“My advice would be to remain open to exploring different genres and experiences. Be open to sending it out into the world. I didn’t know I could write fiction — let alone that I’d love it — and here I am.” - Kathe Gray, SCS learner
“I’ve always been curious about disaster,” says Kathe Gray, recent winner of the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction. “Though, really, it’s the aftermath that intrigues me, how people and communities respond to adversity, how they continue on.” Her winning short story, Panorama, imagines the immediate impact and lingering after-effects a blizzard has on a small prairie community. It was inspired by the Schoolhouse Blizzard, which devastated the US mid-west in 1888. “The storm came up so quickly that people, livestock, and children coming home from school got caught out in it. Many died. I wondered how survivors might reconcile such loss,” she says.
Kathe took her first creative writing course from the School of Continuing Studies (SCS) in 2008. She had transitioned from a career in arts administration, and was establishing herself as a graphic designer specializing in books and exhibition catalogues. “It was working with other people’s words that motivated me to explore creative writing through courses at SCS,” she says. “I’d take a bus from Guelph, where I live, to Toronto for classes. I’d arrive early so I could visit bookstores, then sit in coffeeshops reading what I’d bought. It was a break from my freelance work, and I was inspired by my instructors and classmates — and the writers they introduced me to.”
The arrival of her daughter, and then her decision to pursue graduate studies, put a pause on Kathe’s creative writing. Today, she is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University, where she also completed an MA in Social Anthropology. “I was poised to begin my dissertation research when the pandemic hit,” she explains. “I rely on archival research and ethnographic methods — reading old documents in libraries, doing interviews and, really, just hanging around with my participants — so my project couldn’t move forward. As weeks of limbo dragged on, I decided that resuming creative writing courses with SCS would help ground me.”
Kathe, who mostly writes poetry, jumped back into Poetry II with SCS instructor Chelene Knight, and quickly decided to complete the Certificate in Creative Writing. Last Fall, she took Creative Writing: Introduction, and Creative Writing through Reading back-to-back. “Studying with both Dennis Bock and Ken Murray was a game-changer,” she says. “I had no idea that I would find such pleasure in writing prose. Dennis and Ken taught me ways to keep myself in a short story, even when family and school commitments take me away from the actual writing. It’s like my superpower now: being able to walk the dog or do laundry while also being immersed in the lives of characters I’m writing about.”
“Working with Dennis and Ken also allowed me to gain insight about writing fiction from two different perspectives,” Kathe adds. “That’s one of the strengths of the SCS Creative Writing program. It’s a smorgasbord: you get to work with different instructors who have distinct takes on writing and publishing, on what to look for in what you read and in your own work. Another is that you can build a circle of peers that you workshop new material with long after a course has ended. I owe a lot to the continued feedback of friends I’ve made through coursework.”
Kathe submitted her story to the award to help get into the practice of sending her work out, so she was both surprised and thrilled to win. Moving forward, she aims to complete her Creative Writing Final Project, and build a portfolio of poetry this year. She is also exploring how storytelling might find a place in her scholarly work. “Writing is a skill that you can grow for a lifetime,” she says. “My advice would be to remain open to exploring different genres and experiences. Be open to sending it out into the world. I didn’t know I could write fiction — let alone that I’d love it — and here I am.”