Jane Affleck is a is a writer and artist based in Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island (PEI), which is on the east coast of Canada and part of Mi’kma’ki, the unceeded lands of the Mi’kmaq people. Jane has taught undergrad-level writing, English lit, and art history courses. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including The Great Lakes Review, feral feminisms, Taproot, C Magazine, and Visual Arts News. Jane has received grants to support various academic, research-creation, and art or writing projects, including most recently from PEI Arts Grants to support the residency at Fish Factory. They have also been shortlisted for several writing prizes, including first prize in the creative non-fiction category in the PEI Writers’ Guild’s Island Literary Awards in 2023. Her ink and watercolour drawings have been in group exhibitions across Canada and online.
“June 2025 was my second residency at Fish Factory — exactly 8 years since the first. But the fjord, the village, and Fish Factory were all much as I remembered them (though several renovation projects have changed the building a bit!). Some of the mountains showed only a little wear and tear at the very tops (at heights I’d not dared to climb even when younger), but the moss, the crowberries, the willow, the flowering plants, and the whimbrels, snipes, wagtails, eider ducks, and terns — all were whole-heartedly busy with their own summertime creative processes of growing and nesting and blooming. So Fish Factory was again the perfect setting for the intensive focus required to finish a draft of a complex project.
The quiet studios in the village surrounded by myriad forms of life on the mountains provided daily antidote to the challenges of writing a long-form work crossing genres of dystopia, climate fiction (cli-fi), and solar punk (it’s really a thing!), and with themes that include gender-based violence… And after returning home, my time in Fish Factory inspired a short zine project called Júní / June, which contrasts the peacefulness of the east fjords with the bombings that happened that month in Iran.
Takk fyrir to Kris and Vid and everyone else at Fish Factory for such an amazing month — hope to see you all again before another 8 years goes by!”
Website: https://www.jane-affleck.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/being_littoral/