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography from the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). Her thesis project was on awe and how technology and the pace of our lives prevent us from connecting with nature and the planet.
While she has built a reputation as a photographer, Forde said her MFA project will likely use photos sparingly. She is fascinated by bodies — some thousands of years old — preserved in bogs, and the links between preservation, loss, and environmentalism. She said, “I love the idea of it being focused on bogs and bog bodies, and this one aspect of preservation — and then drawing from the idea of being inspired to preserve our planet, and ourselves, and every other species.” She added, “The final wrap-up of the book will deal with how not preserving — how letting go — is an act of preservation.”
Forde considered herself “a long shot” for SSHRC funding, and said her success shows that fellow MFA students should apply, even if they have doubts about their odds of being selected. She said attending information sessions (or watching videos of the sessions) is helpful, and that carefully reading the application requirements and being “adamant about meeting those requirements” is key.
Because she was out of the country on a research trip to Ireland and missed the first information session offered by King’s MFA Director Gillian Turnbull and Fiction Cohort Director Charlotte Gill, Forde said she scrambled to get two reference letters in time: “So I’d encourage people to line those up well ahead of time.”
The process of applying and being selected “has been extremely validating in a way that I've never experienced before,” Forde said. “It's really interesting as a creative to be awarded this scholarship. When I did my research proposal, I thought either they're going to find this interesting, or they're going to think I'm way out there.”
Her advice to students on the fence about applying? “Pay attention, meet the requirements of the application, but take a little bit of a risk, too. Remember this is a research grant for writing and make the proposal an engaging read.”
Author Monica Kidd on riding the waves of the writing life
“Also part of the joy”
By Lana Hall (CNF23)
Monica Kidd’s (CNF, 2025) latest book started with a rumour. She’d heard, somewhere, that Newfoundland’s Bay of Exploits, where she has a summer cabin, was once home to draft dodgers, fleeing the Vietnam War to hide out in some of the abandoned fishing cabins along the coast. At the time of the war, Exploits Island was one of several “ghost communities,” emptied out as a result of a government resettlement program in the 1960s that incentivized Newfoundlanders to move from outports into more centralized communities. Isolated on the craggy shores of the Atlantic Ocean, it seemed like a natural place to harbour pacifists who didn’t want to be found. The rumour turned out to be false, but Kidd couldn’t get the idea out of her head.
“The idea stuck with me about how someone would come to Newfoundland to try to get away from something horrific - like a war that they don’t support - and then find some healing there,” she says. That’s the premise of The Crane, Kidd’s third novel, published earlier this year by Breakwater Books. The Crane follows the story of James, whose twin brother has been killed in the Vietnam War. Bereft, James eschews his family’s military legacy and travels from Wyoming to Newfoundland to fulfill a promise his brother made to a fellow soldier. There, James becomes embroiled in an intergenerational family secret while on assignment for a local newspaper.
Kidd grew up in rural Alberta, studying ecology and zoology at the University of Calgary before earning a MSc in evolutionary biology at Queen’s University. A gig as a seabird biologist took her to the coast of Labrador, which led her to Newfoundland where she worked as a reporter for CBC Radio for several years. She eventually returned to school to study medicine and now works part-time as a family doctor in Alberta, where she lives with her husband and three children. Throughout it all, Kidd has kept up a writing practice, publishing seven books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as countless essays, magazine features, and op-eds.
If writing, doctoring and completing an MFA while parenting three children sounds like a lot, that’s because, well, it is. “Oh my God; don’t follow my example,” says Kidd. “I always feel a bit frenetic.”
Though her summer cabin on the shores of Exploits Island provides some semblance of tranquility, Kidd is still learning to navigate the ocean-like rhythms of a writing life despite over a decade as a published author.
“Last year I had a lot of really great things happen to me writing wise. And this year the book has been published and I’ve had great response,” she says. “I’m very, very grateful for that, but I’ve also had a ton of rejections — like magazine articles I’ve pitched and different essays and stuff.” To cope, Kidd reminds herself that it’s okay to deviate from daily writing, even if it means taking weeks, months, or even longer away from a project.
“Even in the times when you’re not working on it, you really are still working on it. You’re kind of in that pre-writing gestation, or fermentation stage,” she says.
Some things, however, do get easier with time, like understanding that writing is a long game. While those rejected essays and magazine pitches may gather dust on the shelf for now, Kidd reminds herself that sometimes the trajectory of writing and publishing is beyond her control.
