Writers in Residence
Andrea Currie
Recipient of the Nova Scotia Indigenous Writer's Residency
Andrea Currie is a member if the historic Métis Nation and grew up on her homeland in southern Manitoba. Currently living in Unama’ki (Cape Breton), Andrea is a writer, musician, and psychotherapist who has been working for the past 20 years in the Mi’kmaq community. Andrea is interested in how the ways we choose and use words and sounds can free us up, drop us down into our embodied hearts and spirits, and open up spaces that we can hold for the re-emergence of our lost collective wholeness.
Andrea will be working on a collection tentatively titled Going Free, which focuses on reconnecting and repairing her lost relationships with the lands and waters that shaped her people and, therefore, also shaped her. During recent trips to her ancestral homeland, Andrea has immersed herself in sensory and intuitive experiences of the elements and the natural world. She is writing this collection of short stories and poems in hopes it will be read by other Sixties Scoop survivors, Indigenous people who are healing from the impact of colonization, and anyone else who is interested in broadening and deepening their understanding of the experiences of Indigenous peoples in what is now called Canada.
Andrea will also be developing a novel about Ebbie and Tub, siblings and the younger selves of two adult child welfare system survivors who have reunited after years of separation. The reunited adult siblings head out on a road trip to visit places from their past, with their younger selves in the back seat of the car.
Dea Toivonen
Recipient of the RBC Emerging Artists Residency
Dea Toivonen is a writer, visual artist, and astrologer living and working in Kjipuktuk. Their work explores queerness, community and becoming through poetics and experimental storytelling. Their interests include contemporary fiction, theory and ethical philosophy, film, organic gardening, somatic healing, and dance. They center their practice around process-driven exploration that is generated by questions and desires surrounding transformation and healing.
Dea will be working on a collection of short fiction that explores contemporary loneliness and questing for queer and chosen family. Characters throughout the collection navigate moments of breakdown and are met by a need to reconfigure their moral imaginations as they seek to overcome what stands between them and meeting the world. While the collection is unified by characters that share similar motivations, the collection is formally varied and travels through space, time, and alternative histories to brush upon the universal spectrum of being alone and being with others. The stories are pop, and full of vibrant objects and strange encounters that strike characters as semiotically significant, often imposing realizations or affects that change the course of characters' trajectories.
Michael Goodfellow
Recipient of the William & Elizabeth Pope Residency
Michael Goodfellow is the author of the poetry collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography (2022) and Folklore of Lunenburg County (2024), both published by Gaspereau Press. His poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, The Cortland Review, Reliquiae, and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia.
Michael will be working on a new collection of poems about landscape and hallucination, exploring the act of mapping and naming landscape, and the semiotics of and gaps between naming and the thing named. The collection is situated in relation to the south shore of Nova Scotia and colonial images and maps of the area.
Barbara Lounder
Recipient of a Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Residency
Barbara Lounder has a background in the visual arts. For over 15 years, her interdisciplinary projects have centred on walking as a method for research and creative thought, and as a form of artmaking itself. These projects have often been collaborations, situated in public spaces and involving participation. Historical context plays an important role in Barbara’s work, with research and writing being vital to her creative process at various stages.
At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, Barbara began a project called Corona Walker, inspired by a headstone in the Dartmouth Public Cemetery. Corona Walker was born in 1870 and died in 1889. Her name and the circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic persuaded Barbara to make work about her. As it turned out, there are very few official records about Corona Walker, and the project therefore lent itself to creative invention and speculation. Barbara held seven public walking art events as part of Corona Walker; wrote several essays about the project for academic publications; created and exhibited over 30 collages and artworks on paper; and gave approximately 8 informal, private “dramatic readings” of prose material she has written as part of the work. At Jampolis Cottage, Barbara will be working with the written aspects of Corona Walker to produce the first draft of a book-length prose manuscript — a moving account of an obscure life — that combines elements of historical veracity with invention.
Tegan Zimmerman
Recipient of a Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Residency
Tegan Zimmerman is an Adjunct Professor in Women and Gender Studies at Saint Mary's University; she is also the Chair of the International Comparative Literature Association’s Gender Studies Research Committee. She specializes in contemporary gender theory and women’s writing and is currently completing her first manuscript of poetry, titled Chimeras. When not writing, she likes to spend time with her pug, Kosmo.
Tegan will be working on her second poetry collection, Posthumous, a long poem that explores the theme of the maternal-feminine in relation to definitions of the posthumous (after-ground; after-original; afterlife; after-death; awards after death, and so on). Motifs throughout the work pertain to light, rebellion, decay, and the mirror-stage in psychoanalysis (as theorized by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and Slavoj Žižek). Tegan’s work seeks to move beyond this philosophical tradition by considering gender as well as environmental degradation and technological advances. What does the mirror-stage look like in the world of AI? What does the posthumous signify if it’s read in relation to radiation poisoning? These are the kinds of questions Posthumous attempts to answer.
Investors
The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia is grateful to Amanda Peters; the Delmore “Buddy” Daye Learning Institute; RBC Emerging Artists; and the Robert Pope Foundation for their investments in Sponsored Residencies during the inaugural year of the Jampolis Cottage Residency Program.
