“Cacophonie: Improvising (with) Identities“: Creative Workshop Series
Cacophania (Latin): “The quality of having an ill sound; the use of harsh-sounding words or phrases” (“cacophony,” OED)
This collaborative, creative workshop series focusses on different approaches to theorizing improvisation and the acts of identity making. Improvisation is often thought of as antagonistic to scripting, to the composed moment; but in each workshop we will think through and co-create what it means to attend to the tone, voice, and perspectives of improvisation. The world today can feel as though we are surrounded by a cacophonie of ideas, sounds, and experiences—a discordant and dissonant feeling of being in a world misaligned. But cacophonie can also speak to the attention we can give to feeling otherwise, a way of making sense of the world in new ways, through the actions of improvisation that bring into perspective the moral discord of the world(s) around us.
In thinking about improvisation as a site for cacophonie, for sitting with the difficulty of a discordant world, participants are invited to reflect on the following questions:
How do we build-off, react to, listen in on, embody, move through, carry in us, and interact with our experiences of identity? How might we improvise with the cacophonie of identities we inhabit? How can we use a principle of cacophonie—at once a discordant and dissonant mixture of sound and the unison of difference and plethora of voice—to imagine the dimensions of improvisation as a social aesthetic, ethical practice, impromptu disruption of expectation, and creative method for change in the now?
The Upcoming Workshops
Feb. 5 | Just Listening: Experiments with Collective Memory
Mar. 17 | OsteoSITE
Apr. 24 | The Body as an Archive
May 7 | Bridge to Terabithia: A Somatic Exploration of Childhood Self
Dwelling In/On the Body
In this in-progress project, I look at the multiple registers of dwelling and the female body as a space of conflict. This extends my research on both abortion and animation into the realm of improvisation by thinking about how we dwell in our bodies, what it means to dwell on the gendered and sexualized body, and how female reproductive organs allow for the body to become a dwelling.
Part of this work is captured in a recently submitted article about the “not until…” consensual intimacies in kink and BDSM cultures, where I explore how gender emerges re-imagined not as a kind of social coherence but as a radical connection to the self and to ways of dwelling through unknowing in the world.
Another aspect of this project resides in my upcoming conference presentation, ” When the Past and Future Collide: Spatiality in The Past Is Red.” As a precursor to submitting this writing for publication, the talk will explore the spatiality of intimacy in a world rebuilt on humanity’s refuse. Memory, local and global politics, and technology all play a crucial role in how the novel’s main character, Tetley, finds belonging by overcoming the new-world’s rites of social reproduction. What becomes most familiar is an object out of a lost history: a ghost-voice of a by-gone technology that Tetley brings back to life through the closeness of her body. As Tetley probes the object’s databanks, coming into contact and spatial closeness with this technology from the past, it becomes a space that gives Tetley a new understanding of her coexistence with and relationship to humanity’s hope for the future as a return to lands that no longer exist.
In the background, this project involves reading pregnancy and abortion through frameworks of how and when the female body comes to be inhabited—in the conflict of the public/private space of the female body as a dwelling space, literally taken up by the fetus, that is at times otherwise preoccupied by its associations with reproductive futures. I explore this in an upcoming invited submission to Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice on generative femininity. This article will explore how the perceived-as-female womb-space becomes a locus of generation: a space not only for potential physical reproduction but also the production of notions of femininity and how that plays out as a story of colonization through a torrent of historical narratives about morality.
As part of my postdoctoral work, I’m guided by the following research question: If the body is the site of improvisation, then what does it mean to dwell in and on the body? This work is based in phenomenological studies that extend into the realm of improvisation because of the way the body is the object through which we experience the world.
Here’s an interview about my work with David Lawee and Lindsay Schreder for Media from the Margins, Episode 2: What Makes a Relationship Healthy?
Book Project
My book project focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century transnational feminist thought captured in British and Canadian women’s writing. By investigating the novels alongside their material production, I look at how authors critique socio-cultural narratives of romance. Part narrative analysis, cultural studies, and an exploration of feminist philosophy, the book investigates what gender and sexuality might look like if we had better stories of romance.
This book is a revision of my phd project. While l still explore how women use fiction to critique socio-cultural narratives of romance, my attention has turned towards the idea that everyone has a story of romance and how these stories motivate presentations and inhabitances of gender and sexuality.
“The Gloriously Ugly in Marian Engel’s No Clouds of Glory (Sarah Bastard’s Notebook)” (forthcoming from Canadian Literature) is an earlier version of my fourth chapter.
World-Building: Improvisation and Narrativity
This in-progress article began as a public lecture and thought piece about how improvisation might manifest in literary studies (beyond analysis of musical improvisation). I begin with definitions of improvisation and a partial literary history, drawing particularly from the Italian commedia dell’arte, to think about what it means to improvise and what improvisation could or might be in the context of literary studies.
Both Improvisation and Narrativity share elements of world-building or of negotiating how the world around us is perceived. But world-building is bound by unspoken rules, agreements, and expectation. Does the same go for improvisation? What are the limits of co-creation? How might aspects of narrative theory challenge the way we think about improvisation?
Asking questions about who gets to tell the story, when, and what gets narrated, how, and by whom, resonates with the improvisatory act and how “actors” generate new worlds through co-creation. In narrative studies, this is what we would call attention to in the difference between the focalizer, the narrator, the implied author, and the author themself (not to mention how the characters, setting, and very production of a narrative comes into play)—all the different elements of narrative that go into creating a particular kind of world from the debris we find around us, allowing us to see the world through different perspectives and in new ways.
This is the value of improvisation within narrativity—not excluding the improvised moment from thinking about narrative as a series of improvisations, or characters improvising, or the act of reading itself as an improvisatory moment. We can harness the drive to use improvisation as a means for dismantling power in the same way in literature, in how literature can give us new or multiple, sometimes difficult and discordant, perspectives.
