Dennis Vanderspek

Dennis Vanderspek is a Canadian writer and professor based in Millbrook, Ontario, a village in Peterborough County west of Peterborough. He holds a doctorate in English and is a long-tenured Professor in the School of General Arts and Sciences at Fleming College, where he coordinates the University Transfer program and has taught English composition, philosophy, and general-education courses since at least 2013. His teaching home is the Communications department, and he worked in programming before joining the college.

His fiction debut, A Is for Everyone, won the 2021 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, the prize administered by The Journal of Experimental Fiction and judged that year by Derek Pell. Pell called it "extraordinary fiction" and an "alphabet of surprises" written in language he described as "simple, in the best sense of the word, deceptively so, slightly skewed, a la Russell Edson." JEF Books, under its Depth Charge imprint, published the 175-page book in April 2023.

The novel subverts the children's alphabet-book format so that every letter routes back to "A," layering surreal parables, anthropomorphic fables, prose-poem meditations, and deadpan comedy into a single structure. It is, to date, Vanderspek's only book.

Beyond fiction, Vanderspek writes a regular astronomy column, "Stargazing," for The Millbrook Times, making night-sky observation accessible to local readers, an interest that connects to his general-education teaching in science and culture. His academic profile describes scholarly interests spanning philosophy, environmental non-fiction, science, and cultural studies.

Start with A Is for Everyone; it is the whole of the JEF list under his name, and the book the Patchen judges singled out.