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Faculty
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Matt Kavanagh, Department Chair (Kelowna)
Matt joined the Department of English in September 2007 and took over as Chair in January 2010. He's taught previously at McGill University in Montreal and McMaster University in Hamilton where he lectured on subjects ranging from literature to cultural studies to film and back again. His interests are broad, but if you corner him, he'll admit to a passion for contemporary fiction (British and American), psychoanalytic theory, and literary journalism.
Matt holds a Ph.D. in English from McGill, where his research focused on representations of the market in recent American fiction by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Bret Easton Ellis, Jack Womack and others. Matt is intrigued by the intersection of economics and literature and is particularly interested in the critique of financial reason offered by thinkers like Mark C. Taylor, Randy Martin, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. His current research investigates fictional representations of that strange confluence of information technology and financial speculation known as cybercapital.
As a scholar of contemporary literature, Matt can—theoretically, at any rate—pick up the phone and talk to his subjects. He likes to avail himself of this opportunity where possible. Some of the authors he has interviewed, profiled or reviewed include Will Self, William Gibson, Chuck Palahniuk and Hunter Thompson. His journalism has been published in The Globe and Mail and Maisonneuve.
Credentials:
Ph.D. (McGill), MA, BA (McMaster)
Recent Projects:
Over the summer, I gave a paper on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation at the 2010 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. My most recent publications include a reviews published in American Book Review and The Globe and Mail, as well as a brief essay in English Studies in Canada. Other projects in varying stages of completion include a longer piece based on archival research at the Don DeLillo archive at the University of Texas and my ongoing efforts to revisit some of my doctoral work in light of the 2008 financial crisis.
Recently Read:
A nice stretch over the summer included seven Raymond Chandler novels in seven days. I also particularly enjoyed Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Simon Mawer's The Glass House, and Stone's Fall by Iain Pears.
Currently Teaching:
ENGL 231 and 215.
What Students May Not Know:
I have a deep and abiding passion for the Toronto Maple Leafs. I know, I know...
Why I Teach:
To carry on the conversation...
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Jeremy Beaulne (Penticton and Kelowna)
Jeremy grew up in the village of Pouce Coupe in northern British Columbia. After graduating from high school, he moved to Vancouver to study English literature at the University of British Columbia. Upon completing his MA thesis—an exploration of aesthetics and nationalism in Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy—Jeremy returned to the North, where he taught English, theatre, and film at the Dawson Creek and Fort St. John campuses of Northern Lights College for eight years. He has been a member of the Okanagan College English Department since Fall 2008.
When he is not teaching, Jeremy is active in amateur theatre. He has acted in numerous productions, including a one-man show called Tales of a Catskinner, which toured several communities in northern British Columbia. In addition, Jeremy has directed productions of Krapp's Last Tape, The Importance of Being Earnest, Blood Relations, The Reluctant Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, Between Yourself and Me, Arsenic and Old Lace, Dracula, and The Beaux' Stratagem. He is currently in the planning stages of a new production, which he hopes to direct at the Kelowna campus of Okanagan College during the Winter 2012 semester.
Credentials:
MA, BA (UBC)
Recent Projects:
My recent projects include directing an eighteenth-century comedy called The Beaux’ Stratagem, the inaugural production of Okanagan College’s Red Dot Players; web editing KIdsWWwrite, an online journal featuring poetry and prose by young writers from all over the world; and co-organizing the Okanagan College Speakers Series, a free lecture series at the Penticton campus of Okanagan College.
Recently Read:
Atonement by Ian McEwan; Furious Love by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger; and Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward.
Currently Teaching:
Fall 2011: ENGL 100 & 211; Winter 2012: ENGL 100, 221 & ENGL 215
What Students May Not Know:
I was the editorial cartoonist at The Ubyssey, UBC's student newspaper, for two years.
Why I Teach:
I love how teaching literature exposes me to fresh perspectives on texts I've worked with for years.
