Acclaimed poet and essayist Jenna Butler is MacEwan’s 32nd Writer in Residence.

The author has published three books of poetry and three collections of environmental essays, including Revery: A Year of Bees, released in 2020. Butler is releasing a new creative nonfiction collection in 2025, focusing on BIPOC growers and their relationship to the land, despite historical legal blocks regarding access to land.

Researching her writing may have taken Butler all over the world, but she has always maintained a special connection with MacEwan. We caught up with her to discuss her inspiration, how creativity can thrive in today’s world and what excites her about her new role on campus.

Where do you find inspiration for your writing?

A lot of my work goes back to the land, partly because I've been active as an organic farmer for about 15 years. Working with the land and working with diverse communities in connection to land has been a huge  part of my life, and so it's been part of my writing practice as well. I'm also really interested in stories about how we connect to – or become disconnected from – place. 

How do you shift your writing between such different genres and formats?

I have my roots in poetry. That's where I started out, so it feels like home. Part of the challenge is keeping it fresh. In the past few years, I've voyaged away from poetry and into creative nonfiction. I feel like that has threads of poetry in its rich descriptions, and it also gives more room to tell a story and allows me to bring in research. So it feels like a logical step. 

Once I started getting a bit more comfortable with narrative, I started moving into short fiction, and then began working on a novel. It doesn't feel so much like jumping between things as just flowing, from the poetic language to the creative nonfiction, building the narrative and then moving onward to fiction.

You taught creative writing as a sessional instructor at MacEwan; what does it feel like to be coming back to campus in this different capacity?

I'm so excited to return. I started out at MacEwan in my first year of undergrad back when it was a community college, and it was a really small institution. I transferred to U of A, then got my MA and PhD overseas and came back to teach at MacEwan. It feels like coming full circle. MacEwan hasn't lost the sense of being a small and welcoming place, even though it's grown so much.

What do you hope people take away from their time with you?

Sometimes when you're looking at a creative career or a creative practice, it can be really daunting, especially with the world as it is right now. Many people are wondering what place their creative practice has, or how they can keep going as a writer. You can absolutely find a professional path as a writer, if you want that. If you want to attend to your creative practice and not publish, you can totally do that too. There is necessary space for all of these paths.

For me, I bring away a lot of energy from those conversations, and I turn that energy back into my own work. That’s the beauty of creative conversations – they’re mutually inspiring.

How do you expect people will navigate the future of creative careers with the explosion of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence (AI)?

At least one of my books has been used against my permission to help train ChatGPT, so I deeply understand the concerns of writers and artists in relation to this new technology. But I don't think there's anything that is going to replace human creativity. There are some fairly good approximations out there, but we can still pick them out. AI is not replacing human creativity, but it's definitely overburdening the creative system right now. If you can publish two novels a day on Amazon using AI, it's overwhelming the system, but it's not the creativity itself that's being overwhelmed. I can never write a novel that fast myself, but the quality and the ideas I can come up with are very different. There's always going to be a place for that human creativity, and I think it's more important now than ever. 

What advice do you have for aspiring writers? 

Read first, and read widely. So many people tell me they don't read because they don't want to be influenced by other people, but that's part of the reason you should be reading! Read writers  you love, read writers you don't love. Figure out what it is about that work that doesn't resonate with you because that's also instructive. 

Find community! The people who remind you as a writer that you're not alone, the people who are also experiencing rejections and successes, who have questions about their process and their development and their voice. Community is the place your work will land and will find a home. Our communities are what keep us going. 

Butler will be on campus starting January 6, and will be available for one-on-one consultations. To learn more and to book your appointment, visit MacEwan.ca/WIR.