English Workshop

Join Carleton University’s Department of English for a multi-session, interactive workshop that gives students the opportunity to explore two different areas related to Arts and Culture. This workshop can accommodate a maximum of 45 students (15 students in each component). Each workshop will last approximately one hour.

Students will participate in two of the following three workshops:

• Component A: Literary Studies Workshop with Professor Siobhain Bly Calkin
  Description: This workshop introduces high school students to a university-level seminar on a short literary text. Through a mix of lecture, class discussion and close study of the text, students will learn about the text’s artistic and material forms as well as its cultural context and importance. The text’s material form may be further explored in the Book Arts Lab workshop (when possible) or through engagement with items held in Carleton’s Archives and Special Collections (when possible).
• Component B: Creative Writing Workshop with Professor Nadia Bozak
  Description: How do events or experiences appear differently according to who is describing them? How do authors draw readers into a text by engaging with sensory experiences? How can we foster understanding between diverse groups by writing and reading with creative and critical awareness? These questions inform a series of writing exercises that high school students will engage in and share/discuss in a group setting. Time permitting, we will also talk about the place of creative writing within the university environment and how creative practice can enrich and augment scholarly practice. Students could combine this workshop with: Component C, typesetting descriptions, or word clusters derived from their writing exercises in the Book Arts Lab.
• Component C: Book Arts Lab Workshop with Professor Jody Mason and Larry Thompson, Master Printer in the Carleton University Book Arts Lab
  Description: This workshop introduces students to typesetting by hand, an art and industry that has been important to the production of literature in the western world since the fifteenth century. Students will set one line of type (from a supplied text, from one of the texts studied in the Literary Studies Workshop, or from a short text produced in the Creative Writing Workshop) and will print proofs using the Vandercook Press. Students will also have a chance to look at the poetry broadside collection from Carleton’s Archives and Special Collections.

Available workshop date: Friday, March 1, 2024

To book:

Please contact outreach@carleton.ca.