Events › Poetry as Research Method with Fenn Stewart

In this workshop, we’ll consider poetry as a kind of research method that can help us think through crucial questions in our lives. Fenn will share some of what she has learned from other writers and artists who are working through their own relationships with birds, bears, colonialism, “Canada,” other homelands, other home nations, other ancestors, highways, diasporas, gardening, zucchinis, zebra mussels, salmon, lawns, hiking trails, and poetry itself.

As we are different people, and different writers, and as we have different relationships with the land, and with ourselves, we need different things. The goal of this workshop, then, is to begin to develop poetry-research plans for ourselves, in a mutually supportive and resource-sharing way.

Celebrate National Poetry Month with a Creative Writing Class at VPL. This class is supported by the Canadian Poetry Fund, a local donor-advised fund which fosters accessible public education outreach for poetry and other forms of creative writing.

Fenn Stewart teaches writing and literature at Capilano University; she previously taught the same subjects at Douglas College and UBC. Fenn holds a PhD from York University, and she's a former editor and current contributing editor of The Capilano Review. She's the author of several articles on Canadian cultural and political history (most recently, a piece in Briarpatch co-written with Jastej Luddu), three chapbooks of poetry, and Better Nature (2017), an anti-colonial rewriting of Walt Whitman's diary of his travels in Canada. Her latest book of poetry is Women & Roosters (2025).

Creative Writing Classes at VPL provide open, friendly, creative spaces for book lovers and aspiring writers of all levels.