An unexpected route to writing

Yet that’s the path she’s followed. Today Dean teaches English and creative writing at Selkirk College in Castlegar, B.C., not far from where she grew up. Previously she was the interviews editor for the Humber Literary Review for two years, and has written for The New Quarterly and Concordia’s Headlight Anthology, as well as other publications.

And now Dean’s first book of short stories, Waiting for the Cyclone, was recently published by Brindle & Glass.

The 13-story collection, which took her four years to write, explores strong, rebellious women. That’s the sort of “contemporary rebel” Dean wishes to see represented more in literature, she says, crediting such writers as Mary Gaitskill and Nancy Lee with doing just that.

“As I was writing it, I had in mind a cross-section of ‘the other kind of woman.’ What does it look like for women in the here and now who struggle with this idea that the ’50s are over?” she asks.

“We don’t get married and have babies and do that whole thing automatically. What does life look like for a woman with choices? Also, there are a number of women in the book who grew up in the age of nuclear families and monogamy, and they’re struggling.”

Dean adds, “I wanted to show, ‘This is what happens when you’re born into something and it’s not really working out for you.’”

Geography, her previous area of study, also plays a role. “I started writing the book as my master’s thesis, so it was only when I was called upon to defend it to a committee that I really realized what I was up to,” she explains about these two themes.

“These stories are all really rooted in place.”

Full circle

Dean comes from northern British Columbia. She moved to Montreal and attended Concordia, where she remained for 10 years, completing her undergraduate degree at night while working full time.

She always loved writing — as a teenager she says she tried to write a novel “for fun.” Yet Dean admits that it never occurred to her that writing could be a realistic career path, until a 2007 writing workshop she took at the Quebec Writers Federation helped motivate her to follow her passion.

“It just blew my mind open and I was like, ‘This is what I need to be doing,’” she says.

When she changed programs at Concordia, Dean was 28, considerably older than most of her classmates. She felt intimidated. Yet by her third year of hard work, things improved.

Dean had some poems published in Concordia’s Soliloquies Anthology and was short-listed for the university’s Irving Layton Award for Creative Writing. She then began considering a career and life in writing, and went on to earn an MFA at the University of Guelph.

She was an English professor at Toronto’s Humber College and then relocated back to B.C. for her current position.

“I’m the first person in my family to go to university,” Dean says. “My mom went to Selkirk College, which is where I’m teaching right now, so everything’s come full circle.”

Teaching is a profession she’s “equally in love with,” she says. “I’m trying to teach my students to be passionate and disciplined. I think those are the two most important things.”

Confidence and community are also significant, Dean feels. She herself learned over time to be confident about her work thanks in part to the strong, inspiring women who, she says, “helped me just sort of own it” — including Concordia professor Sina Queyras, MA 95, and The New Quarterly’s Susan Scott.

In addition, Dean says she found her Concordia community in her third-year writing class. “We really gelled and were doing things together outside of school like readings in bars and loft spaces,” she recalls. “Knowing there could be a sense of community within that group of people meant a lot to me.”

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Related links

• Department of English and Creative Writing program
• Department of Geography, Planning and Environment
• Leesa Dean
• Waiting for the Cyclone
• Leesa Dean: Waiting for the Cyclone book trailer on YouTube