Marian Dodds writes creative nonfiction that interweaves her life experiences from the Arctic to Africa with threads of teaching, counselling, and advocacy. Marian’s memoir exploring the existential underbelly of her years working in Ethiopia, titled Tizita—A Memoir of Perseverance and Enchantment, was published in 2025. In 2022, she won second place in the Susan Crean Award for Nonfiction and was shortlisted in 2022 and 2024 for the Federation of BC Writers’ Creative Nonfiction Award. Her work is published in Volumes 2 and 4 of the Federation of BC Writers’ Literary Contests Anthology Roots to Branches, in the SFU Writer’s Studio anthology Emerge 18, Teacher newsmagazine, Post Script, Above and Beyond, Canada’s Arctic Journal, and more.  

Her next project, Arctic Love Stories (working title), will braid her parents’ writing about their Arctic life in the second half of the forties with her own childhood memories of living in Canada’s Arctic in the late fifties and early sixties. 

Marian has a B.Sc. (H.Ec.), British Columbia and Alberta teacher certification, an M.Ed., post-graduate Diplomas in Curriculum Development (U of Alberta) and Guidance Studies (UBC), a Certificates in International Development (UBC) and Creative Writing (SFU), and is a graduate of the SFU Writer’s Studio and the TWS Graduate Workshop.