Together we get to decide what improvisation means, what it can mean, and how we can apply it in different terms. We get to build together the world of improvisation—as a story we tell, as a way to connect, as a possibility of an unproviding for tomorrow through the gathering of knowledge in order to make the world a better place.
The History and Politics of Abortion
This project involves the historical and political representations of abortion as part of SSHRC funded-research project “Choreographing Change.” I was hired by Professor Michelle LeBaron as a research assistant because of my previous research and writing on abortion in women’s literature and experience with manuscript development.
My research for this project delves into the early modern archives, including literary objects such as midwife handbooks and church sermons but also includes newspaper reporting around medical procedures, attitudes towards miscarriage and the use of abortifacients, abortion in early twentieth century Canada, embedded connections to witchcraft and magic, as well as the representation of abortion as a “miraculous vanishing” in medieval hagiography and penitentials.
In my writing about abortion, I look at the metaphorical and moralistic underpinnings that influence its wider socio-cultural imaginings and politicization. This research has culminated in both non-fiction op-eds, essays, and fictional short stories to be sent out for publishing consideration.
The zombi/zonbi in Black Canadian Women’s Writing
In my forthcoming article, “Encountering the ‘Difficult’ Text: Teaching Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Inselberg’,” I revisit the figure of the Haitian zombi through the lens of difficulty: What makes a text “difficult”? How do we approach teaching “difficult” texts? What do we need to know, or what work do we need to do, to facilitate students’ encounters with “difficulty”?
Looking at the polysemic way “Inselberg” presents difficulty, I analyze the story’s use of the Haitian zombi figure to think about the difficult histories of colonialism and racism Hopkinson embeds in her narrative about climate change. This leads to my final reflection on how inherited reading practices entail projections of a reader’s own difficulty rather than the text being difficult or inaccessible in and of itself. The text requires attentive reading because it has the potential to be a locality of uncomfortable but generative learning.
Previously, I have written about the figure of the zombi and animation—as the way racialized bodies are animated through cultural narratives and political discourse—in my scholarly interview with Junie Désil published in Canadian Literature, “‘the suitcase in the closet’: Talking Zombi(e)s with Junie Désil (an Interview).”
The idea of animation intrigues me, not only in the way Black bodies have been animated by whitewashed histories but also in the way animation works as a form of apostrophe—of throwing voice into an absent other that lacks agency or has had their agency violently taken from them—that resonates with histories of marginalized voices.
The Dissertation
I completed my PhD program in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia in April 2025. My dissertation is part cultural studies, narrative theory, and feminist ethics. It focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist critiques of romance.
Incorporating performance theory and perspectives developed through direct experience, I analyze how women’s gender and sexuality are influenced by their inheritance of certain kinds of stories about their bodies. I locate these stories in traditions of romance and adventure. These stories define the decisions women make based on what they have been told and learn to tell themselves. I analyze the cascading and accumulative power of those decisions that congeal into gender identities, informed by sexuality. In turn, I argue that the authors examined (Virginia Woolf, Daphne Marlatt, Marian Engel, and Angela Carter) find space to re-write the possibilities of what bodies can do beyond the scripts and boundaries of romance and adventure. I call attention to the queering process and theories of love queered to destabilize and question the taken as given nature of gender and sexuality, motivated by the promise of romance’s happily-ever-after.
On Being a Margaret Atwood Scholar
Atwood’s recent publication of her memoirs hasn’t change the fact that she has become a controversial figure in Canadian literature. You can read more about this in my review of The Testaments and Burning Questions, “Secrets, Deception, Celebrity.”
I also touch on what it means to be a Atwood scholar in “Updating the Companion,” that looks at how we can diversify our critical responses to Atwood’s work in generative ways:
As for Atwood and recent feminist-centred controversies, most chapters gloss over or avoid calls for greater analysis of Atwood’s contemporary role as a public intellectual, which she has stepped into as part of her status as a literary celebrity. Given York’s contribution to Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, it’s not surprising that her chapter was omitted from the updated collection. In “How Do We Get Out of Here? An Atwood Scholar, Signing Off,” York argues that Atwood has backed herself into “a corner of her own making” (132) through her support of the UBCAccountable letter and that, “in her corner, she is also operating as a nodal point in the various controversies that are linked to the UBC case in the same way that power is interlinked in literary and other hierarchies” (132). The Companion glosses over Atwood’s own use of power, even as it attests to the ways in which her writing attempts to hold power to account. This criticism is meant to shed light on another aspect of contemporary Atwood scholarship: her role as a public intellectual with international influence.
My ambivalent and ongoing research of Atwood’s publishing history looks at her work within the context of her status as a Canadian icon and literary celebrity. I’m especially interested in Atwood’s perspective on debt and her tenuous relationship with feminism. As a juggernaut in the Canlit scene, we can’t ignore her contributions, but we also need to think carefully about the worldviews and politics she perpetuates as a brandname—ideologies so often swept under the rug of her literary whiteness and insistence on cisgender, heterosexual perspectives.
Christina Rossetti & the Making of “Goblin Market”
This creative historiographic metafiction is a work in progress on the back burner. Based on extensive archival research, including working with the author’s notebooks and letters, I creatively reconstruct the production of Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems.
One of her most notable poems, “Goblin Market” tells the strange, moralistic tale of two sisters. It was produced during Rossetti’s time working at a convent for “fallen women.” The graphic poem offers rich textures with which to imagine Rossetti’s inner turmoil and complex relationship between spirituality, her own sexuality, and the grubby underbelly of Victorian society.
S. D. Engbrecht 