“Rejection and trying to work through something, thinking that you finally have it, and then realizing that ‘I don’t have it,’ that is always disappointing,” she says. “But it’s also part of the joy, because you’re problem solving.”
As the wave of work that is her most recent novel recedes, Kidd has already turned her attention to other writing projects. These includes finishing the nonfiction book she worked on during her MFA, titled “Holding Ground: The World’s Eroding Coastline.” Kidd describes it as an in-depth look at not only why coastlines are eroding, but the effects of erosion on the people deeply connected to the knife edge between land and sea. In August, Kidd was invited to attend the biannual conference of the Association for the Study of Literature & the Environment in Galway, Ireland, where she read an excerpt from the book. For now, she’s looking ahead at the horizon, steadying herself as much as she can amid the chaos.
“I guess the coping strategy is to not panic. Trust that you’re a writer and keep writing.”
Class Notes
Emilie Adin (CNF25) is thrilled to share that McSweeney’s has published her “self-deprecating” humour piece “A Disillusioned Urban Planning Glossary.”
Jennifer Bain (CNF20) took home two prizes at the 9th Annual Society of American Travel Writers (SATW) Canadian Chapter Awards. Notably, her story on a sturgeon safari and caviar tasting in New Brunswick, originally published by Jay Kana in Modern Traveler, won Gold for Best Culinary Story.
Gloria Blizzard’s (CNF21) Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas: Essays has been nominated for a 2025 Heritage Toronto Award in the Book category. In October, Gloria will travel to the United Kingdom, for readings and talks on her book at the University of Bristol, the Coracle Europe Fringe and The Muse in Brecon, Wales.
CNF Mentor Sonja Boon is the recipient of the 2025 Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize from the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) for her textile work, At Sea. According to WFNS, Boon’s work “attends to the relationship between text and textiles and to the ways that women’s lives have historically been stitched rather than written.”
Esmeralda Cabral (CNF19) is a contributor in Here & Elsewhere: An Anthology of Portuguese Canadian Writers (Arquipélago Press, 2025).
Michaela Cavanagh’s (CNF24) MFA project, Present Tense: How We Reckon With The End Of The World, a globe-spanning work of environmental reportage journeying through the emotional landscape of the climate crisis, is slated for publication in spring 2027 with The New Press (US) and McClelland & Stewart (Canada). Michaela’s “The Hideaway” also won a Silver Digital Publishing Award for Best Science & Technology Storytelling.
Dr. Joanna Cheek’s (CNF24) It’s Not You. It’s the World: A Mental Health Survival Guide will be released in hardcover on February 3rd, 2026 with HarperCollins Canada, Hachette Go in the US, and in the United Kingdom with Canongate Books on February 6, 2026. The book is being translated into at least six languages.
Moira Dann’s (CNF16) memoir Fat Camp Summer (Sutherland House) was published on May 20, 2025. The Toronto Star published an excerpt from the book in August. Earlier that month, Moira wrote an op-ed for The Globe and Mail about the CMA’s latest guidelines for pediatric obesity. This fall, Moira is teaching the course “Would You Say a Few Words?”, on tribute and obituary writing, at the University of Victoria in Continuing Studies. She developed the course last winter as part of King’s Teaching Creative Writing workshop, and presented at the King’s Creative Writing and Storytelling Conference that took place in the spring. Moira begins an MA in Public History at UVic this fall, aiming to develop additional volumes to augment her 2021 BC Lieutenant Governor award-winning history Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures (Touchwood Editions).
The Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) honoured the Toronto Star with its Special Citation for its groundbreaking investigation into the sexual abuse that Andrea Skinner, daughter of Canadian literary giant Alice Munro, suffered at the hands of her stepfather, Munro's husband. According to CJF, “the months-long investigation,” reported by King’s alum Deborah Dundas (CNF23) and Betsy Powell, “shows extraordinary courage and sensitivity, illuminating the darkest shadows of human experience.”
Amy Fish (CNF23) released her third book, One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity (Goose Lane Editions). The book went into a second printing after only seven weeks.
Kirsten Fogg (CNF22) received her first grant from Access Copyright Foundation to work with one of her King’s mentors, the amazing Wanda Taylor, and finish The House of Silence, a memoir about healing from long-term suicide loss.
