Apart from his own writing, Mark has extensive experience in editing and teaching.
Many writers still recall the years when he edited the book-review pages of the Montreal Gazette. He has edited special Canadian issues of Verse (an American poetry journal) and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. In 2004 Canadian Geographic asked him to edit much of the copy in their 75th anniversary issue, “Canada: Global Citizen.” Mark is also the editor of several books, including Stories From the Ice Storm (1999) and When Earth Leaps Up (posthumous poems by Anne Szumigalski, 2006).
Mark has been a frequent and happy visitor to the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has taught non-fiction courses for the Writing With Style program at Banff, and has participated in its Cultural Journalism program as a writer, editor and guest lecturer. Mark has also taught non-fiction at the Maritime Writers’ Workshop in Fredericton and for the Quebec Writers’ Federation in Montreal.
He has been a guest lecturer on many Canadian campuses, as well as at Oxford, Cambridge and Ohio State universities. Closer to home, he has conducted workshops in a variety of Quebec’s schools and colleges. For the Quebec Writers’ Federation he has given workshops in children’s writing, and he has taught poetry for Concordia University’s Creative Writing program.
Mark has spoken to audiences as diverse as those attending the International Symposium on the World’s Indigenous Languages (Nagoya, Japan), the People’s Poetry Gathering (New York), the Edinburgh Writers Festival (Scotland), ideaCity (Toronto) and the Saskatchewan Festival of Words (Moose Jaw). In June 2010 he will be the keynote speaker at a conference on dictionaries and contemporary language to be held at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
If you would like to invite Mark to speak, please use the Contact page on this site.
