Cassidy McFadzean: First days as Sheridan College's CW&P Writer-in-Residence

 

 

 

 

I write this having just completed my first week on campus as Sheridan College’s newest Writer-in-Residence for their Creative Writing & Publishing BA Honours program. I wanted to submit a WIR report for other writers who may be interested in applying for this position and are not sure what it entails. I saw the job posted on Quill & Quire in May, I interviewed in June, and found out I had gotten the position by July. The payment is quite generous, offering $56,000 over 8 months (before taxes as a self-employed writer). 

Sheridan’s CW&P program emphasizes cross-genre writing; students take workshops in both poetry and fiction as well as hybrid genres. They also take courses on publishing, and go onto complete internships in their fourth year. Students have an opportunity to work on Sheridan’s literary journal, The Ampersand Review, and participate in the & Festival, the Ampersand reading series, and the new Ampersand Writing series (which involves local authors brought into campus to give writing workshops).

During the interview, I emphasized my dual MFAs in poetry and fiction as well as my past roles as fiction editor and Editor-in-Chief for The Brooklyn Review. I also have experience teaching and mentoring young writers, including teaching creative writing at the university level and a recent stint as the Saskatchewan Writer Guild’s virtual Writer-in-Residence for their Virtual Facilitated Retreat. I think all these qualities made me a strong candidate and I was thrilled to be offered the position. The job officially starts the last week of August but I was away at a writing residency and Sheridan was kind enough to let come into campus in September.

So far everyone at Sheridan has been incredibly friendly and helpful. Setting up bureaucratic matters such as payment and email has been seamless, which is important when working as a freelance contractor (especially compared to the 20+ forms I had to complete when teaching at Brooklyn College!). I’ve had a couple meetings with deans and faculty on campus, and gotten to know staff a little. It’s truly been a warm and supportive environment, and I’m excited to get to know the Sheridan faculty a little more over the course of the year. Support staff have also been incredible in anticipating anything I might need before the question even arises, such as sending me sample invoices so I can get paid on time!

The main campus for the CW&P program is Sheridan’s Hazel McCallion campus in Mississauga, directly across from the Square One Mall. I’ve never spent much time in malls, but thanks to my commute, I’ll be travelling from Yorkdale Mall in Toronto to Square One in Mississauga 2-3 times a week. I think prior WIR have lived in Toronto and Hamilton. The commute from Toronto is about an hour and a half but I’m giving myself two hours just to be safe. The GO bus is also pretty comfortable, and I’ve already done some writing on my laptop. Maybe I can work on a series of GO bus poems…

The main focus of Sheridan’s Writer-in-Residence is meeting with students in one-on-one office hours so it’s important to physically be on campus at least twice a week. After doing a series of classroom visits, I already have some students signed up for next week, which is exciting. I’ve also been asked to work with a fourth year student on their internship, which involves meeting an additional hour a week, and I’m looking forward to mentoring a student in a long term capacity. The WIR office is a cozy space with shelves filled with back issues of the Ampersand Review, CW&P merch, and books by prior WIR. Large windows look out onto the CW&P front desk as well as the hallway—you can watch students and faculty walking past, and everyone knows when the WIR is in session. I feel like posting Lucy’s sign from Peanuts—“The Poet is IN.”

Other duties include: interviewing authors at the Ampersand reading series once a month, collaborating with CW&P faculty to plan two talks/panels with local authors over the next year, doing classroom visits and giving short presentations (I have an hour long talk on imagery in fiction coming up), and making online content to engage students. Past WIR have written blogs or recorded zoom interviews with authors. I’ve decided to record a short biweekly podcast for Sheridan students on topics pertaining to the writing life, as well as reading a poem/short story excerpt and giving an associated writing prompt. I’ve never thought of starting a podcast, and I’m excited to try something new that I might not have done otherwise.

