Current Writer-in-Residence: Gordon Portman

Gordon Portman is a writer and performer experienced in theatres, classrooms, and rehearsal halls from coast to coast. His practice is as an actor, playwright, dramaturge, director, producer, and teacher; his most recent play, After Sundown, was premiered in 2023 in a self-produced production under the auspices of Live Five in Saskatoon.

His project focuses on the wide range of experiences lived by older, cis-gender, non-heterosexual men like himself. These stories are not nearly as apparent/available to the reading public as the stories of younger non-heterosexual, male-identified persons. Gordon states that “such stories have value and need to be told, but in a world where the experiences of elders in general are often devalued and/or absent, the voices of non-heterosexual elders are particularly silent – the occasional glimpse of “the elder gays” on RuPaul’s Drag Race notwithstanding.”

Gordon will be performing a public writing workshop titled “The Story in the Telling”. He will explore different ways that writing craft – from structure to voice, from metaphor to dialogue, from grammar and punctuation to genre and setting and style – can shape the author-reader relationship across the disciplines.

The workshop offers a chance for writers across the four primary genres, non-fiction, fiction, drama, and poetry, to consider and reconsider their ways with words through lenses that might challenge habits, and travel down new paths to connection. Gordon invites participants to come with work, questions, and ideas that can be discussed during the workshop.

This hybrid in-person and online workshop will be an initial talk, followed by facilitated discussion, and closing with Q&A period.