Following much success with The Accidental Caregiver (Sutherland House, 2022) and The Care Book (Sutherland House, 2023), Kim Fraser (CNF19) is thrilled to be working with Hancock House Publishers for her newest challenge writing historical nonfiction. Wind Beneath Their Wings, 1926-2026: One Hundred Years of Flying Adventures In and Around Canada’s Oldest Operating Airport is forthcoming in 2026 in time for Cooking Lake Airport’s 100th Anniversary.
Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann (CNF21) is thrilled to be a recipient of the National Public Readings Program grant with funding support from the Canada Council for the Arts through The Writers’ Union of Canada. Suzanne read from her book The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community at the Wynford Seniors’ Club Book Reading Event on Wednesday, Sept. 17 in the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre Heritage Lounge. Hartmann learned more about the Writer’s Union during a King’s presentation and is thankful she was paying attention as she discovered they offer many worthwhile and generous programs worth looking into. Suzanne’s book was also nominated for a 2025 Heritage Toronto Award in the Book category.
Michelle Hébert’s (CNF 24) memoir, A Good Girl’s Guide to Lying: Losing My Memory, Searching for Truth, & Living with Dissociative Amnesia will be published by Nimbus Publishing in Fall 2026. Earlier this year, she received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to work on her next novel, tentatively titled Sea of Grass. She’s recently joined the Board of Directors of the Nova Scotia Talent Trust. As a former scholarship recipient, she looks forward to supporting students in the arts sector. In September, Michelle will combine her MFA and MSW skills to provide writers with both craft and emotional support — so important for those writing memoir or about difficult subject matter. Learn more (and see photos of her cats!) at michellehebertwrites.com/services-for-writers.
Fiction Mentor David Huebert was awarded the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for his debut novel, Oil People. He was also a finalist for the 49th annual Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and shared his “Words to Live By” in May for King’s Alumni newsletter.
Taslim Jaffer (CNF22; MFA Publishing Instructor) and former King’s CNF Mentor Omar Mouallem won GOLD in the 2024 Forward INDIES Anthology category for their co-edited collection Back Where I Came From(Book*hug Press).
Taslim was also awarded grants by the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts to complete the essay collection she started writing at King’s. Are We There Yet? examines Taslim’s life as a first-generation Canadian and explores themes of cultural inheritance, liminal spaces, belonging, and parenthood.
Nonfiction Cohort Director Dean Jobb’s true crime book Empire of Deception: From Chicago to Nova Scotia – The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation, spent two weeks on the Toronto Star’s national bestsellers list this summer. Originally published in 2015, the tale of a Chicago con man on the lam in 1920s Nova Scotia was reissued as a mass market paperback by HarperCollins Canada in May.
Inglis Professor and former MFA Cohort Director Stephen Kimber was chosen to provide “Words to Live By” for King’s Alumni newsletter, where a faculty member talks about a book that played an outsized role in making them who they are today. Read more about the book that helped define the way Kimber thinks about, reads, and writes nonfiction in June’s Words to Live By.
Kelley Korbin (CNF25) wrote a story, “Big Feelings,” for Edify magazine about Edmonton's Pilgrims Hospice and its grief support program for children, teens, and families. Former King’s Mentor Omar Mouallem is the editor of Edify and Kelley says “it was a privilege to have the opportunity to work with him again.”
Margaret Lynch (CNF20) is thrilled with the publication of her flash CNF memoir "Sacrifice" on the Ireland Writing Retreat website. The piece was selected as a finalist in the Creative Nonfiction category of the 2024 Wild Atlantic Writing Awards (WAWA), based on a prompt to write 500 words about danger without using the word “danger.”
Angus MacCaull’s (CNF23) piece “‘The Curse of Convenience’: The Limitations of AI Music, and Why It Must Be Regulated,” was published in Exclaim!
Nonfiction Mentor Lori A. May has had an essay accepted for publication as part of a new anthology, Critical Insights: Literary and Popular Culture Sidekicks (Salem Press/Grey House Publishing). This September, Lori will be hosting two writing salons in Hawaii, one in Hilo and another in Kona.
Dr. Chris Moore’s (CNF22) The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal, to be released in hardcover with HarperCollins Publishers on December 30, 2025, was named an Indigo fall “Most Anticipated” book, which means pre-orders are 30% off. A guilt-free purchase.
