Nelson Gray is a writer, director and an instructor in the English and Creative Writing Departments at V.I.U. He has a B.A. from SFU, an MFA in Directing from UBC, and a PhD in Theatre History from the University of Victoria. His writing for the stage has been produced in Canada, the U.S., England and Germany, and his poetry and scholarly articles have appeared in numerous journals and in two anthologies: Readings in Performance and Ecology and Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context. Current projects include an anthology of eco-dramas and, with the assistance of a Canada Council Grant and a SHHRC award, the script for an ocean-based opera, drawing on oceanographic research from Dalhousie and the University of Victoria.
Teaching Philosophy
Teaching writing at V.I.U. is a privilege and a pleasure for me. What I love more than anything is engaging with language and performance that explores the depth, possibilities, and undiscovered mysteries of lived experience: what the poet Frank O’Hara called the “grace to live as variously as possible.” Writing, for me, is a way of being more keenly alive, and it is this kind of experience that I want to pass on to my students--the opportunity to know, through storytelling, what it means to imagine other identities and to extend one’s vision of the world. By assisting them to learn from one another and from a range of highly accomplished writers, I would have them appreciate their existing strengths and develop the skills and confidence to convey their particular truths as fully as possible.
Email: nelson.gray@viu.ca
Website: http://nelsongray.ca/