Uiversity to reach out to community through storytelling

Magally Zelaya, staff

A centre devoted to storytelling and creative writing, set to open in the spring of 2008,will aim to create ties between the University of Manitoba and aboriginal and immigrant communities in Manitoba.

The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture (CCWOC), unique in Canada, will encourage the study, research, and celebration of creative writing and oral culture.

“We’re also hoping to reach out to the community a little bit better frankly than we do right now at the University of Manitoba,” said Richard Sigurdson, the dean of arts.

“I don’t think that we have really made as much of an impact in reaching out to the community,” he continued, naming the location of the Fort Garry campus and the nature of academic life as contributing factors.

Warren Cariou, director of the CCOWC and an English professor, said he hopes that the centre will reach out to the aboriginal community and help to transmit their stories.

“Native communities keep themselves alive as living entities through their stories, explained Cariou. “We have a lot of elders really wanting to share their stories as much and as widely as possible so that native people of future generations can have a sense of who they are,” said Cariou, whose fiction and non-fiction writing mainly deals with Métis people.

In 2005 there were 1,560 self-described aboriginal undergraduate students and 87 graduate students enrolled at the U of M, making up about six per cent of the student population, according to the U of M Office of Institutional Analysis.

“We’re also hoping that the centre will also be a place where members of immigrant communities can explore their own oral traditions,” said Sigurdson.

Cariou said that the CCWOC would not only reach out to the aboriginal communities, but to many other cultures that are orally based —“whether [these are] immigrants coming from Africa, or whether it’s stories that are coming through third- or fourth- or fifth-generation immigrants from Scotland or Ireland,” said Cariou.

The centre, which will be housed in a large room next to the multimedia centre in University College, will be home to a storyteller-writer-in-residence, will hold creative writing and storytelling workshops, and present lectures on issues of orality and literacy, according to the university’s website.

Its location next to the multimedia centre in University College will facilitate collaborations that may “involve preserving and archiving some of these stories,” said Sigurdson.

The centre has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHERC) for the first phase of renovation. According to Sigurdson, the CCWOC is looking to secure external funds for the rest of the renovations.

The CCWOC will cost $100,000 a year to operate with the funds coming from a new budget allocation from the university for the faculty of arts.

Until the centre is open, courses in creative writing are offered by the university, and the storyteller-in-residence program is already up and running with Gregory Scofield, a Métis poet and author of seven books, as the storyteller-in-residence.

At this time, the university does not offer a master’s degree in creative writing, though Sigurdson said that it has been discussed.