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Norah Bowman-Broz (Kelowna and Vernon)
I'm currently a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta in the English and Film Studies department. Right now I'm working on writing a radically new eco-philosophy for Northern BC. I'm reading as much Gilles Deleuze as my addled mind can absorb, and dreaming of pine beetles burrowing their coniferous highways from BC to Kafka. Believe it or not, I love this project, which is also my doctoral dissertation. Students might hear about pine beetles and Deleuze in my class: don't worry, there will be no entomology on the exam.
My next project might be about resistance literature. I'm collecting stories about resistance and creation in times of oppression; nothing like a Get Up Stand Up to rouse my academic torpor.
Credentials:
Ph.D. candidate (University of Alberta), MA, BA
Recent Projects:
"To Become Beavers of Sorts: Creative Ecology in Eric Collier's Three Against the Wilderness," upcoming in edited anthology The Bioregional Imagination. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty, published by University of Chicago Press.
"Shitless Family Love: Deleuzo-Guattarian Creative Affiliations in Eden Robinson's Blood Sports," in Fall 2009 issue of Canadian Journal of Native Studies.
"The Entomological Machine : The Beetle, The Human and The Open in BC's Northern Interior" (dissertation, in progress).
Recently Read:
At Swim Two Boys, Jamie O'Neill; Mother to Mother, Sindiwe Magona; Every Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada; Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze; Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Rebecca Goldstein.
Currently Teaching:
ENGL/WMST 210, ENGL 213, WMST 100.
What Students May Not Know:
I'm good with a speed rope.
Why I Teach:
How exciting, presenting literature and ideas to a group of curious minds! What better place than a classroom to enjoy the luxury of conversation, intellectual rigour and creative exchange? I'm one lucky human.
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Corinna Chong (Vernon)
An obsession with Roald Dahl books inspired Corinna to pursue a career as a writer from an early age. She studied photography and fiction writing at the University of Calgary, earning degrees in both Visual Art and English. After a stint as a Graphic Designer and a few backpacking adventures around China, South Korea, India, and Nepal, she spent a couple of years in the Maritimes at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where she received her master's degree in English and creative writing, edited and designed for a number of literary projects, and conducted social research on broadband video technology with the National Research Council. She is deeply in love with Canadian literature and fascinated by Asian-Canadian perspectives. Her research examines multiethnic identity, gender relations in media and pop culture, and food and consumption in contemporary Canadian literature.
Credentials:
MA (University of New Brunswick), BFA, BA (University of Calgary)
Recent Projects:
Belinda's Rings – a novel, forthcoming from NeWest Press in Fall 2012.
"Video Technology and the Gendered Gaze" – chapter forthcoming in The Blackwell Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media (Wiley-Blackwell, October 2011).
Ryga: A Journal of Provocations – designed issue 3 and website.
Recently Read:
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro; The Golden Mean Annabel Lyon; Monoceros, Suzette Mayr.
Currently Teaching:
Fall 2011: ENGL 100 & 153; Winter 2012: ENGL 151 & 210.
What Students May Not Know:
I am hopelessly addicted to ice cream.
Why I Teach:
For the love of learning. For the chance to inspire a love of learning in others. For the sake of fostering creativity, curiousity, self-confidence, and an appreciation for diverse perspectives.
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Jason Dewinetz (Vernon)
Jason grew up in Vernon, graduated from W.L. Seaton, and began his college studies at OC in 1989. Between 1999 & 2005 he returned to Vernon during the summer months to produce the Greenboathouse Reading Series, and in 2007 he came back for good.
Also in 1999, Jason founded Greenboathouse Books, a small press publishing limited edition collections by emerging and established Canadian poets, an endeavour that has continued to gain momentum and attention across the country and internationally. His interest in the formal presentation of writing led him to the design of books, with special interest in typographic principle and history. Greenboathouse Press has garnered eight national book design awards, and in 2008 Jason served as one of three judges for the Alcuin Society's Annual Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. In 2008 he was invited to present a talk on Fine Press Publishing in Western Canada to the National Arts Club in New York, and in 2009 he undertook a research fellowship and speaking engagement at the Newberry Library in Chicago. More recently, he has returned from a month-long research trip to Holland, where he visited over a dozen archives and special collections libraries towards a bibliography of the work of typographer and type designer Jan van Krimpen.
