 So, Kevin McNeely, the real McNeely on Twitter. So the idea is just for us to introduce you to anyone who might be taking ArtsOne at UBC or interested in ArtsOne Digital, the website. Right. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, how you came here, what you did before coming to UBC? Sure. I've been at UBC for over 20 years, I think, it's been a while. But so my name is Kevin McNeely, I work in the English department usually at UBC. And before coming out here, I taught for a year at the University of Western Ontario and I, before that, earned my PhD from Queen's University in Kingston, where I studied the thesis I did. The doctoral dissertation was on WB Yates, the poetry of WB Yates, and certain philosophers, a philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas. So some sort of exploratory philosophical readings of poems and plays and things like that. And how did you come to do English? Actually, you have a story about this and about an exam in which you did particularly well, is that right? I have told this story to ArtsOne students and to others. I was originally as an undergraduate aiming to study physics and math and astronomy and things like that. That was very cool. But I always had an interest in English literature, so I took English, first year English as kind of an option. And it turns out I didn't do as well as I perhaps could have or should have in first year science, but I did really well somehow on my first year English exam and I got a really high grade. And so I decided, oh, why not? I better switch. My physics professor actually at Western was a man named T. Dean Galey. Dean Galey. And he used William Blake to illustrate his physics, things in his physics class. So even though I was headed for the sciences, I thought the arts and English language poetry kept impinging on all the things I did and I decided that's the direction I should go in. And your specialization is, would it be fair to say, 20th, 21st century poetry and also mass culture? Yeah, contemporary. I was hired here. We all have our job descriptions. I was hired here at UBC to teach what they call critical theory and cultural studies. So basically sort of the philosophy around literature and aesthetics and things like that. And I do do some work on popular culture. But I also teach contemporary literatures in English, some Canadian literature, contemporary British and Irish poetry principally, and contemporary American literatures as well. So I kind of reach across national boundaries in my interest. I do some Caribbean writing sometimes when I'm teaching texts and different kinds of things. And I also teach courses in, as I said, in cultural studies, which deals often in popular culture. One of the texts I put on, for example, on the section of Arts One that we just finished doing, they go in two-year cycles. So the two-year cycle that we just finished, one of the texts I put on was Watchman by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, which is, I guess, one of the most famous now graphic novels sort of built out of a comic book. So I'm very interested in popular culture as well and the ways in which pop culture, television, film, music, too, the way that they intersect with literatures and with what that intersection can sometimes mean. How do everyday people, how do we all use literature? How do we read it? What is it for? And what kind of literacies do we have? Those are sort of questions I often find I'm dealing with. Can you write poetry as well? Can you say something about that? I don't know how relevant it is. Although there is a YouTube video of me reading, so that's perfectly accessible. Everyone's welcome to find that if they want to. I do write poetry. I have done for a long time. There's only one book of my poems that's come out, although others are, I hope somewhere in the pipeline, so we'll see what happens to them. The book is called Al-Mashur, which is a sort of musical technical term for your, the shape of your mouth for your chops, a jazz musician would say, for how your voice sounds in some ways or how your body relates to the instrument. So there are a lot of poems about the history of the jazz trumpet, of jazz trumpet players. It's a kind of a coherent book rather than a collection of, you know, odds and bits and pieces of poetry. It holds together as a book on its own, so it's a sequence really. Part of that book comes out of my own interest in improvised music and in jazz. The current kinds of research that I do, publications, they go, it goes, my research goes in different directions I think, but one of my primary focal points is on improvisation, asking about how does improvised music work? How does improvisation give us models for thinking about things like community building or listening or attention for reading? For aesthetics and artistic practice, improvised music has a lot to do with time and with immediacy and with presence and with questions, I guess, of authenticity and voice. So reading those ideas over onto certain kinds of literary practices is very interesting for me and pretty contemporary kinds of literary practices and poetry. And I try to bring up some of those questions in my own creative work. You've also talked about your teaching in terms of improvisation. I wonder if you could tell us more about your approach to teaching. Well, I try. I mean, I guess that's