WRITE YOUR BOOK! U of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction

Write Your Book reminder on a wall calendar

Are you a mid-career writer, a veteran journalist, an aspiring author with a book you want to write? The University of King’s College MFA in Creative Nonfiction is the place to do it. People in our program come with ideas for issue-driven journalistic projects, memoirs, biographies, or collections of essays. We work with our students — who, over the past five years, have ranged in age from early 20s to 80 and have come from across Canada and the U.S. — developing a proposal and writing chapters. Along the way, you learn the ins and outs of the book publishing industry and meet a wide range of professionals, from best-selling writers to editors to agents.

It’s a two-year limited-residency program consisting of two summer residences in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a winter residency that alternates between New York and Toronto. In the two-week summer residency, you create proposals and write chapters, learn structure and research skills through lectures and mentorships, and work with your colleagues to fine-tune your prose. During the one-week winter residencies in Toronto and New York, you meet with agents and editors and learn more about the business of book publishing.

MFA Aug2017 - DH workshop

One of my morning workshops during the Halifax residency.

In the time between the residencies, you remain in your home city working with your mentor on your proposal and chapters. In the end, you’ll have a book that is either completed or well on its way.  Apply how until the deadline of February 15th, 2018.

Why the King’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction? One of our graduates, whose book on missing and murdered Indigenous women will be published by Doubleday next year, said the program made sense to her because it “suited my goals pretty perfectly. I was really drawn to the pragmatic focus — how to write a proposal, get an agent, how the publishing industry works — because that’s the side of writing that’s always left me befuddled.”

Among the books that are either published or soon-to-be published are:

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood
by Pauline Dakin (Viking, Sept 2017)

F-Bomb: Dispatches From the War on Feminism
by Lauren McKeon (Goose Lane Editions, Sept 2017)

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir
by Aaron Williams (Harbour Publishing, Oct 2017)

A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Monction, and Me
by Jason Murray (Nimbus Publishing, May 2017)

Highway of Tears: The Missing, The Murdered, The Mystery
by Jessica McDiarmid (Doubleday, TBA)

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest
by Helena Moncrieff (ECW Press, April 2018)