Apart from his career as an author and journalist, Mark has done extensive work in editing and teaching.
He is the editor of several books, including the best-selling Stories From the Ice Storm. As literary executor of the prairie poet Anne Szumigalski, he assembled and edited three posthumous books of her work. And in 2011, after serving as writer-in-residence for the city of Pointe Claire, Mark edited a bilingual collection of writings by local residents, The City We Share / La Ville que nous partageons. He continues, from time to time, to edit the work of his fellow writers.
Back in the years when the Montreal Gazette had a book review section, Mark spent a couple of years overseeing it. He has edited special Canadian issues of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas and of the American poetry journal Verse. He acted as a guest editor for the 75th anniversary issue of Canadian Geographic, “Canada: Global Citizen,” and between 2009 and 2020 he served as an acquisition editor for McGill-Queen’s University Press.
At the Banff Centre, Mark has led nonfiction workshops for the Writing With Style program. He has also taken part in Banff’s Creative Nonfiction program as a writer, editor and guest lecturer. Mark conducted a nonfiction workshop for the Maritime Writers’ Workshop in Fredericton, and for the Quebec Writers’ Federation he has given workshops in nonfiction and children’s writing. He has been a guest lecturer on many Canadian campuses, as well as at Oxford, Cambridge and Ohio State Universities; he has taught poetry-writing at Concordia University; and in March 2016 he served as writer-in-residence at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
Mark has spoken to audiences at the International Symposium on the World’s Indigenous Languages (Nagoya, Japan), the People’s Poetry Gathering (New York), the Edinburgh Writers Festival (Scotland), ideacity (Toronto), and the Saskatchewan Festival of Words (Moose Jaw). He has addressed the annual meetings of groups as diverse as the Editors’ Association of Canada, the Canadian Unitarian Council, and the Association of American University Presses.
If you’re interested in asking Mark to read and edit your work, or if you would like to invite him to speak, please use the Contact page on this site.
