Events

• Book Club Valentine:

Make What Casanova Told Me your book club’s choice and get access to this amazing offer including a podcast q&a with Susan and a book club guide to the novel. Click here for details.

• Lit on Tour Project: Madelaine Thien and Helen Humphries in discussion with Susan Swan

Thursday, Novemeber 3^rd @ 7:30pm, Midland Public Library

• International Festival of Authors: The Family Dynamic

Saturday, October 22^nd @ 12:00pm, Lakeside Terrace, Harbourfront Centre

Susan Swan moderates a roundtable discussion with authors Jennifer Haigh, Sina Queyras and Alexi Zentner. Up for discussion: three beautiful and touching novels illustrating the power and fragility of family and redemption.

• Banff Centre for the Arts,
• Conference of Commonwealth Literatures at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Park, UK;
• McNally Robinson bookstore, New York City;
• UNESCO book festival, Montreal;
• Humber College, Toronto;
• McGill Alumni celebration;
• Freedom to Read Week Celebration;
• and the Vancouver Writers’ Festival

In 1999-2000, Susan was awarded York’s prestigious position of Robarts Chair in Canadian Studies. Sponsored by York’s Robarts Centre, Swan held a Moveable Millennial Wisdom Symposium at York University and the Royal Ontario Museum, featuring eighteen prominent novelists, historians and archeologists speaking about the way we recreate the past in popular culture through literature, archeology and history. At ten public events, writers like Anne Michaels, Alberto Manguel, Ronald Wright, Guy Vanderhaege, Carol Christ, Tomson Highway, Rosalind Miles and Dionne Brand talked about whether we ever learn from the past, and if so, what wisdom does the past have to offer us as we enter the Twenty-First century. Swan gave the concluding Robarts Lecture March 21, 2000.

Susan Swan’s teaching activities at York University have included teaching fiction classes and creative writing classes. Her popular course, Making Yourself Up: The Fictionalized Memoir, focused on the fictionalized memoir as a form of autobiographical narrative (or life writing). The course engaged critical discussion of the poetics of self-development in the memoir form. A form of literary solipsism begun by St. Augustine, this tradition of prose narrative views the interior self as the central canvas for political and social dramas, as well as spiritual and emotional ones, and is closely linked to the confessional novel. The course devoted particular attention to the issue of narrative form and strategy in the production of the fictionalized memoir.

The relations between “autobiography” and “fiction” have provoked considerable debate and discussion in recent criticism, and the course engaged a range of questions arising from this critical work. Jill Ker Conway opens When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography with a provocative question: “Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?” The course examined a selection of fictionalized memoirs in the interests of developing a range of responses to this query. Attention was directed to the issue of genre in relation to life-writing and the fictionalized memoir, to the issue of the representation of “reality” in the memoir form, and to the issue of gender as it concerns the production of the memoir narrative.

To get in touch with Susan about a talk or workshop, please see the Contact section.