Heather Jessup

Selected Publications

• This Is Not a Hoax: Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture
  Wilfrid Laurier University Press (WLUP), Waterloo ON. 2019.
• The Lightning Field. Gaspereau Press, Kentville NS. 2011. (novel)
  Finalist for the Thomas Head Raddall Award and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, Nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Literary Award
• “The Art of Stumbling.” Poetry Is Dead Magazine. Issue 14: Fall 2016. Vancouver. 46-48.
• “Complicated Truths in Contemporary Art: Inventions, Interventions, and Hoaxes.”
  Dalhousie Review 93.1 (Spring 2013). Halifax. 95-110.
• “The Daylight Factory” (short fiction) Grimm Magazine (Fall 2006) no. 4. Kitchener.
  22-35. (Nominated for New American Voices)
• “At the Akira Kurosawa Film Festival” (short fiction) Malahat Review 153
  (Winter 2005) Victoria. 31-39. (Nominated for the Journey Prize)
• “Boxcar” (short fiction) PRISM international (Fall 2004) 43:1. Vancouver. 29-33.

• 2019 Make Believe: The Secret Library of M. Prud’homme – A Rare Collection of Fakes
  Director and Co-Curator, prudhommelibrary.ca
• 2013 “Lifetime Achievements.” At The Edge (co-written chapter in a collaborative novel). Eds. Marjorie Anderson and Deborah Schnitzer. Unlimited Editions: Winnipeg, 2013.

• Canada Council New Chapter Grant - Lead Director, Co-Applicant (2017-2019)
• Langara College Centre for Applied Research Grant (2018)
• Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Writing Residency (2016)
• Canada Council Creation Grant (2013)
• Nova Scotia Creation Grant (2013)
• Harvard English Institute Scholarship (2012)
• SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship (2009-2012)
• University of Toronto, Graduate Fellowship (2008-2009)
• Massey College, Junior Fellowship (2008-2012)
• University of Toronto, Kathleen Coburn Award (2008)
• Canada Council Professional Emerging Writers Grant (2007)
• Concordia University, First Graduating Class Award (2006)
• Banff Centre for the Arts, Writing Studio Scholarship (2006)
• BC Arts Council Undergraduate Award for Creative Writing (2003)

Remarks

Hi. I’m Heather. I’m a fiction writer and academic who loves collaborations, hybrid forms and genres, interdisciplinary projects, and teaching. I am grateful for the chance to write and teach in K’jipuktuk on Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. I am grateful for the Black history and Black present in this place. I acknowledge that Indigenous and Black culture, intelligence, creativity, and resistance shape the city where I live, and that I benefit inordinately from this work. As a scholar and writer, I commit myself to learning and working against my complicity in the continued project of colonization.

I have previously taught smart and stylish students about stories and the small miracles that are commonly known as words at Langara College in Vancouver, located on the territories of the Musqueam, who have given the College the name snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓, House of Teachings. I have taught Critical Theory and Art History at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Literature at Saint Mary’s University, English Composition at Concordia University, and workshops on Fiction, Poetry, Character, Creativity, Art and Activism, and Pilgrimage for the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia, the B.C. Writers Federation, Writers In the Schools, Sorrento Retreat and Conference Centre, and at Rivendell Retreat Centre on Bowen Island.

I believe that when we take and teach Creative Writing and Literature classes, we engage in radical acts of empathy and imagination that are needed now more than ever in service to our world. We give ourselves routines, rhythms, and community so that we are more bravely equipped to encounter discomfort, strangeness, and otherness-than-ourselves with grace and intelligence. We use improbably focused acts of attention to understand the galactic structures of a novel’s constellations, or the small gentle sway of steam rising from a character’s cup of tea – and this attention is at the root of empathy. When we take and teach Creative Writing and Literature we learn to still ourselves. We learn bravery, resilience, patience, and practice. We learn how to ask open and beautiful questions, and how to trust in our community and in the value of diverse experiences and voices.

These themes of stories and truth, trust and community, attention and diversity, and how words shape societies and self-understanding is also what I am most curious about in my own creative and academic work.