my name is deborah schnitzer. i’m glad you found me.
as a student, teacher, writer, filmmaker, and editor, i am interested in a wide range of creativities and forms of creation. i’m a professor emerita and national 3m teaching fellow, now retired (2013) from the department of english at the university of winnipeg, whose focus in classrooms, courses, and communities has been on the dynamic relationship between scholarship and activism through practices grounded in experiential learning, arts-based education, and interdisciplinarity.
i have worked with other artists and editors, collaborated in the making of experimental narrative short films, helped conceive of a collaborative novel composed by 16 writers from around the world, written screenplays, adapted poetry for film soundscapes, published traditionally, and independently.
in each instance, i discover dimensions of voice and vision that animate and interconnect undertakings. most recently, this has involved the screenplay i have completed for before anything you say, a feature film directed by shelagh carter which was released in the fall of 2016. my third novel, jane dying again, which explores the interminable anguish chronic illness imposes, was published in 2017. a fourth work of fiction, the woman who swallowed west hawk lake, an investigation of how official and unofficial german and jewish narratives haunt and corrupt a canadian imagination and landscape, is being adapted into a feature length film with carter.
quartet for inside voices has been published as an eBook available from Amazon. quartet is comprised of four novellas, joined at the heart by characters bent by constraints they dimly comprehend yet struggle to reconfigure. the collection gives voice to stories where seeming and actual violations of norm and expectation rupture rights, rule, and ritual.