Loranne Cecilia Brown, MFA

Sessional Assistant Professor of Communication
In class and out, I share my students’ joys, and have been entrusted with their fears and pain. My collaborative-style classes have become a sanctuary where we all feel equally blessed to share each other's trust, empathy, and respect.

Loranne Brown has worked in almost every form of creative writing. Her first novel, The Handless Maiden, was published by Doubleday Canada and was short-listed for awards at the provincial, national, and international levels.
For her BA, she specialized in English, with an emphasis in creative writing, at the University of Toronto and obtained graduate-level credits in editing and technical writing at Harvard.
Firmly committed to life-long learning, she completed her MFA in creative writing (fiction and nonfiction) at Pacific University near Portland, Oregon, in January 2011. Her creative
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thesis—a novel entitled After the Fact of Fire—is based on the 1989 crash of Air Ontario Flight 1363 near Dryden, Ontario.
Can creative writing be taught? "Most humans share the desire for self-expression," she says. "Provide students with models of excellent writing, prompts to unleash their creativity, a safe environment in which to share, critique, and learn - and most of them will catch fire. One need not be a born writer to develop craft. Self-discipline and hard work are better indicators of success than any so-called innate genius."

  • Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Fiction) (Pacific University
    Forest Grove, Oregon; 2011)

Expertise

Loranne's career hasn't followed a traditional academic or scholarly path: she is a professional writer who also teaches. For many years, she worked as a legal assistant in Bermuda, where she co-authored a manual to accompany customized law revision software and trained lawyers and legal assistants to use it. In Bermuda, she was a journalist and weekly columnist; in Canada, she has written for the Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, and other publications. She is a keen editor who finds it particularly rewarding to help steer book-length material to publication.
She has a long association with the Federation of BC Writers (past President and Executive Director) and with Surrey Continuing Education, where she taught creative writing. Since 2001, she has served in the Professional Writing stream at TWU, offering classes in journalism and narrative nonfiction.

Loranne helped develop a specialized curriculum for first year Media + Communication majors in research and writing. Her nonfiction students come alive when they discover, often in their senior year, the intimate potential of reading and writing; her goal with this introductory course (MCOM 191) is to spark that flame with freshman students, to engage them intellectually, emotionally, and professionally, and to prepare them to write effective papers within their major.
Over the years, Loranne’s narrative nonfiction class (MCOM 369) has become a favorite among majors and non-majors alike and was recommended by Mars’ Hill as a course all freshmen should take with her at some point in their TWU careers. Several students who have undertaken the senior capstone course in professional writing (MCOM 469) have successfully used their critical and creative work as a launch pad to graduate school.
Loranne brings fresh ideas from workshops, readings and lectures with mentors and peers at Pacific University. The cross-genre pollination in fiction, nonfiction and poetry feeds her creative work, her imagination, and her teaching.
Since publishing The Handless Maiden, Loranne has completed two novels (Random Acts of Madness, and Blind Judgment) and is seeking publication for them. Two others (After the Fact of Fire and Two Truths and a Lie) are works in progress. Each of these (rather hefty volumes!) requires extensive interdisciplinary research. Blind Judgment, for example, has required her to become familiar with Ojibwe language and lore and, by extension, North American Indigenous literature - in addition to restorative justice, the bioethics of reproductive technologies, and the neuroscience of mystical experience, to name a few.
She is working on a nonfiction book, Blowback, based on her late father’s experience with dementia and the criminal justice system.

Awards & Honors

  • International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (long list) (2000)
  • Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award (finalist) (1999)
  • BC Book Awards Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (finalist) (1999)
  • Literary Writes Competition (3rd prize short fiction “Through Your Hands”) (1999)
  • BC Festival of the Arts (Award of Special Recognition short fiction “Repetitive Tasks”) (1996)
  • Writers Union of Canada Competition (short fiction “Repetitive Tasks”), finalist (1996)
  • Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference (short fiction “Some Trick of Light”), finalist (1996)

Recent Publications

Novels:

Short stories:

  • “Waxwing”, Dec 2009/Jan 2010 edition, This Great Society e-zine.

  • “Cycles of Loss”, anthologized in The Fed Anthology: Brand New Fiction and Poetry from the Federation of BC Writers. Susan Musgrave, ed. Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2003.

Affiliations & Memberships

  • Member, International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS)
  • Member, Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)
  • Member, Creative Nonfiction Collective
  • Member, National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE)
  • Member, Conference for College Composition and Communication (CCCC)
  • Executive Director, Federation of BC Writers (2001)
  • President, Federation of BC Writers (2000)
  • Secretary, Federation of BC Writers (1999)
  • Member, Editorial Board, Wordworks, Federation of BC Writers (1998 – 2001)
  • Judge, Cecilia Lamont Literary Contest, South Surrey, BC (1998)

"I consider myself, foremost, a mentor," Loranne says. "My students are
not vessels to be filled with knowledge. Rather, my job is to help them discover their own areas of 
creativity and competence. To ignite their curiosity to know more and assist them to research those 
areas. And to learn from them as much as they might learn from me."
 

  • MCOM 191 Research and Writing for Communication
  • MCOM 251 Introduction to Journalism
  • MCOM 261 It’s Personal: Intro to Narrative Nonfiction
  • MCOM 352 Multimedia Journalism
  • MCOM 361 Business and Technical Writing
  • MCOM 451 Public Relations Writing
  • MCOM 369 Adventures in Narrative Nonfiction
  • MCOM 452 Feature Writing for Newspapers and Magazines
  • MCOM 453 Editing for Newspapers and Magazines
  • MCOM 461 Travel and Adventure Journalism
  • MCOM 469 Senior Capstone in Professional Writing