Lynne Van Luven

B.A. (Saskatchewan), M.A., Ph.D. (Alberta)
Associate professor. Journalism, Creative Non-fiction

Lynne Van Luven joined the University of Victoria Department of Writing in July of 1997, after a five-year stint teaching journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa. Van Luven was born and raised in rural Saskatchewan, worked as a journalist in Alberta from 1968 to 1992, and has always parlayed her love of reading and writing into gainful employment. Now an associate professor at UVic, she has worked at a variety of jobs, including general-store clerk in her home town of Dysart, ward aide in a Regina nursing home, women's editor on a small daily newspaper, education and social affairs reporter, freelance drama reviewer, books editor, radio columnist, and CBC radio critic in both Ottawa and Victoria.

Van Luven's first six years of schooling were obtained in a rural one-room school, complete with outhouse. Perhaps due to such early pioneering, she always regarded education as a "ticket to travel" and as a means to expand her personal experience. After obtaining a BA in English and psychology at the University of Saskatchewan, Van Luven worked as a newspaper reporter for 12 years before going back to school to pursue her MA and PhD in Canadian Literature at the University of Alberta. While a graduate student at the U of A, Van Luven discovered that teaching English was the next best thing to reading. She subsequently worked as a sessional lecturer for several years before returning to reporting and copy editing at the Edmonton Journal.

Over the years, whether editing, reporting or teaching, Van Luven has kept her freelance career alive (sometimes barely) by writing reviews, feature commentaries and articles for a number of outlets including Books in Canada, Quill and Quire, The Vancouver Sun, The Ottawa Citizen, Herizons Magazine, The Edmonton Journal, The Literary Review of Canada, Media Magazine, NeWest Review, The Times-Colonist and The Malahat. She is an occasional contributor to CBC Radio, and hs begun a once-monthly column on media and culture for Monday Magazine. Van Luven is the co-editor of a textbook on popular culture in Canada entitled Pop Can, published by Prentice Hall Canada. She is the editor of Going Some Place, an anthology of creative non-fiction, published by Coteau Books. She has also edited a number of fiction and non-fiction books for Edmonton's NeWest Press.

In 2007, the anthology of personal essays entitled Nobody's Mother (TouchWood Editions, 2006) was nominated for two non-fiction awards. In September 2008, the "sibling anthology," Nobody's Father: Life Without Kids, was released by TouchWood, co-edited by Van Luven and Bruce Gillespie, an Ontario writer and editor. Nobody's Father features essays by 23 men who re-interpret what it is like to live as 21st- century childless males. Van Luven is now researching a book of personal essays about aging with attitude, tentatively entitled Flesh Wounds.

You can find her once-monthly column, Media/Matters in Monday Magazine.