What does it really mean to say that the personal is the political? In this craft lecture, Joanne Leow shares the challenges and methods that she used to weave fragmentary life writing with political critique in her new book Exhumations.

Drawing from her experience as a journalist, researcher, educator, and poet, she will discuss how to calibrate between different registers of writing while preserving the coherence of a longer manuscript. She will examine what it means to write not just as an author but also as a mother, daughter, caregiver, patient, and political subject.

We will be using a new format for this Creative Writing Class. Joanne will be giving a lecture on writing craft, followed by a Q + A. There will not be peer group work in this session.

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Joanne Leow grew up in Singapore and lives on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University. Her work includes the academic monograph Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool University Press, 2024), the poetry collection Seas Move Away (Turnstone Press, 2022), and the hybrid memoir Exhumations: Inside the Body of the Petrostate (Alchemy Press, 2026).