World Building as Sensory Practice
The opening talk of SWG's 2026 Virtual Facilitated Retreat will explore world-building as an intuitive, sensory practice across poetry and fiction. Rather than focusing on maps, systems, or lore, David Ly, the Virtual Writer-In-Residence, will reframe world building as an act of attention to atmosphere, image, and emotional truth.
Whether writing poetry or fiction, writers are always constructing worlds. Sometimes those worlds are expansive and imagined; other times, they are intimate and rooted in memory, body, and place. This talk considers how worlds emerge through accumulation rather than explanation, built from texture, imagery, and recurring details.
As a welcome to the retreat, this talk sets a tone of curiosity and openness, encouraging participants to trust their language, allow worlds to remain unfinished, and let imagination unfold naturally at their edges.
David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020) and Dream of Me as Water (Anstruther Books, 2022), both short-listed for ReLit Poetry Awards, and the fantasy novel Not All Dragons (Poplar Press, 2026). He co-edited, with Daniel Zomparelli, Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). David’s poems have appeared in publications such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, PRISM International, and The Ex-Puritan, where he won the inaugural Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, as well as in the Pan MacMillan anthologies He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (2024) and You’re Never Too Much: Poems for Every Emotion (2025). He is the Poetry Editor at This Magazine.
Learn more about David here: www.davidlywrites.ca
