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One of the unexpected benefits of moving the MFA totally online last June was realizing we can now offer more value-added virtual lectures, workshops, panels, readings and even occasional socializing"frivols" in the months between residencies.
During this fall term, for example, we added — on our own as well as in partnership with others — a number of bonus virtual events for MFA students.
We partnered with the Afterwords Literary Festival to provide free tickets to our students(and alumni) so they could sit in on a thought-provoking online conversation with best-selling American author and essayist Roxane Gay.
We teamed up with the Canadian Freelance Guild to sponsor a panel discussion in which recent MFA grads discussed their experiences as new writers in the nonfiction publishing trenches.
To help students prepare for their upcoming winter residency pitch sessions, we made arrangements with Paragraph New York so our students could participate in“Pitch Perfect,” an online webinar hosted by"Friend of the MFA" Brenda Copeland and featuring top New York agents and editors discussing what makes a great pitch.
We staged a online panel discussion on“Research in the Time of COVID”, featuring award-winning Canadian author Charlotte Gray, Library and Archives Canada reference librarians Julie Roy and Laurena Frenette, and the University of King’s College interim librarian and archivist, Janet Hathaway.
We organized a conversation and Q&A about research, interviewing and writing with bestselling business author Howard Green.
We offered a Zoom workshop exploring different ways of using time in narrative prose with award-winning poet and author David Huebert.
All of those events were live but also available, later, in recorded form.
Thanks to MFA alum Megan Cole(2020), we also launched a“Watching Writers Read Club.” MFA students and alumni attended a number of online author events together, then reconvened a few days later for a writerly conversation about the readings. As Megan describes the structure:“We’ll talk about the books, but we’ll also talk about the way the reading was presented, the platform used, what we liked and didn’t like: all things that can help us as writers when we consider how we’ll handle readings when it’s our turn to put our books — and ourselves — out there.”
We’ve also increased the number of opportunities for students to read from their work with special evenings set aside student readings in September and December.
And we have plans for more online content in the winter semester, including"Further Reading," a new podcast series in which mentor Gillian Turnbull interviews Canadian authors.
So... we made a little virtual lemonade out of this lemon of a pandemic!
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