Writing His Own Path: Kieran Rice and the Bobbi Lee Journal

Five years ago, Kieran Rice kept his creative writing to himself. Today, he’s a published author – and helps to head up one of Canada’s only Indigenous-led journals.

Having grown up with a love of reading and a natural talent for writing, Rice wrote for years without sharing his work with others. A turning point for him was his entry into undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto via the Millie Rotman Shime Academic Bridging Program. The creative writing courses he took as a student in the Faculty of Arts & Science helped him to develop his skills and confidence as a writer.

Now a master’s degree student in creative writing at the University of Toronto, Rice is partway through writing his first novel and is helping other writers get published in a new journal called Bobbi Lee: a Collection of Indigenous Knowledges.

A writer in the making

A member of the Snuneymuxw First Nation, Rice was raised in an artistic household in a small village outside of Guelph, Ontario. He remembers feeling inspired by his mother, a writer and playwright. “I always had a romantic idea about writers, from my mom being one, and I always thought I would like to do it,” he recalls. But for a significant period of time, athletics took precedence in his life, and this pulled him in a different direction. “Being an athlete was sort of my identity… so it led me away from that for a long time.”

Although a very bright student, Rice struggled in school and was funnelled into the “applied” stream – not by choice. He felt pressured to pursue trade school, first attending an engineering program at Mohawk College and then graduating from Niagara College with a diploma as a renewable energies technician. After graduating, he realized he didn’t want to work in that field as he didn’t feel any real passion for it. While working a series of jobs that felt deeply unsatisfying, Rice began struggling with his mental health. At this point, he began doing some creative writing, mainly for himself – though he was rarely able to finish what he started.

Forging a new path at U of T

Attending university had always been at the back of his mind, and during the pandemic, Rice began investigating his options. Without any university-level high school courses, he wasn’t sure what his pathway into university could be. He learned about the Academic Bridging Program, an access program at University of Toronto’s Woodsworth College. He had always thought of U of T as an elite institution and knew it to be a top-ranking university, but this didn’t deter him. As he began planning his applications, he recalls thinking, “I may as well start at the top and work my way down from there.”

Once he began his studies in the Bridging Program, Rice recalls that something “clicked” for him. “It felt like I had gone the wrong direction out of high school, and I was better suited to university… it just felt like this was where I was supposed to be all along. It felt fun and not like work at all.” As a mature student who had known the drudgery of unsatisfying jobs, he felt very motivated and took his studies seriously.

Rice felt supported by the staff and faculty at Woodsworth College, finding it to be a small and welcoming community. Reflecting on his Bridging instructor, Professor Jon Johnson, Rice remembers how encouraging and patient he was, adding that his class was “the perfect way to ease into academia.”

By the time Rice completed his Honours Bachelor of Arts in 2025, with a major in Indigenous studies and a double minor in English and creative writing, he was the recipient of numerous awards including the Brookfield Peter F. Bronfman Leadership Scholarship and the Jackman Scholars-in-Residence program.

In 2022, Rice and one of his classmates helped to revive U of T’s Indigenous Students’ Association (ISA) which had been inactive for a number of years. Rice feels grateful to have had a chance to co-lead the ISA for three years, creating space for Indigenous students to build community. Highlights of his time on the ISA included a trip for Indigenous students to Hart House farm and an organized cleanup of a park off of Yonge Street named after Lillian McGregor – an important figure within Toronto’s Indigenous community.

Building the Bobbi Lee journal

In 2024, Rice’s friend and classmate, Tristan Gosselin, also a member of the Indigenous Students’ Association, floated the idea of establishing an Indigenous-led journal. Rice agreed that there was a huge need for this. “As someone who submits their work to journals regularly, it was disheartening that there weren’t more Indigenous-led journals. I always felt it would be really nice to have my work published by a team of Indigenous people.”

This became a passion project for Rice and Gosselin. They recruited two other Indigenous undergraduate students (Devo Moosewaypayo and Bailey Bornyk), and together, they created a new journal called Bobbi Lee: a Collection of Indigenous Knowledges. Named in honour of Lee Maracle’s 1975 autobiographical work Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel, the journal serves as a platform for Indigenous scholarly and creative work, including but not limited to essays, poetry, short stories, visual art and videos.

“It was an incredible amount of work… we were literally starting it from scratch,” recalls Rice. The team worked tirelessly on marketing and outreach, but still worried they might not receive any submissions. In the end, they were blown away by the response, with writers and artists submitting from all across Canada. “We ended up getting more than we could handle, which was a great problem for us to have,” Rice recalls.

The first issue, published in July, 2025, reached a far larger audience than they had anticipated. “It’s been the most meaningful thing I’ve done in undergrad,” says Rice. “To give a voice to all these incredibly talented Indigenous artists and writers – for them to have a place to publish their work, the place that I’d been looking for in the past couple of years. It just feels good.”

With the cost of printing being so prohibitive, they decided to publish the first issue of Bobbi Lee on their website. Since its publication, the journal has received widespread acclaim across social media, and Rice continues to receive messages of appreciation and support in relation to the journal.

A master’s degree – and beyond

In September 2025, Kieran began a master’s degree program in creative writing at the University of Toronto, where he is the proud recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant. 

Continuing to head up the Bobbi Lee journal will be a priority for him throughout his graduate studies. Plans for the next issue are underway and the submission deadline is coming up on January 5, 2026.

Rice is also hard at work writing a novel that he began during his undergrad. Earlier this year, an excerpt from the novel earned him an Indigenous Voices Award in the unpublished prose category. Once completed, the novel will form part of Rice’s MA thesis project, and he hopes to see it published someday.

The novel is partly based on his father’s life and the Indigenous side of his family who reside in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island. Rice notes that family encouragement has been a key part of his journey. “My community is super supportive. My mom is really proud and excited for me, and my family on the west coast are really supportive of me from afar.”

Currently working as a teaching assistant, Rice hopes to pursue a PhD in English following his master’s degree so he can one day teach.

With his first year of grad school now well underway, he takes inspiration from a few Indigenous people in his community, Cody Caetano and Karen McBride, who previously completed the MA in creative writing. 

Similarly, he hopes to provide inspiration and support to other students as they navigate their academic and artistic journeys. Whether as a teacher or as co-director of the Bobbi Lee journal, it is clear that Rice is set to pave a pathway for a new generation of writers and academics.

Bobbi Lee is seeking submissions from self-identifying Indigenous folks for their journal’s second issue, set for publication in spring 2026. The submission deadline is January 5, 2026. 

Story by Emma Culpeper.

Photo by Kris Caetano Photography.