Amanda Jernigan
Amanda Jernigan
Amanda Jernigan, a SSHRC fellow (Canada Graduate Scholarship) in Memorial’s Department of English is currently working towards my Master of Arts degree. “My research is on poetic tradition and poetic form, particularly in the work of some contemporary Canadian poets: George Johnston, Jay Macpherson, Peter Sanger, Eric Ormsby, and Richard Outram. These poets, far-flung in terms of both provenance and poetic approach, nonetheless share a kind of "scholarly" aesthetic: a readerly connection to intellectual traditions of other times and places, which transcends the local focus we so often ascribe to Canadian verse.”
Amanda grew up in southern Ontario, and did her undergraduate degree (a B.A. in English from Mount Allison University) in Sackville, New Brunswick, where she subsequently lived and worked for several years.
“I chose to pursue graduate studies after several years working in publishing (as an intern at the Porcupine's Quill in Erin, Ontario, and as a freelance copy editor for Nova Scotia's Gaspereau Press). One of the frustrations of literary publishing in Canada is lack of an audience. A typical first book of poems is published in a run of 500 copies, and is considered to have done well if it even approaches being sold out. I came to feel that the way to develop an audience was not through marketing but through education. This made me consider a return to the academic world.”
“At the same time, in my own work as a poet, I was coming to appreciate the importance of wide reading: of a grounding in the literature of other times and places. I felt that it was only through such a program of reading -- an ever ongoing one, I should add -- that I might furnish myself with the tools to intelligently approach, as a writer, my own time and place. I felt that graduate school might give me a kind of designated space in which to embark on the reading I had in mind.”
“My partner and I spent some time in St. John's in 2001/02, and fell in love with the city. An acceptance from Memorial was the excuse we needed to come back. I was also acting on a hunch that a university on the geographical margin of the country might give one the freedom to determine the coordinates of one's intellectual centre with more independence than might otherwise be the case.”
“In a story by Guelph writer Sandra Sabatini, the narrator talks about "welcomes and distance," her two favourite things. "Welcome and distance" also describes what I look for in an intellectual community: warmth and collegiality on the one hand; and on the other hand, the freedom to pursue one's own interests and take one's own approach. I've found both of these things in the English department at Memorial. As for the advantages of studying in St. John's, they are legion: but for a writer and literary scholar they include a strong and supportive artistic community, comprised of longtime Newfoundlanders, recent revenants, and new arrivals. I love the -- sometimes uneasy but always interesting -- mingling and intermingling of these various groups.”
“Alongside my studies at Memorial I have continued to pursue an extra-academic literary life. I am a contributing editor of The New Quarterly and of Canadian Notes & Queries, and a frequent contributor of essays to both magazines. My poems have appeared in journals in Canada and the United States (most recently Poetry, Parnassus, and The Antigonish Review), and I am at work on the manuscript for my first collection.”
In 2005 Amanda received a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship to undertake her current studies. I have been short listed for the National Magazine Award (essay category) and the Malahat Review Novella Prize. Her creative projects have recently been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the New Brunswick Arts Board, under whose auspices she is currently at work on a collaborative project with her partner, photographer John Haney.
“ My Master's degree may eventually lead me to further academic work at the doctoral level; however my immediate project, post-degree, is to finish a number of essays-in-progress, and to complete the manuscript for my book of poems.”