Dr. Alanna Bondar

English at Algoma University

Overview

Dr. Alanna BondarMemorial University of Newfoundland: Ph.D. 2003
The University of New Brunswick: MA (English & Creative Writing)
(advisor Dr. Don McKay).
The University of Western Ontario: BA, honours.

Alanna F. Bondar is assistant professor of English and creative writing. She received her Ph.D. from Memorial University of Newfoundland (2003) and her MA in Creative Writing from University of New Brunswick. Alanna's scholarly work has been published in Canada and USA and explores how, through the lens of ecocriticism, how Canadian literature revisions our connections within biotic communities. Her most recent article, "Ecofeminist Canadian Literature" appears in Teaching North American Environmental Literature (MLA 2008). Current poetry manuscripts include there are many ways to die while travelling in Peru which critically explores links between the Andean region and the quirky 'wilds' of Northern Ontario, and Dead Sparrow Chronicles which tells the story of a woman's geopsychic journey into beauty, compassion, and abandonment.

 

Teaching Philosophy

As a writer, academic and editor, I understand the challenges involved in learning how to identify original ideas and how to find the best way to articulate them. The discipline of English language and literature does not simply privilege what is being said, but stresses how well you say it. Understanding one's own cognitive style and ideologies is an important first step to reading literature; to be aware of how language and narrative strategies work is the next step. By developing ways of engaging in academic process, and through the study of philosophy, criticism, technique, style, content, and critical vocabulary, students will develop a healthy skepticism for the ways in which rhetoric controls, manipulates, convinces, and stimulates - but also the ways in which literature and art inspire creativity, evolution of ideas, and beauty.

Like the academic classroom, studio practice courses in creative writing explore both the skill involved in articulating new ideas and the critical 'readerly' perspective necessary for reaching outside of undisciplined creative capacity. Creative writing courses at the university level are not designed to train students to be writers-instead, they explore critical approaches to literature that focus on choices for style and strategy. In this way developing writers will obtain skills important for expression and informed, disciplined creative writing.