Out of the Woods: Voices from the Forest City, an anthology project created by the London Writers Society and chaired by Martha Morrison (CNF22), appeared in The Globe and Mail’s “Books we’re loving in August: readers share their picks.” The anthology project was also featured in a full-length CBC article, on CBC’s London Morning radio show with Andrew Brown, on the front page of The Middlesex Banner, and in various other local publications.
Ingrid Phaneuf (FIC27) is a registered psychotherapist and former journalist who will soon be kicking off a Substack newsletter titled “Textual Healing,” in which she interviews fiction writers whose work describes healing and transformation. She recently interviewed Canadian author Andrew Kaufman. She’s interested inreceiving suggestions for interview subjects. Ingrid can be reached through her website:
https://www.ingridphaneuf.com
Set Shuter (CNF22) published an opinion piece in the Toronto Star, “I work in Toronto’s thriving film industry. Trump’s tariffs will hurt us — here’s what we need to keep the cameras rolling,” about Trump’s threats of tariffs on film industries outside of the USA.
Jon Tattrie’s (CNF20) biography of Charles R. Saunders, To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy, is forthcoming with McClelland & Stewart in January 2026. The project began a few months after Jon graduated from King’s MFA program, and he is “so excited to be nearing seeing it in the world.” He continues to help other people write and publish their own books through Write Now! with Jon Tattrie.
Fiction Cohort Director Wanda Taylor was commissioned to write a book review of the forthcoming anthologyAs the Earth Dreams (House of Anansi Press). In it, ten contemporary Black writers each share haunting short stories in the speculative fiction space. One of the writers is our very own Fiction Mentor, francesca ekwuyasi. Wanda's review will appear in an upcoming issue of Quill & Quire.
CNF Mentor Harry Thurston’s poetry book, Icarus, Falling of Birds (Anchorage Press), with photography by Thaddeus Holownia, was performed by Gale Force Theatre at York Redoubt, Halifax, on August 22nd and 23rd, and at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, Canning, on August 24th. In June, Thurston headlined the Ultramarine Music & Arts Festival, named for his latest poetry collection, Ultramarine (Gaspereau Press), in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, where he also launched his newest collection, I Could See It Spoken: Early Poems, 1969-1985 (Gaspereau Press).
Iryn Tushabe (CNF27) was named as one of 22 “Canadian Writers to Watch” by CBC in 2025.
Lis van Berkel (CNF23) has an essay in the Summer issue of Queen's Quarterly entitled "Entangled with a Geologist."
Sherry White (CNF23) won Best Atlantic Director at the Atlantic International Film Festival for Blueberry Grunt, starring Joel Hynes (CNF23), described by the jury as “confident, layered work on a portrait of a marriage facing a crisis.”
Bill Wittur (FIC27) anticipates the release of his self-published book, Mr. Kite, by mid-September. Check out his website, www.billwittur.com, for details.
Creative Nonfiction Mentor Ayelet Tsabari’s essay “When Words Fail Us,” (The New Quarterly) was a finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Awards in the Columns & Essays category. CNF Mentor Kelly S. Thompsonwas also nominated under the Fiction category for “DonJuan3000” (Ex-Puritan), and grad Lauren McKeon(CNF16) won Silver for her piece “Sins of a Small-Town Doctor” (Toronto Life) under Investigative Reporting.
King’s MFA Director Gillian Turnbull and CNF Mentor Kelly S. Thompson are both recipients of the 2025 Marian Hebb Research Grant, administered by Access Copyright Foundation.
Tamara Kramer (CNF25) and Morag Wehrle (CNF25), two 2025 King’s MFA graduates, were interviewed for The University of King’s College Campus and Community student profiles.
King’s MFA students are well represented on the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society Board of Directors this year, with Nancy Dutra (CNF25) as President, AnnMarie MacKinnon (CNF22) as Vice President, and Morag Wehrle (CNF25), Sue Nador (CNF20), Rebecca Hogue (CNF27), Erin Pollard (CNF24), and Jen Watt(CNF25) as Directors-at-Large.
A note from Nancy, CNFC President:
“If you’re interested in nonfiction writing—memoir, essays, literary journalism—we’d love to have you join us. The CNFC is a national community of writers, including many MFA alumni, and a great way to stay connected and inspired. Membership is affordable—just $60/year or $30 for students. To learn more and get involved, visit: https://creativenonfictioncollective.ca/join-the-cnfc/. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. We'd love to have you!”
