Michelle Barker, writer-in-residence 2025
McLoughlin Gardens is pleased to announce our 2025 writer in residence is Vancouver author and editor, Michelle Barker.
Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and a senior editor with The Darling Axe. Her most recent publication, co-authored with David Brown, is Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her YA historical novel My Long List of Impossible Things (Annick Press) was a Junior Library Guild gold standard selection. The House of One Thousand Eyes (Annick Press) won numerous awards, including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award, and was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of A Year of Borrowed Men (Pajama Press), finalist for the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. Her poetry, short fiction and non-fiction have been published in literary reviews around the world. Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and lives in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
Michelle will offer two workshops during her residency, as well as a number of consultations with local writers.
Yvonne Blomer, writer-in-residence 2023
Yvonne posing in the studio, just before her workshop got underway.
Yvonne gave two amazing workshops while she was in residence - “Eco-poetics: Responding to Nature” and “Ekphrasis: Responding to Art.”
Sara Cassidy, writer-in-residence 2023
Sara arrived at the Gardens in July 2023 and accomplished an enormous amount in a very short time, including delivering a workshop for adults titled “The Poetry of Writing For Children,” a workshop for children with the charming title of “What Did the Dog Smell Like?” as well as consultations with a number of local writers.
Don McKay, writer-in-residence 2022
Don McKay reading to a packed house at the Comox Valley Art Gallery, June 30, 2022. Artwork by Marlene Creates.
While in residence Don and his partner Marlene Creates were enthralled by the spiralling calls of the Swainson’s Thrush, usually heard at the Gardens at the end of June. We look forward to seeing Don’s praise poem “A Song for the Song of the Swainson’s Thrush” in a future publication.
Darrel McLeod, writer-in-residence 2022
In August, 2022 Darrel McLeod was in residence and gave two workshops on memoir writing. He also performed selections from his recent CD at the public reading, held at the K’ómoks First Nations community hall.
The title of Darrel’s CD is Waseskwan, which is the Cree word for blue skies. It's a jazz album in the style of George Gershwin meets Jobim.
Jennifer Manuel, 2021 writer-in-residence
In 2021, writer Jennifer Manuel was in residence at the McLoughlin Gardens. She led two workshops outside, in the shade, “The Hidden Layers of Narrative Detail” and “Three Steps to a Strong Narrative Theme.” Jennifer also gave a reading from her novel - The Heaviness of Things that Float. Jennifer brought two heavy items to inspire her during her residency - her cello and her typewriter.
Jennifer Manuel typing away on the porch of the cottage. In her reflections on her experience at the Gardens, she wrote: “One thing I felt was very important was that I started a writing routine the very first morning in the cottage—otherwise it would have been easy to simply enjoy the surroundings and delay the writing. I am an early morning writer, so my writing started when the sun was just coming up across the water. I also brought my old Underwood typewriter, which I used as a creative experiment to see if my thinking and writing process changed using a typewriter. It did, but I’m still reflecting on how exactly. So as far as my own creative work, my time at the cottage was incredibly productive…Best of all, playing my cello next to the ocean or in the garden under the trees was magical.”
Summer 2020 Events at the McLoughlin Gardens
A reading in the great outdoors
Marcus introduced the reading by inventing a story about how Dr. Bonnie Henry had flown in that afternoon to make sure we had followed all the necessary protocol for a public event.
Public reading with Marcus Youssef
“Creative Differences: Art, Adaptation & the Reinvention of the World” took place on Thursday, September 3rd at 4:30 p.m. in Puntledge Park.
Marcus’ plays are entertaining, surprising, edgy and often satirical. Every single one tackles an urgent political and social question, from climate change to migration and racialization to militarism to the corrosive personal consequences of capitalism to his unique, ten-year writing collaboration with Niall McNeil, a Vancouver-based artist whose life includes Down’s Syndrome. These plays are some of Canada’s most incisive examples of how an artist’s work can disrupt our thinking about urgent social questions in ways that are unexpected, full of humour, and – most of all – authentically human.
Marcus Youssef, 2020 writer-in-residence
A recent update on Marcus: If you’re visiting Vancouver in the summer of 2024, you can find Marcus performing as Sir Toby Belch in the Bard on the Beach production of Twelfth Night.
Marcus was joined in residence by his partner of 30 years, teacher and scholar Amanda Fritzlan. Amanda is in her fourth year of a PhD in Education and Curriculum Theory at UBC, and will be writing the final stages of her dissertation. Amanda’s research examines relationships between a historically colonizing education system and non-western (primarily Indigenous) systems of knowledge in math and science.
Marcus Youssef’s fifteen or so plays, about half written in collaboration with pals, include Winners and Losers, Leftovers, King Arthur’s Night, Jabber, The In-Between, Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, Everyone, Adrift, Peter Panties, and A Line in the Sand. They have been produced across North America, off-Broadway and in Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Greece, Germany, China, Denmark, Belgium, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. Marcus’s work has received numerous awards, including one of Canada’s most prestigious cultural awards, the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize for Theatre, the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award, Berlin Germany’s Ikarus Prize, the Rio-Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award, the Chalmer's Canadian Play Award, the Seattle Times Footlight Award, two Arts Club Silver Commissions, the Vancouver Critics’ Choice award (three times), the Canada Council Staunch-Lynton Award for artistic excellence, as well as multiple local awards in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Marcus Youssef’s plays are published by Talonbooks and Playwrights Canada Press. A co-founder of the Vancouver-based artist-run production studio Progress Lab 1422, Marcus is currently Senior Artist at Vancouver’s Neworld Theatre (which he led from 2005-19), International Associate Artist at Farnham Maltings (UK), Playwright in Residence at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, an artistic advisor to the National Arts Centre English Theatre and an editorial advisor to Canadian Theatre Review.
