"Once secreted away in the crannies of liberal arts colleges and assigned to the dull torture of reading undergraduate manuscripts, writers today are just as likely to be taking up residence in bookstores and libraries, prisons and scientific research stations, cruise ships, safaris and almost any semi-public enterprise that happens to include an extra chair in the corner.
Some seek a new version of the traditional sanctum where they can devote themselves wholly to their work – without paying rent. 'I was honoured and thrilled to have a space with a door that closed,' says Manitoba children’s and young adult writer Anita Daher, author of Spider Song and the first-ever writer-in-residence at Winnipeg’s Aqua Books. 'It was a room of my own when I didn’t have one, and there’s nothing nicer for a writer than being surrounded by books.'
Others, like Cape Breton-born Jean McNeil, pursue novel residencies in search of experience. 'I’ve been writer in residence in the Antarctic, in the Falkland Islands, Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic, and on a ship’s expedition to the west coast of Greenland,' McNeil said this week by phone from the banks of South Africa’s Selati River, where she is undergoing training as a safari guide – 'my own kind of bespoke writer in residence.'”
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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