
In September 2025, I’m going to be at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for the two week Science Fiction residency with faculty Ai Jiang, Premee Mohamed, and Amal El-Mohtar.
I’m excited about this for a bunch of reasons. First, getting to hang out with Premee, Amal, and Ai for two weeks would be reason enough to go. (Not to mention a bunch of other writers. I don’t know who else is going, is it you?). Writers, hanging out and writing. Yes, please.
The Banff Centre also has a lot of cachet and I’ve wanted to go since forever. I’ve applied for residencies before and haven’t gotten in. I’ve been there; stayed two days for a paid gig in 2019 which felt like a massive achievement, but to get accepted into one of the Centre’s official programs is a whole another thing. Banff is a place where professional artists learn and grow, and I’ve always wanted to be among them.
But maybe I’m most excited because I grew up in the Canadian Rockies, not in Banff but further north, near Jasper. To locals, the Banff Centre is a place to be proud of, an organization with international standing, an institution with a long history (more than 90 years!). But it also feels to locals like a world apart — we take it on faith that amazing thing happen there, but these aren’t things for us.
What I mean is, my life as a local kid was horrifyingly culture-free, filled with skidoo accidents, serial killings, mishaps in the mountains, alcoholism, trauma, six-month long winters, one TV channel, and a desperate search for books and stories. A narrative-free zone. Culturally impoverished. A creative desert, where the one good teacher at our high school made community theatre happen for a few years before fleeing to a town that didn’t hate him.
It’s where my fear and morbidness comes from. But I always knew there was a place apart. Nearby. Not open to me, but there, in the same mountains. Banff Centre.
Banff Centre was where creative artists of all kinds birthed beauty, intelligence, and meaning into the world. I didn’t think I would ever be among them, that seemed impossible. But now, very satisfyingly, I am.
Sometimes I write stories about the place and the time I grew up in (here’s one), a very specific place that nobody else writes about. Those stories feel like I’ve sent them into interstellar space, like the Voyager missions, into the deep dark beyond the heliosphere. They gently beep: I am here. This is what it was like, in that cold lonely place. Where are you? Do you understand? Were you someplace like that, too?
What will I be working on in Banff? Nothing like that. A novel. I’m many tens-of-thousands of words in and am hoping to have a well completed first draft to revise in Banff. It’ll feel great, because I love revision. For me, drafting can be a painful drag — it often feels like mistake upon mistake. Revision is like having a jet pack strapped to my back — everything is onward and upward, to the good.
September, please arrive faster.