His poetry has been published in journals across Canada, and he is the author of The Gift of a Good Knife (Outlaw editions, 2000), In Theory (Above/ground press, 2002) Moving to the Clear (NeWest, 2002) and Clench (Gaspereau Press, 2011). He also co-authored (with Michael O'Driscoll) A Bibliography of the Black Sparrow Press Archive (University of Alberta Press, 2003).
Credentials:
MA (University of Alberta), BA (Honours, University of Victoria)
Recent Projects:
The reincarnation of Greenboathouse Press (print-shop set-up with over 30,000lbs of printing presses, typecasting machines, and metal type); 2008 judge for the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design (in Canada), ongoing scholarly research into 15th & 16th-century Italian writing books, and the establishment of the Okanagan College Kalamalka Campus Print Shop.
Recently Read:
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (for the 6th time); The Collected Poems of Ann Sexton; The Journals of Thomas James Cobden Sanderson.
Currently Teaching:
Fall 2011: ENGL 116 (2 sections), ENGL 206, FINA 201; Winter 2012: ENGL 126, ENGL 207, FINA 202.
What Students May Not Know:
That I went to OC as a student way back in the late 80s.
Why I Teach:
To challenge and open and explore.
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Kerry Gilbert (on Leave 2011-12)
"I love the process of teaching, because I love what it means to learn."
Kerry was born in Calgary, Alberta, and raised in Vernon, British Columbia. She started her university career at Okanagan University College, Vernon. She finished her Bachelor of Arts at Malaspina University College, in Nanaimo, with a major in Creative Writing and a minor in Liberal Studies. Kerry undertook her Masters in Creative Writing at Griffith University, in Australia, for which she received academic excellence.
Kerry started teaching, Creative Writing and Literature Courses, at Okanagan University College in January 2003. She has recently published her first book of poetry, (kerplnk): a verse novel of development (2005). Kerry continues to live in Vernon, with her husband and kids. She believes in the unique opportunities for students of new Okanagan College, and is happy to be a part of such a dynamic, creative English Department.
Credentials:
MA (Griffith University), BA (Okanagan University College, Malaspina University College)
Recent Projects:
(kerplnk): A verse novel of development (Kalamalka Press).
Recently Read:
I Love You, Stinky Face, written by Lisa McCourt, illustrated by Cyd Moore.
Currently Teaching:
[On leave.]
What Students May Not Know:
I did my first two years of University at Okanagan University College.
Why I Teach:
I like to teach, because I love to learn!
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Francie Greenslade (on Leave 2011-12)
Teaching is not "merely to confirm the status quo [but] to challenge ourselves so that we may become critical participants in our educational process and society as a whole." — Carl E. James
I've written stories since I could write. After several unsuccessful attempts to make what I thought would be a more practical choice, I chose to study English literature at University of Winnipeg. It has proven to be a very practical choice for me, a field that has allowed me to do what I love – read and write, and think about writing.
I did my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at University of British Columbia in 1992. I have written for TV Guide, trade magazines, non-profit organizations, business and government. Penguin, Canada published my first book, A Pilgrim in Ireland: A Quest for Home, in 2002. My second book, By the Secret Ladder: A Mother's Initiation was published by Penguin in May 2007. Shelter, a novel, was published by Random House in August, 2011 and is forthcoming in the UK, Australia, and the US, as well as translations in German and Dutch.
Credentials:
MFA (UBC), BA (University of Winnipeg)
Recent Projects:
Shelter, a novel, was published in Canada by Random House in summer 2011. I'm working on a new novel called Sing a Worried Song, set in rural Manitoba and Bombay, India in the 1970s.
Recently Read:
Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Currently Teaching:
[On leave.]
What Students May Not Know:
As research for my next novel, I'm learning how to sing Hindustani classical ragas.
Why I Teach:
Where else but in a classroom do you get to hear thirty people get so intense, funny, sincere, pissed off, and sweaty about a book?
