WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px
WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px

Clare Goulet

BIOGRAPHY
Writer of essays, poems, stories and hybrid forms; editor/consultant for academic and literary manuscripts in arts and sciences. My latest book is Graphis scripta: writing lichen (Gaspereau Press 2024). Research passions are metaphor, biopoetics, polyphony, & hybrid scholarly-creative-botanical forms.

I teach undergrad courses in creative writing and editing at the Mount, where I run its Writing Centre and collaborate with diverse partners on and off campus. First adjunct faculty to win its university-wide faculty teaching award. As an educator I aim for transformative, inclusive learning experiences.

As a British/québécoise hybrid, raised in a mixed-race family, schooled in different countries, please don’t ask me where I’m from! I survive my writing deadlines with wildly bad dancing. Total lichen obsessive.

In my writing workshops for adults and youth, I love renewing a person’s relationship to their own writing practice.

I live in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a road that escapes into trail and woods and ocean along the Northwest Arm.

PUBLICATIONS

Books:
Graphis scripta: writing lichen (Gaspereau 2024). Poems.

Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky (Cormorant 2010). Contributing co-editor, with Mark Dickinson. Essays.

Book chapters:
“‘Conversations with a Toad”, in Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: the Arts of Robert Bringhurst. Eds. M. Dickinson and B. Wood (McGill-Queen’s, 2015). “Reading thisness” in Lyric Ecology (Cormorant 2010).

Poems, essays, hybrid forms and mixed-media published in Canada and abroad including in The Fiddlehead (296), Grain (50.4), Room of One’s Own (Room), Ilanot Review, The Antigonish Review, and Collateral. A poem on early Irish botanist Matilda Knowles appears in P. Whelan’s Lichens of Ireland & Great Britain.

Outdoor installation: Collaborated with the E.C. Smith Herbarium (Alain Belliveau) to create a permanent lichen-poem trail on North Mountain at Ross Creek Centre of the Arts (Chris O’Neill) in Nova Scotia.

Interviews and reviews in The Dalhousie Review, Poetry Canada Review, Atlantic Books Today, and Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne.

As interviewee: WFNS “Author Spotlight”with Dea Toivonen; ”20 Questions” with rob mclennan; (mini) “Stop! Look! Listen” with The Fiddlehead; EAC Toronto “Editors Unplugged” with Jessica de Bruyn, Open Book Toronto.

Presented research on metaphor, poetics, polyphony, and creative use of AI at national teaching or research associations (ACCUTE, CASDW, CPA, CCWWP) and for the Editors’ Association of Canada.

AWARDS

Grateful for grants from the NS Talent Trust, WFNS Mentorship Program, Canada Council for the Arts, and Arts NS to help research, create, travel, and present.

Scroll to Top
WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px

Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) uses the following terms to describe writers’ experience levels:

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
  • Early-career authors: those with 1 or 2 book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short-form publications.
  • Established authors: those with 3 or 4 book-length publications.
  • Professional authors: those with 5 or more book-length publications.

Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, writing for children and young adults, and others) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the above definitions. A workshop’s participants should usually have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their career stage. 

For “intensive” and “masterclass” workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If you’re uncertain of your experience level with regard to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca