Course Offerings
To learn more about what we are offering every semester, you can consult the Humanities and Social Sciences course availability search interface.
Creative Writing Course Offerings Fall 2025
ENGL 2905
Introduction to Creative Writing
Instructor: Dr. Michelle Porter
Want to be a writer? Introduction to Creative Writing introduces the techniques and tools for writing original non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Here we will experiment with language in order to capture the experience of contemporary existence and ask questions such as: what is truth? How does creative non-fiction differ from fiction? How does poetry play with sound to create new meaning? What are the rules of writing, and how do we break them? What keeps a reader reading? The class includes weekly writing exercises and peer-editing workshops where students create their own language experiments, and critique each other’s work, along with readings of and responses to a variety of assigned texts which we’ll look at as models. At the end of the course, students will have a better understanding of these three genres of writing and how they inform each other. They should find that their perceptions are sharpened by the work that they do in the course, and that their ability to measure the full significance of experience is enhanced by it. They will also have in hand, by the end of the semester, a portfolio of original writing.
Open registration; no portfolio required.
ENGL 3900
Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction
Instructor: Lisa Moore
In this class students will explore the tools we need to tell these stories. We will examine concepts and tools such as point-of-view, (first, second and third, authorial distance, psychic distance) flashback, dialogue, plot, story arc, scene, atmosphere, mood, character development, authorial gap, diction, cadence, vocabulary and rhythm, to name a few. We will also consider the various forms and genres of fiction. We will consider how to provoke physical reactions in our readers: a heart flutter, tears, belly laughs, a smirk, or the flush of indignation – all the emotional and intellectual responses we experience when reading excellent fiction. In other words, we will transport the reader. We explore these tools and concepts in a workshop environment, through group critique. I will also provide individual assessment of each student’s writing, both in the form of a line edit and a substantive edit.
Send up to 5 pages of your best work to Lisa Moore at lisam@mun.ca by August 25, 2025. Priority given to early registrants.
ENGL 3904
Writing Place: Fiction
Instructor: Dr. Aaron Tucker
Writing Place is an in-person fiction class for writers interested in exploring the possibilities for engaging with place. This specific workshop will engage with notions of place, world building, setting, and localities with a focus on genres of fiction (ex. the romance, literary fiction, science fiction, the western).
Students interested in the course are asked to submit a 1500 word writing sample to aaron.tucker@mun.ca by August 25, 2025. Priority given to early registrants.
ENGL 4924
Nature Writing
Instructor: Lisa Moore
In the nature writing course, we will be exploring the liminal space between humans, animals and minerals and how they contaminate and collaborate and move through each other and with each other. We’ll talk about bears, digging into garbage bins in national parks or strolling through towns in Alberta. We’ll talk about those moments when we were afraid of high tides or or raging fires. We will talk about the difference between wilderness and gardens. We will write when we have come closest to our animal instincts, the silence and noise of a forest, the moments when pollution has destroyed biodiversity or when we’ve helped with the birthing of a new puppy. Through this course, we will explore all the writing tools at our disposal point of view, imagery voice, truth, and fiction and poetry.
Send up to 5 pages of your best work to Lisa Moore at lisam@mun.ca by August 25, 2025. Priority given to early registrants.
Graduate Level
The Secret Lives of Objects: Writing, Items, Archives
Instructor: Dr. Aaron Tucker
This course take a multi-genre creative writing approach to objects, localities, histories, futurities, and archives and aims, in part, to incorporate creative research methods into poems and prose. Students in this class will consider what an object is, what an archive is, and how poetry and prose can reveal, narrate, argue, reconsider localities and narratives.
Interested graduate students can register normally, no portfolio necessary.
For more information about the Creative Writing program, students are invited to contact:
Dr. Michelle Porter, Program Coordinator
Phone: 864-8292
Room: AA 3007
Sign-up for the Creative Writing at Memorial University Newsletter for details about upcoming course offerings, writing tips & more!