Faculty

Teacher, Writer, Author, Scholar

My intellectual and creative life began in university. First, I studied art history. Classics— ancient Greece and Rome— "tradition and the individual talent.”                                        

I have a BA (Brock University), an MFA (University of Regina), an MA in Interdisciplinary studies focusing on literature, philosophy, and art (York University), and a PhD (Simon Fraser University) in modern and contemporary American and Canadian literature and poetics.

My relevant academic memberships include the MLA and the ALA where I have presented papers in Vancouver, Austin, Pennsylvania, New York, Boston, and Seattle.

My teaching philosophy has evolved along with my evolving interests as documented in my publications. My first book was bpNichol Comics (Talonbooks, 2002); it taught me how to look at images in the context of their framing by language— about ways of seeing wherein the subject was image, the context linguistic.

My teaching interests have evolved along with my teaching philosophy. My second book, textual vishyuns: image & text in the work of bill bissett (Talonbooks, 2011) explores the art of close reading and ways of seeing without the aid of linguistic hierarchies determined by conventions of capitalization, spelling and punctuation.

My research interests have evolved along with my teaching philosophy and interests. My third book, Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (Talonbooks, 2016), reinvents close reading beyond even the genre-breaking rigors of Gertrude Stein's work, and is an annotative deconstruction of her whole book in which she sets out to actively elide even the conventions of standard English syntax.

Most recent:

Suprematist Film: Malevich & Meta Film: Painterly Ways of Seeing Reality in Film. BCIT. 24 May 2023—a focus that evolves out of my recent work and presentations at the MLA (Austin, Pennsylvania, New York, and Seattle)

“Imagism and the Ready-Made: The Minimalist Turn in Modern Poetry.” MLA (and the Hemingway Society) Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, January 4–7, 2017.

“Reading Studies in Description Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.” In this presentation of Studies in Description I will give a close reading of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, and discuss her poetry and poetics in the light of contemporary developments in painting, theatre, and cinema. Simon Fraser University, October 6, 2016.

“William Carlos Williams at the Centre: Tradition and the Derivative Poet.” MLA (and the William Carlos Williams Society) Austin, Texas, January 7–10, 2016.

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times: The Work of Life in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility (Routledge Press, 2022)

Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Talonbooks), 2016.

Textual vishyuns: image and text in the work of bill bissett (Talonbooks), 2011.

bpNichol Comics (Talonbooks), 2002.

I consider teaching to be a foundational path to community engagement as it evolves alongside my curatorial work, which includes the first solo exhibition and retrospective "textual vishyuns: image & text in the work of bill bissett and his whole art" at The Reach gallery and museum, in addition to curating recent film festivals.