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Shona R. Harrison (Kelowna)
Shona Harrison holds a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature at University of Victoria, and studied towards her interdisciplinary Ph.D. at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, U.K. While pursuing doctoral studies at the U of York she also completed specialist instruction in medieval manuscript codicology and palaeography. Her research explores the social, cultural and gender dynamics of the medieval household manuscript within the context of the household as a community of readers, consumers, writers and patrons. This addresses important issues relating to the uses of literacy in the household and family, to power and gender relations, and the construction of social, familial and gender identities.
Before moving to England to begin her Ph.D., she taught full-time at Vancouver Island University in the Department of English. Shona joined the faculty at UBC Okanagan in January 2008 and continues to teach there. Shona joined Okanagan College in September 2010. In the past she has taught courses on Composition, Short Fiction and the Novel, Poetry and Drama, Medieval Romance, Literatures on Corporeality, Mother Daughter Literature, and Children's Literature.
Credentials:
MA, BA (University of Victoria)
Recent Projects:
Creating a diplomatic transcription of a unique text found in late medieval manuscript BL Cotton Caligula A.ii.
Recently Read:
Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent; Findley, Timothy. Pilgrim; Kowaleski, Maranne and PJP Goldberg, eds. Medieval Domesticity.
Currently Teaching:
ENGL 153.
What Students May Not Know:
I own a gorgeous Thoroughbred horse and spend a lot of my spare time galloping in the orchards and flying over jumps.
Why I Teach:
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~Victor Hugo
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Alix Hawley (on Leave 2011-12)
"Let a man get up and say, 'Behold, this is the truth,' and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say." — Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Alix Hawley grew up in Kelowna and completed her Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in English Literature, with a minor in nineteenth-century interdisciplinary studies, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She went on to Oxford University, where she completed a Master of Studies in Research Methods in English and a Doctor of Philosophy degree; her doctoral thesis discusses Virginia Woolf and her family juvenilia in the context of late-Victorian children's culture.
In England, she also received an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests include writing by and for children, as well as nineteenth-century and early Modern fiction and poetry. She enjoys teaching both literature and creative writing, especially helping students to see further into texts and to improve their skills.
Credentials:
D.Phil., M.St. (Oxford), MA (East Anglia), BA (Honours, UBC)
Recent Projects:
Them, a novel (forthcoming). "Little Boy," short story, shortlisted for CBC Literary Awards, 2009. The Old Familiar, short story collection (Thistledown Press, 2008).
Recently Read:
All of Jean Rhys's novels. I am now quite depressed.
Currently Teaching:
[On leave.]
What Students May Not Know:
Burtch Road in Kelowna is named after my great-grandfather. I have hopes of an Alix Hawley Boulevard.
Why I Teach:
Talking about books and writing is a great pleasure.
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Maryann Tjart Jantzen (Distance Ed. Tutor)
Maryann has fifteen years of university teaching experience, primarily at the first year level, include several semesters of tutoring for Simon Fraser University Distance Education. She has also served for six years as co-director of the Trinity Western University Writing Centre.
Maryann acted as associate editor (with Elsie Neufeld, et a) of Half in the Shadows: Anthology of British Columbia Mennonite Writing. (Vancouver, BC: Ronsdale Press, 2006) and she is co-editor (with H. Neufeldt and R. Martens) of a volume of biographical essays focussing on the lives of early Fraser Valley Mennonite settlers, Windows to a Village: Life Studies of Yarrow Pioneers (Waterloo: Pandora Press, in press Spring 2007).
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Sasha Johnston (on Leave 2011-12)
I tried to convince one of my classes to write this bio for me, but they refused, so here we go (in point form)....
- I grew up somewhere/time between Vernon and Calgary.
- I am a historically minded literary person with a BA in History and a MA in Interdisciplinary Studies, which is more or less a MA in English/Cultural Studies.
- I feel fairly fanatical about many ideas and issues. I try to use this fanaticism to create an engaging pedagogical experience. I like to use the term fanaticism as a synonym for 'passion' or 'zeal.'
