Each year, Laurier welcomes a writer in residence who spends ten weeks at the university working with students and the greater community. On Jan. 22, Thea Lim will begin her residency as the 2025 Edna Staebler writer in residence.
Lim is a novelist and her most recent work, An Ocean of Minutes, has been critically acclaimed. She has also served as a creative writing faculty member, lecturer and mentor. The program is funded through a bequest the late Edna Staebler left to Laurier. Staebler was a writer and literary journalist from Kitchener-Waterloo.
”I heard a lot of wonderful things about the program from other authors who had previously been Writer-in-Residences. I’m really looking forward to it,” Lim said.
“What we found as a committee very interesting about [Lim] is her versatility,” said Mariam Pirbhai, a professor in the faculty of English and Laurier and the chair of the Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence program. “I would describe her as a novelist, an essayist, and a culture critic. She does interesting work across these genres and she’s always experimenting with form and with narrative,” she said.
Pirbhai outlined the four aspects to the writer-in-residence’s stay. They include classroom visits, workshops, office hours and working on the development of their own projects.
“I think that it is really important to open up conversations about creative writing, what creative writers do, what literature does outside of creative writing and how it might be relevant to other disciplines,” Pirbhai said. “[The writer-in-residence] has an important role as a literary ambassador in the university community and for students.”
Lim’s office hours are open to students and community members during the duration of her residency. “I really hope you come in — and you can come in any form. I’m always happy to talk shop with anyone,” Lim said.
One week of Lim’s residency in January will be spent on the Brantford campus.
“I just love to talk stories with anybody at any stage. I hope that writers and poets and people working in all different formats all feel able to come and chat stories with me,” Lim said. To kickstart her residency, Lim will deliver a public lecture titled Boring Worlds: The Storytelling Power of the Mundane on Jan. 30 at the Hawks Nest.
“It’s open to everyone in the Laurier community. Bring friends who might be interested in creative writing, or even specifically in Lim’s work or her genre of science fiction,” Pirbhai mentioned about the lecture.
For more information about Thea Lim and the Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence program, visit the university’s website.
“I hope that people come and come often so that we can make the most of this wonderful resource together,” Lim said.
Contributed Photo/CTV Your Morning on YouTube. Lim in an interview with CTV Your Morning in 2018.
