The Toronto New School of Writing

The Toronto New School of Writing was founded by Jay MillAr and Jenny Sampirisi in 2009. We originally looked at the colleges and universities in Toronto to see if we could pitch a course or series of courses centred on underrepresented poetics, but it was clear that unless the goal of the course was to turn your average student or hobbyist into a best selling author by the end of the term, there wasn’t a place for this kind of literature in an academic institution.

So in response to this, we said screw it, we’re starting up a school, we’re going to be smart asses and steal the title of the “New School” in New York, we’re going to set up in a bookstore absurdly titled ‘of swallows, their deeds, and the winter below,’ and the purpose of many of our courses will be failure – that is, that students would be encouraged to try and fail. The New School wouldn’t demand an A-level example of a sonnet (though there’s room for that too). We wanted to give time and space for ideas to be explored. In your average university course, the student is expected to maintain a grade point average and that expectation can negate the necessary processes that happen when one is trying out a new form of writing or exploring a new set of ideas and can even foster frustration around exploring unfamiliar poetic territory. In short, a university course, by design, can easily run counter to real thought. It should be noted here, that we want that level of critical thought to happen for the writers who facilitate the classes. They need not be seasoned pedagogs, just people who are excited about what they’re talking about and want to explore it with others.

We’ve started the School because there was no other venue for these workshops on this scale. We’ve set it up it because Toronto has an excellent and intelligent community of writers we can draw on. We did it too because we conceived it might be a vehicle to expand the Toronto community. We see an opportunity to bring in writers from outside Toronto. This fall, Charles Bernstein will run a workshop with us. Alice Notely, who hasn’t visited Toronto in 20 years, will run a workshop and give a reading. Vanessa Place will do the same. What we hope for the New School is that, despite the Canadian granting system that asks us to pretend that the flow of creative thought and energy never makes it through customs, we can expand the network. Only good can come from bringing writers and thinkers here to show us what they do and to give them the chance to see what we do and report back.

We hope you’ll be part of the Toronto New School of Writing and that you’ll find it a welcome space to explore your own practice with us.