Credentials:
MA (UBC), BA (Mount Royal)
Recent Projects:
"The Idea(l) of White British Benevolence: 'Breaking the Chains' and the 2007 Bicentennial of Abolition," in December 2009 issue of Philament.
I am currently working on a project that considers the role of museums and public exhibits in constructing particular notions of Canadian national identity.
Recently Read:
Anita Rau Badami, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson, Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman.
Currently Teaching:
[On leave.]
What Students May Not Know:
My greatest source of inspiration is my two guinea pigs.
Why I Teach:
To do my part in the cultivation of critical thinkers. And I haven't decided what I want to do when I grow up. And teaching reminds me that I really don't want to grow up.
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Sean Johnston (Kelowna)
Sean has been at Okanagan College for five years, teaching composition, literature and creative writing. He's originally from Saskatchewan and has lived and worked as a surveyor and labourer all over Canada. He has also worked as a journalist and is the author of the poetry collection The Ditch Was Lit Like This (Thistledown, 2011), the novel All This Town Remembers (Gaspereau, 2006), and the collection A Day Does Not Go By (Nightwood, 2002), which won the 2003 ReLit Award for short fiction. He is the editor of Ryga: A Journal of Provocations.
Credentials:
Ph.D. (South Dakota), MA (New Brunswick), BJ (Carleton)
Recent Projects:
Listen All You Bullets, a novel coming out in 2013 and We Don't Celebrate That, a short fiction manuscript.
Recently Read:
The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson; Borderlands by Derek Lundy; The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
Currently Teaching:
ENGL 100, 204 & 217.
What Students May Not Know:
Perhaps how many times I've cheated death, though I don't like to talk about it.
Why I Teach:
My favourite part of teaching is kind of selfish and also a bit of cliché; though I enjoy being able to help students learn, what I love is being challenged by them, being made to rethink my own stances and assumptions, to defend them or revise them.
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Jake Kennedy (Kelowna)
According to Google, Jake Kennedy is a British director of, and actor in, horror films. According to Yahoo, Jake Kennedy is a VP Controller at URS Corporation in Washington, DC. According to Ask Jeeves, there are 25 professionals named Jake Kennedy. According to my mom, Jake Kennedy is "looking very tired."
Credentials:
Ph.D. (McMaster), MA (U of Calgary), BA (York University)
Recent Projects:
I am (still!) currently working on an entirely made-up biography of New York poet and architect Madeline Gins entitled Made Line Sing. I am also (still!) collaborating with my dear friend kmaximus mcfairson acough on Death Valley: A Collaborative Community Novel. Lastly, I have just started working on some text-based/writer-inspired paintings and sculptures. Oh, and I am writing poems... all the time!
Recently Read:
You mean--this week?--like, in addition to Kafka's, Proust's, Shakespeare's, and Dostoyevsky's entire respective corpora? The new Denny's menu, chickens!
Currently Teaching:
ENGL 116 & 150.
What Students May Not Know:
According to Madeline Gins, poetry ain't this or that--it's thit and thas.
Why I Teach:
To receive the words and give the words and spread the words and learn the words and forget the words... and for the big cash money.
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Jeremy Lanaway (Vernon)
After completing the first two years of my post-secondary education at Okanagan College (then called Okanagan University College), I went on to complete a few degrees (BA, MFA, BEd) at UBC. My teaching experience ranges from teaching English courses at Okanagan College to teaching English and Creative Writing classes at high schools in Canada and Hong Kong to teaching advanced English grammar to ESL students preparing to enter Canadian post-secondary institutions. I've dabbled in freelance writing, publishing short stories in literary journals and non-fiction features in newspapers and magazines in Canada, the United States, and Hong Kong. I've also worked as a freelance writer / editor for Pearson Longman Asia (in fact, I still do), Pearson Longman Canada, and Pearson Longman UK, which has given me an opportunity to author, co-author, and edit more than forty English Language Teaching textbooks.
Credentials:
MFA, BFA, BEd (UBC)
Recent Projects:
I am currently writing a monthly hockey column for The American magazine, four supplementary textbooks for the new Longman Junior Secondary coursebook series (Hong Kong), and new short fiction, as well as editing an older novel.
