Mahak Jain

Today is I Read Canadian Day. I was able to celebrate it with a visit to West Preparatory Junior Public School, where I spoke to first-graders about my picture book, MAYA. The book is set in India, and I told them about my own experiences sleeping on rooftops and also the animals of India that inspired the book as well as their Canadian counterparts. (Do YOU know the national bird of Canada? No, it’s not a goose.) Thank you to Yannis Lobaina and the School Advisory Council for inviting me and connecting me with their students.

I don’t often publish poetry, but my poem “Wild Fire” is in the latest issue of Canadian Notes & Queries (CNQ). The theme of the issue is “Writing in the Age of Unravelling.” The essays, poems, fiction, and reviews in the issue center around the unravelling of our ecologies and our planet. There is a lot of beautiful writing in this issue, including an essay from Catherine Bush, the coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA program, which I graduated from and where I used to be the program administrator.

I am super pleased to have my short story “The Marriage Broker” included in Issue 152 of The New Quarterly, alongside short stories by fellow writers and friends Marcia Walker and Allison LaSorda. Many thanks to editor Pamela Mulloy, who provided detailed feedback that clarified the themes and intentions of this complicated (and very long) story. “The Marriage Broker” has improved immensely as a result of her attention. “The Marriage Broker” is one of the stories contained in a short story collection that I will soon be submitting to publishers. It’s also an inspiration for the novel that I am currently drafting. I workshopped the story last year at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.  

Really pleased to share that my short story “A Secure Form of Living” is now available in the 32.1 Winter/Spring 2020 issue of the Gulf Coast Journal. I share that honour with an incredible roundup of writers. Many thanks to fiction editor Kaj Tanaka for selecting the story for publication and his keen edits. The short story is also available for reading online, thanks to digital editor Robbie Howell. Fun fact: “A Secure Form of Living” is also the title of my short story collection. Happy reading!

I am delighted to share the news that I have joined the faculty at Sheridan College’s Creative Writing and Publishing program as a Professor of Creative Writing. This unique undergraduate program teaches students the skills of creative writing and prepares them for positions in the publishing industry. In addition, students take literature courses and a wide variety of electives in areas such as history, science, and psychology. All this to say, there’s no other program like it in the country and it perfectly combines my own interests and background as a writer, editor, and educator. I am delighted to be joining the team and growing alongside the students.

I’m back from an eventful week at the Community of Writers in California. I am grateful to the conference for awarding me the James Houston Memorial Scholarship. It turns out that the mentor I was paired to have my one-on-one with, Krys Lee, received the same scholarship when she attended the conference for the first time! I also took part in a fiction workshop that was run by a different staff member each day. Jonah Straus, literary agent at Straus Literary, led the workshop the day we examined an excerpt from my novel in progress. I’m grateful to the Ontario Arts Council, thanks to whom I was able to attend Community of Writers this summer as well as the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Summer Workshop last year.