Dr Theresa Muñoz and I sat in the Gibson Room of Graham House, poring over a small stack of papers: poems I’d written for a creative writing class. As the 22nd writer in residence at Green College, Theresa had offered to provide feedback on any resident’s writing. She began our session by showing me her line-by-line comments on all three poems. Over the next hour, she walked me through the possibilities of lyric at the level of word, sound, and line break. The depth of her attention astounded me; I’d never received such finely detailed feedback.
But Theresa’s incredible capacity for careful scrutiny felt consistent with her experience in archival research, in which she combs through documents, studies objects, and meticulously records her observations. She spins poems out of these archival encounters: Archivum, Theresa’s latest poetry collection, draws from her research in the archive of late Scottish writer Muriel Spark, as well as Theresa’s personal experience of visiting that archive. When I asked Theresa about her poems’ own preoccupation with minutiae and mundanity, she mused, “I like to focus on paper, on materials. I like textures in poetry. I think my personality is suited to smaller details. That makes sense, because poems are smaller things.”
A month after my one-on-one with Theresa, we met in the Piano Lounge to talk more about Archivum, her creative research practices, and her engagement with Green College. I was especially interested in her homecoming to Vancouver, where she grew up and received her BFA in Creative Writing at UBC.
DS: What led you to apply to this residency, and how does it feel to be back in your hometown?
TM: I've always wanted to come back and work creatively in my hometown again because I did my undergraduate [degree] here. I graduated in May and left in September to do my Master’s in Glasgow, Scotland. I never gave myself a chance to feel like a Canadian writer and talk about issues pertinent to Canada. It's something I felt was missing from my career, so I applied [to Green] as a way of coming back to my creative origin. [In Vancouver,] I just instantly felt like I was back. It's brought out a part of me that I haven't felt in a while, a creativity and a connectedness with the land. I do feel that in Scotland, but I really feel that here. Even coming here today: it was so rainy, and I have many memories of waking up and trudging through the rain on this campus.
As part of her residency, Theresa hosted the lecture series Living Archives: Legacy, History, and Creation, which situated her poetry in conversation with other Canadian storytellers who likewise turn toward archival research in their own artistic practices. During one lecture titled Imagined Histories, Theresa and author Madeleine Thien contemplated what they called the “edges of the archive.” I interpreted the term to refer to the gaps in information an archive leaves, the questions it fails to answer. Both writers spoke of such gaps as representing frustrating absences and, simultaneously, fruitful opportunities to insert authorial imagination.
DS: How do you approach the “edges of the archive” in your research and writing?
TM: When archives end, sometimes you go to the physical place where it happens. [Archivum contains a] poem about Eliza Junor, one of the first documented multiracial individuals in Scotland; her father was a slave owner and her mother was a slave. There's only one letter that exists from her in the world. How do you create a poem out of that? I caught on to what I felt was missing from her story—the voice of her mother—because that is where I feel most of the loss. I wanted to map out [Eliza Junor’s] origin story or talk about what she lost. I went to where she was born. I walked the beaches that she might have seen. I visited her gravestone. So I think when archives end, you have to see it for yourself. And from there you speculate on what is most important to you. I don’t know Eliza Junor’s full history, but it felt important to address the part of her life that hasn’t been documented.
“Last Words of Eliza Junor” is not the only poem in Archivum that uses a real person’s artifact as a springboard for speculative extrapolation. For instance, “Letter from Marie Battle Singer and James Burns Singer” envisions the titular figures “in a still from a movie: Marie at a window / overlooking Les Halles, / James in a fishing boat in Scotland, above foam and kelp” on the basis of an archived letter, while “Dear Frances” inhabits the voice of Muriel Spark delivering an ode to her girlhood friend. Theresa and Madeleine Thien described their immersion into historical figures’ archives as a form of friendship, an idea I found both tender and tragic.
DS: It strikes me that this friendship is always one-sided: the researcher can only perceive the archived subject, and never the other way around. How did you confront this solitude during your research process? Archivum has a throughline of loneliness, the isolation of working in an archive.
TM: The conditions [of the archive] make that isolation from the start. It feels monastic in there. You’re not allowed any items, you’re not allowed to drink or eat, you’re not allowed ink. You’re not even allowed to leave a trace of yourself, because you have to wear gloves. Clean white gloves. There’s an issue of privilege, because you’re being allowed to look at and revere these objects. There’s a sense of curation beyond [the archive itself]: the library has deemed these objects rare and precious, and you are lucky to see them. So with the weight of that, you go in, and you don’t talk to anybody. You can’t leave. If you leave, you can’t come back. It doesn’t have to be an isolating experience. But in Scottish culture, looking at these rare books, and looking at these prized possessions of a nation, they want you to do that singularly. It continues that cycle of adoring objects.