part of improvisatory practices, is that you are constantly at risk of making errors and slips and flubs and, you know, so it's a bit of a testing always. But in terms of sort of pedagogy of teaching practice, I think about improvisation as a way to, in the classroom, let's say, to produce some sense of immediacy and relevance. It's a technique of, I think, I mean, you can do improvisatory practices in various ways, but it's a technique that focuses on thinking on your feet. So often this maybe works a little bit better in seminar than in lecture, although I've certainly tried it there. But the idea is to try and model in front of students or with students in a kind of co-participatory manner critical thinking and critical kinds of practices to try to engage in a fairly immediate way with particular kinds of source materials. I don't know how much I did of that in lecture. The lectures tend to be a little bit planned because in Arts One, at least there's a large group there, so we have to kind of sketch things out. But in terms of even the material, sometimes I like to deal with. Last year or the year before in Arts One, we dealt with Beowulf, the Old English poem translated by James Heaney, so there's a kind of contemporary poetic angle on that. But one of the things that happens in Beowulf is a kind of discussion and a description of a performing poet and of how it is that poetry enacts itself off the page and around a campfire, let's say, or wouldn't be a campfire in that case, a hearth in a building or a kind of gathering place, but how a poet in Old English she'd be called a scop would stand up and perform and often in a fairly improvised and certainly in a kind of immediate way poetry was meant to kind of focus your attention and to garner your interest and to talk about big issues in a fairly concentrated and vital form. So I try at least in part to convey some of that, I hope, when teaching it. So that's part of that sort of improvisatory aspect of teaching. I mean it does involve just making things up on the spot, that's part of what you're doing, but really what it's trying to do, these kinds of practices, are to engage people with a more immediate sense of critical thinking to make you, encourage you to think a little more directly and critically about what's going on in the text you have in front of you or the things we're describing. Can you tell us a little bit about what attracted you to Ads1? You've just spent two years teaching on it and what were some of the highlights of your time? I think what drew me to it was the opportunity to to teach with colleagues whom I normally don't really get to interact with so much in a really what we call an interdisciplinary format that I could deal with, be talking about and talking with others about books and ideas that I don't always encounter directly in my own teaching practice, and could find ways in which different kinds of perspectives intersected with some of my own interests and ideas. So that was really what drew me to it. It's also got a really powerful historical sense to it, Ads1 does as a program and as a course, that you're dealing with some of the great books of the western world and of other worlds and the opportunity to encounter those texts in a first-hand way was a little too hard to pass up so I would really really interested in having the opportunity to think about these big, big texts and big books and talk with others about it. What I think I liked most, I mean there are all kinds of great things happened in Ads1 but if I had to say what I liked the most, it was the interaction with the students. The way the program is set up, you have a lot of very direct interaction with students in seminar and in the tutorials. It's a very close sort of one-on-one interaction and there's a lot of opportunity to think through ideas, to argue, to discuss, to talk about some of these things in really new and dynamic ways. Students bring a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of vitality, a lot of interest to the material and that for me was a really a really great aspect of what Ads1 is all about is that kind of dynamic interaction. So finally what advice would you have either to a student about to take Ads1 at UBC or to somebody who's looking through the website Ads1 Digital? Well the first advice would be just to take it because it's a great course. I mean I don't, there aren't any real drawbacks to taking Ads1. It's just full of opportunities to, as I was just saying, to sort of interact in a kind of very direct way with scholars and critics and academics and thinkers who are dealing with some of these issues that you want to deal with in the arts and the humanities. So take it is my first piece of advice. The other thing I would say is that if you are interested in following through in Ads1 come prepared to participate. It's an opportunity that you should take advantage of. As I said you got this this gift of being able to connect directly with scholars dealing with great texts, with big texts and with important issues. So you should come ready to take advantage of that and to really get down and try and and focus on this kind of process and make it happen for you because there's a lot to be gained from it. You can really get a lot out of it and yeah that's what I would say. There's lots to get out of this. Thanks so much Kevin. Oh thank you.