Other small duties have come up, such as judging the Ampersand’s essay contest, but the payment is so generous and everyone is so supportive that I feel happy to contribute to Sheridan’s community in the most helpful way I can. There’s also plenty of time to work on my own projects, which I’m planning on doing the days I’m not on campus. I’ve only had short interactions with students so far but I am already impressed by their enthusiasm, and I’m looking forward to reading their work throughout the year. I’m planning on writing another blog at the end of April letting you all know how it went, but for now I’m very excited to get started!

 

 

 

 

Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry: Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024), Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and Dead Writers (Invisible Publishing, 2025). Cassidy was born in Regina, earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, and currently lives in Toronto.

Margaryta Golovchenko: Drolleries, by Cassidy McFadzean

Drolleries, Cassidy McFadzean

McClelland & Stewart, 2019

There is always a special sense of promise that I feel when picking up a poetry collection that is centered around a term taken from art history or visual culture more broadly. Much like the drolleries or “grotesques” — small decorative images depicting comical and whimsical hybrid creatures that can be found in the margins of illuminated scripts — for which it is names, McFadzean’s Drolleries entices its reader with the promise of an intricate world that the poet has painstakingly gathered within the pages of the book, as the speaker so aptly puts it in “Kunstkamera”: “It is the artistry/ of the still life that draws us in,/ a cover story for our flagrant staring.”A handheld cabinet of curiosities, Drolleries is filled with the everyday-turned-magical along with the downright fantastical as we have come to recognize it from mythology or even the distant past, far enough removed that it begins to feel like it’s own kind of fantasy.

It feels like a bit of a cop-out but I still think that “Nymph,” the opening poem in Drolleries, would have to be my favourite for the way it captures McFadzean’s masterful handling in transitioning from comically relatable scene of the speaker falling “ass-first in the dappled brook,/ grasping moss-covered rocks” to the promise of an unseen beyond that is revealed in the poem’s final lines, where “the tree’s outstretched hand took hold/ of my ring and wedded itself to me.” “Janus,” “Ghosting,” “Dream Interpretation,” and “Summer Palace” similarly stood out as examples of McFadzean’s control, her ability not so much to weave the impossible into the everyday but to imbue some of the places and activities we are so familiar with that we take their mundaneness for granted, like taking a shower or feeling out of place at an event, with an otherworldly quality.

Similarly, McFadzean offers a different spin on the ekphrastic poetry tradition. The many poems in Drolleries that respond to museums or artworks feel less like reimaginings of these spaces and more like conversations McFadzean has with the source material. In “The Unicorn Tapestries,” McFadzean balances an informative approach with an analytical one, listing the titles of all seven tapestries throughout the poems while attempting to create a relationship between them that historians today still cannot seem to agree upon. McFadzean’s narrative extends beyond the familiar iconography of the tapestries and it is her playful hide-and-seek-like game of listing flora and fauna that demystifies the artworks, bringing readers who have not seen the tapestries in person into their visual space and reacquainting those readers who have with the mysterious subject in a new way.  

The reader is therefore brought into McFadzean’s conversation with art and museums through an atmosphere of intimacy that McFadzean cultivates over the course of the collection in the form of a personal narrative, giving readers a glance into the life, love, struggle, and loss of the poems’ “I.” One does not need to have visited the Winter Palace in Russia to feel simultaneously moved and caught off-guard by the final lines in “Russian Ark,” to feel a certain familiarity, rather than déjà vu, with the longing and letting go that McFadzean captures when she writes:

We end our call in the rotunda

after I share the Rembrandts

through my iPhone’s shaky lens.

Sit with the Rubens a little longer

for me. I walk backwards down

the stairwell, and into the sea.

Drolleries can be best summed up in the words of McFadzean herself, from her poem “Ten of Swords”: “Poetry means never being sated.” It is a collection of endless curiosity filled with poems that do not sit still, propelled forward by their own desire to be in and with the world that, as McFadzean shows us, is still full of endless wonders waiting to be discovered around every corner and shower curtain.

Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history and curatorial studies at York University and can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.