Recently Read:
Pastoralia by George Saunders; Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter; Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Currently Teaching:
ENGL 100 (Fall); ENGL 100 & 233 (Winter)
What Students May Not Know:
Hockey has always been a huge part of my life: from playing rep as a kid, to playing junior as a teen, to playing in a beer league as an adult. I've also been lucky enough to combine hockey with writing: I've worked as a recap / features writer for Canucks.com, and I'm currently the hockey writer for The American, a forty-year-old arts and culture magazine based in London, UK.
Why I Teach:
My life has been shaped by teachers. Imitation, as they say, is the highest form of flattery.
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John Lent (Retired)
John Lent lives in Vernon, BC, where he has taught Creative Writing and Literature Courses for Okanagan College for twenty-six years. So It Won't Go Away (2005) is his seventh book and is a sequel to his 1996 work of fiction, Monet's Garden, in its third printing. Other books by Lent include The Face In The Garden (1990) and Black Horses, Cobalt Suns (2000).
Lent has read from his work in many cities in Canada, the USA, France and England. He has written scholarly articles on Malcolm Lowry, Thomas De Quincey, Wilfred Watson, Mavis Gallant, Kristiana Gunnars and others, and has always been fascinated by the representation of consciousness as narrative.
He is a founding member of Kalamalka Press, The Kalamalka Institute For Working Writers, and the annual Mackie Lecture and Reading Series at Okanagan College in Vernon. Lent is also a singer/songwriter in the Lent / Fraser / Wall Trio whose CD, Shadow Moon, was released in 2005.
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Heidi Maddess (Vernon)
I have been involved in the creative arts for the past twelve years through my education, my employment and my professional art practice. My undergraduate and graduate studies at studio‐based institutions that emphasize critical thinking and conceptual rigor have proved both challenging and rewarding.
After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, in Vancouver, I established my professional practice through exhibitions at public and private art galleries, alternative art spaces and international artist residencies. My artwork is in public and private international collections. I completed a Masters of Fine Arts degree with Honours at the San Francisco Art Institute, in California, which supports a multidisciplinary, rigorous approach to studio practice and contextual enquiry.
Credentials:
MFA (San Francisco Art Institute), BFA (Emily Carr University)
Recent Projects:
Upcoming Solo exhibition in 2011 at Vertigo Gallery, Vernon BC. Selected to exhibit in 2010 for the group exhibitions- "Flow," North Vancouver Community Arts Council, North Vancouver and in "Corporeality Bodies in Question" at ConradWilde Gallery, Tucson AZ.
Recently Read:
Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
Making a Noise! Aboriginal Perspectives on art, art history, critical writing and community – a collection of Essays. Banff: The Banff Centre, 2003.
Currently Teaching:
FINA 134 and 144.
What Students May Not Know:
I can't stop myself from finishing a bag of pretzels once open and I ride a motorcycle].
Why I Teach:
I think being an artist is about everything you know. And being broadly educated makes you a more complex human being, so that you can bring more to the discipline." Ellen Phelan - Can Art Be Taught?
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The Literary Encyclopedia:
John Glenday
Wole Soyinka
Athol Fugard
Greg Simison
Dennis Cooley
The Kailyard School
Burnside, "A Poet's Polemic"
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Craig McLuckie (Vernon)
(On secondment as Acting Associate Dean, Arts and Foundational Programs.)
Craig McLuckie is a College Professor in the English Department. Born in Scotland, Craig was raised in South Africa, Canada and Scotland. Craig's commitment to the teaching and learner-centred mandate of Okanagan College is reflected in his scholarly work, especially in the purposely polyphonic and political design of the edited collections: Critical Perspectives on Dennis Brutus, 1995 (with Patrick Colbert), Ken Saro-Wiwa: Writer and Activist, 1999 (with Aubrey McPhail) and Arthur Nortje: Poet and South African, 2005 (with Ross Tyner). He has also published essays in a variety of academic journals, and two monographs, one on Nigerian Literature (1990) and one on Scottish writer, William McIlvanney (1999).