“Archives,” writes Theresa in her poem “White Gloves,” “your love is selective.” Theresa confronted this tension in her workshop Voices and Archives, in which she led a group of seven students from the broader UBC community through discussions, sample texts, and writing exercises. Theresa asked each participant to bring any object from their personal inventory. She instructed students to write a “frame” around their object delineating its emotional significance. This, she explained, is how one might use objects to transcend the archive’s isolation and connect with the person on the other side of the catalogue.
DS: How do you know when a research discovery will generate a poem? How do you move from a fact or object toward a poem’s emotional truth?
TM: I think it’s when and how you see yourself in those objects. To make poems successful, to not make them one-sided, you have to enter the [archival object] somehow. You have to ask: What can be learned from looking at this? What can be explored? What parts of myself can I find here? You have to find your way of bonding with objects, or else writing about them will feel more like description than narrative. The thing with archives is that you find your own personality in there. You find your own wishes and desires in the lives of people that you read about.
Archivum combines archival perception with other throughlines. Poems like “Cashino,” “Names,” and “Love in a stone” celebrate and probe the frictions of interracial relationships. Others like “Balmoral Clock” and “On Arthur’s Seat” dwell on the architecture of Edinburgh, reveling in the city’s “Study of absolute lines, of light and gold.” The result is a complex weaving of several moods, subjects, and voices.
DS: How do you see Archivum’s multiple themes relating to each other?
TM: I wrote three different sequences of poems, and my editor said they weren’t meeting up. They were parallel trains. I had to link them. The only way to do that was to have a common ground in archives and my own discovery, and to put myself at the centre. I had to be the main character because otherwise it wouldn’t hang together. I also [organized] it by theme. Women writers was a theme, author legacies was a theme, migration was a theme, and the interracial couples came in at the end—I was trying to write my way into something slightly happier. I also wanted Archivum to be a walk around Edinburgh; it helped orient the book for readers, like a pathway. You can imagine someone moving physically from one site to another, which grounds the themes. The next poems I want to write are really slow. I’m deliberately writing poems where everything is in slow motion, atoms touching atoms. But Archivum was faster.
DS: What are the next poems? What have you been working on while in residence?
TM: Here I’m writing about goodbyes. I’m very interested in how we say goodbye on a daily basis. Leaving our house, adjusting our relationships to new changes in our lives. The places where I grew up are changing; saying goodbye to things I used to know is part of climate change. I’ve been talking to doctors about the way they see goodbyes in the medical field; it’s been tough, but I’m trying to find ways to write about it that are empathetic and that will connect with people. [In the next collection], each poem is a little goodbye. The conciseness of that is troubling me a bit, because sometimes I’ll go off on a tangent, but I’m trying to be strict with myself and also write slow poems—poems where there’s barely any action, poems trying to explore one moment.
Theresa’s reflection on the ubiquity of goodbyes felt especially poignant when her time as writer in residence concluded. She, her husband Harry, and her daughter Sienna departed Green College to return to their home in Edinburgh, and we residents have missed them keenly since then. Theresa’s lectures, workshops, and dinner conversation enriched the Green community on not only an intellectual but interpersonal level. The way she connects with archives—her unique ability to see into the potentials, fine details, and personal resonances of objects—is also the way she connects with people. But here, thankfully, she’s left a trace of herself.
Written by Danielle Sherman, Master’s student in Creative Writing and resident member of Green College
Dr Theresa Muñoz is a Canadian poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a PhD from the University of Glasgow. She has published one collection of poetry, Settle, which was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. Her second collection Archivum, an exploration of what it means to engage with archival artefacts, is published by Pavilion Poetry (2025) and was nominated in the Saltire Literary Prizes 2025. She has been awarded the Scottish Muriel Spark Centenary Award, Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, Creative Scotland Award, and shortlisted for The Kavya Prize and a Sky Arts Royal Society of Literature Writers Award. She has directed several literary initiatives in the UK, including the Newcastle Poetry Festival and the James Berry Poetry Prize.
She was in residence at Green College for three months in the winter term of 2026.