Maleea Acker, 2019 writer-in-residence
The McLoughlin Gardens Society welcomed our third writer-in-residence in the summer of 2019.
Maleea Acker is the author of two books of poems, The Reflecting Pool and Air-Proof Green (Pedlar 2009, 2013), and one of essays, Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast (New Star Books, 2012). Her work has been published in Canada, the US, Mexico and the UK. She writes an environmental column for Focus Magazine and serves on The Malahat Review’s non-fiction editorial board.
Maleea Acker
hard at work reviewing work submitted for consultation.
Maleea has lived and worked in Canada, the US, Spain and Mexico. She is also an award-winning Geography lecturer at the University of Victoria, where she is a PhD candidate, focusing on Geopoetics.
During her residency, Maleea gave two workshops, both of which challenged participants to think differently about their relationship to the landscape.
Arleen Paré, 2018 writer-in-residence
Arleen reading a local writer’s submission on the porch.
In August, the McLoughlin Gardens Society welcomed Victoria poet Arleen Paré as our 2018 writer-in-residence. During her residency, Arleen met with local writers to discuss their work. She also gave a one-day workshop on the topic of “The Habit of Art” and one afternoon at the Courtenay Library, she read from her poetry and prose collections.
An Interview with Arleen Paré
MGS: What project were you working on while in residence at the McLoughlin Gardens?
Arleen: While I lived at McLoughlin Gardens last August, for which I am entirely grateful, I worked steadily on a new project that I am currently calling First. This is a book-length collection of poetry that tracks my relationship with my first best friend though childhood into the fifty years I lost track of her altogether, and then into finding her again just down the street. The collection also includes questions about the origins of the cosmos, and Nancy Drew. I was fortunate enough to have the digital inspiration of Toronto poet and teacher Hoa Nuygen, who provided a poetry course based on the writings of Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickenson. This course was a poetic challenge for me, a new way to write poetry, and I loved it. I was able to add over fifteen poems to this new collection.
MGS: What was your writing routine while you were staying at the cottage?
Arleen: I avoid routine in my writing life like the plague (how’s that for a cliché?). I love to have routine in my daily life, but not in writing, that would make it too much like work. I don’t think of writing as work. I worked for decades in government bureaucracy, which was routine and discipline enough for at least three lifetimes. Now I write whenever I can, which is easy enough because I love writing almost as much as I love my children. I am a devoted writer; I take enormous pleasure from writing. Nothing about writing is work for me.
When I wrote at the McLoughlin Gardens, which was constant but sporadic, I perched on a kitchen chair at the little wooden table in the main floor bedroom. I moved the table so that it stood beside the large wardrobe with the figure of Mercury painted on the door. A beauty. I didn’t look out a window, though the views were exquisite. I looked into the south-facing wall, which was white. I used two cushions on the chair. Sometimes I used notes from the night before when I would have woken up with a poem bumping around in my head.
Arleen at the desk in the main floor bedroom.
MGS: What did you learn from meeting with local writers to discuss their work?
Arleen: I loved working with the local writers. They were most delightful, curious, kind, and generous in their approach to me. They listened carefully and asked good questions. What I learned from them and from working with such a diverse collection of writers was the beauty of the individual writer, how each writer has their own way of expression and of learning, how important it is to respect that.
MGS: What tips would you give someone who is setting up a writing retreat at home?
Arleen: Set the retreat for a defined period of time, for a weekend or for a week. Clear the decks, both socially and physically. Tidy up a bit. Load your printer with paper. Make sure you have access to a good dictionary, a good thesaurus, any research books you may need or want. Eat simply. Keep a notebook by your bed.
MGS: Thank you!
Arleen reading in the living-room at the cottage.
Past residencies
Nova Scotia poet and writer, Anne Simpson, arrived in the spring of 2016 to be our first writer-in-residence. Winner of the Griffin Prize in poetry, as well as several other literary awards, Anne met with local writers at the library in Courtenay to offer consultation on their work. She also gave an evening class in poetry and two fiction workshops.
Local writers and poets expressed their appreciation for Anne's presence:
Poetry
"Anne [was] exceptionally generous with her time and programming. Not every writer in residence would offer an array of courses and private meetings. We were very lucky to have Anne, and I hope she will come back, also to Hornby Island. Good luck in your deliberations for a new writer in residence, and my sincere thanks to the McLoughlin Foundation." Cornelia Hoogland
Fiction
"[At Anne's fiction workshop] I learned how to get right to the action of the story so as to avoid too much preamble. I also learned that my real experiences are far more unique and interesting than I supposed and that I just have to provide enough background so that the reader understands what is actually happening in the story, context, environment, characters.
One amazing thing is that it was free and to be able to learn from a professional writer free of charge is quite a boon. Anne’s style of teaching I found a great combination of hands on, covering essential information yet being spontaneous enough to elicit valuable information from the participants. At the same time she was disciplined about keeping us on point." C. R. Wells, workshop participantIn
Envelope of Summer
Anne Simpson
Shiny-backed crow, pecking in gravel,
rose-tinted peony, the bride’s skirts,
turtle in the culvert, crooked elbow in the trunk
of the young beech. Elderberry, bedecked
with scarlet, with Chinese ornaments. Rolled up
fields across the estuary, tide over rock, once, twice, and again
the single grey heron, a monk observing
fish glimmer in eelgrass. Dignitaries,
on perches of dead spruce, scan the crowd. A yellow-gold
gaze, far-seeing. Poplars turn silver-backed leaves, turn them
this way and that. A robin’s query. An onshore breeze
puckers the tablecloth of water. Here, the guests,
having gathered, having
settled. Faint scent of bayberry. The robin
again. A hush—