Craig has been teaching for twenty-six years, twenty-two teaching English at Okanagan College. Acting Associate Dean 2010-12. While he is resistant to the shallowness of capitalist models of education, Craig does see ownership of the process as central to a learner's success in education and in life.
With Jim Hamilton, John Lent, and Ross Tyner, Craig is a founding member of the Kalamalka Institute for Working Writers (kalwriters.com). His musical tastes cover Lucinda Williams, Billy Bragg, and REM. Craig is also an avid motorcyclist, a rugby enthusiast, and he has a passion for Guinness.
Recent Projects:
Editor (with RT, FG, JK, JL) Out of the Ordinary: Politics, Poetry, Narrative (2009) by Gary Geddes.
Editor (with FG, JL and RT): perhaps i shpould/miskien moet ek (2010) by Peter Midgley.
Recently Read:
Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009)by Terry Eagleton, Townie (2011) by Andre Dubus III, Rising, Falling, Hovering (2009) by C. D. Wright, Big Sid's Vincati (2009) by Matthew Biberman, and Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010) by Christopher Hitchens.
Currently Teaching:
ENGL 222 (Fall) & ENGL 233 (Winter)
What Students May Not Know:
Survived the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Why I Teach:
"What he or she represents and how those ideas are represented to an audience - are always and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless." —Edward Said
"We must improve the shared conditions in which we live, of course, but vthe essential purpose of that will be in order to inhabit more fully the necessary and unalterable terms of our existence. Take away the avoidable injustices of some lives that we may humanly share in the unavoidable injustice that is in all our lives." -William McIlvanney.
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Kevin McPherson (Vernon)
Kevin McPherson can often be overheard telling students, "Well, if you had followed the guidelines" and "No, you're wrong." I'm only joking! I once was classically trained in the art of paradiddling the snuff out of a snare and, since Calgary, have been a lifelong supporter of the '''Pataphysique Party of Canada. My teaching style has been called "clumsy" and "huh?" by students, and I currently hold a mean rating of 3.5 on ratemyprofessor.ca – I love being average! When I'm not poetrying words on computer or weeping over a table of essays, you might find me drinking day-old coffee with bestfriends at Denny's.
Credentials:
MA (U of Calgary), BA
Recent Projects:
My second book of "poetry" was kindly published by Snare Books in 2011 – easy peasy! I am also collaborating with my friend Jacque K'Neddy on Death Valley: A Collaborative Community Novel and asking the world to write my biography... so send me words!
Recently Read:
Blert by Jordan Scott and Attack of the Difficult Poem by Charles Bernstein.
Currently Teaching:
ENGL 116, 100 & 216.
What Students May Not Know:
I completed my BA with a minor in Chemistry. I have many aliases. I am rarely correct.
Why I Teach:
Because I am terrible at scaling buildings and even worse at teeth-catching bullets... and I sometimes believe that learning and art can be detergents for criminal thought and, thus, behaviour!
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Melanie Murray (Kelowna)
Melanie Murray began her literary career in high school due to her epiphanic experience of reading The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. Thereafter, she attained a B.A. (Honours English), B.Ed. and M.A. (Canadian Literature) at the University of New Brunswick. She has been teaching with the English Department at Okanagan College since 1988, pursuing her scholarly and pedagogical interests in the fields of Canadian, Children's, and Women's literature. She believes she has the best of vocations: reading and discussing great literature while assisting students to appreciate and express the beauty and power of words.
Credentials:
MA, B.Ed., BA (Honours, University of New Brunswick)
Recent Projects:
A book of creative non-fiction, For Your Tomorrow, published by Random House Canada in May 2011.
Recently Read:
Shelter by Frances Greenslade, Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod.
Currently Teaching:
Fall 2011: ENGL 100, 151 & 212; Winter 2012: 100, 153 & 219.
What Students May Not Know:
I don't have a television.
Why I Teach:
"Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand." (Chinese Proverb)
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Terry Scarborough (Penticton and Kelowna)
Terry has been with Okanagan College since Fall, 2006. He has taught in both the Department of English and the Department of Communications.
Terry's broad literary interests and teaching experience led him to Okanagan College where he enjoys the personal nature of relatively small class sizes. A Gothic specialist, his interests also include medieval and baroque literature, Romanticism, Victorian culture and thought, science writing and literary theory. His teaching philosophy is based in dialogue and he believes that a teacher is as much a student as every student is a teacher.
Terry completed his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Victoria, where his research focussed on Bram Stoker's Dracula, late nineteenth-century psychology and the Victorian family. His recent research includes the Victorian city, representations of crime and narratives of urban exploration, specifically in the works of Dickens and Doyle.
Outside of teaching English, Terry is an avid musician and has played guitar, bass and drums in multiple Victoria bands.
Credentials:
MA, BA (University of Victoria)
Recent Projects:
Conference paper: "'Open the window then!': Filmic Interpretation of Brian Mills's The Hound of the Baskervilles." Presented at the University of Hull, UK. (Accepted for publication in The Baker Street Journal).
Review: Proposal for Frances Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire, Broadview Press.
Soundtrack: Marc Arellano's Strange Fruit.
Conference paper: "'I shall be my own police': Literary Reflections of Victorian Crime and Social Surveillance in Dickens and Doyle." (Presented at Simon Fraser Univeristy's "Interdisciplinary Themes" and published in Interdisciplinary Themes Journal). Instructor's Manual: The Empowered Writer, Oxford University Press.
"'If you don't come to me, I'll come to you': Primal Injury and Revenge in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James." (Presented at 1st Global Conference: Revenge, Mansfield College, Oxford U.K. and accepted for publication in an ISBN ebook of the same name).
Recently Read:
Catherine Wynne's The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic.
Currently Teaching:
Engl. 100, 150, 151, 211 and 221.
What Students May Not Know:
I'm a surfer.
Why I Teach:
I enjoy discussing new and changing perspectives on our world, especially those reflected in literature and film.
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Tim Walters (Salmon Arm)
Tim was raised in Middlesbrough, a failing industrial town in the North East of England, and moved to Canada during the 'difficult' teenage years, a transition from which he has never fully recovered, and which in part explains his peculiar accent. He was educated at McMaster University in Hamilton, a failing industrial town in Southern Ontario, where he received an Honours BA in English and Psychology (1997), an MA in English (1998), and a PhD in English and Cultural Studies (2004). Tim taught a variety of Literature, Film, and Cultural Studies courses at McMaster and the University of Guelph before moving to Salmon Arm, a town that is neither failing nor industrial, in 2006.
At some point in the past decade, Tim became enamoured of the (admittedly strange and perhaps naive) idea that discussing books, films, and cultural theory with students could help make the world a more tolerable place, and so tries to teach accordingly. His primary areas of interest are contemporary British and American fiction, film, and cultural theory, and he has published and/or presented papers on: Vladimir Nabokov, Julian Barnes, Canadian juvenilia, Brett Easton Ellis, Lars von Trier and the dogme95 manifesto, Chuck Palahniuk and Slavoj Zizek, subversive cinema, and Ward Churchill and the 9/11 controversy.
At present, he is working on a book length study of Fight Club, a coffee table book, and conducting research for a book about the complex and perverse relationship between football and the global economic system as it relates to the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Tim is a member of the Eco-Comittee, College football team, and is the organizer of "College Night at the Classic," a weekly film series at the Salmar Classic theatre.
Credentials:
Ph.D., MA, BA - English, BA -Psychology (McMaster)
Recent Projects:
I've spent most of the past year researching and writing a book about football and globalization which I hope to have ready for publication by early 2009.
Recently Read:
Violence by Slavoj Zizek.
Currently Teaching:
ENGL 100 & 151.
What Students May Not Know:
I care more about the fate of Middlesbrough Football Club than any other person in the Okanagan valley. And I like cats.
Why I Teach:
Because when I was an undergrad I realized that I liked lounging around talking about books and films more than doing just about anything else, and I've yet to find anyone who'll pay me to do that in a pub.
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