There was a time when Natasha Singh couldn’t wait to get out of Jasper. Now, she’s sorry she can’t visit more often.

Singh who was born and raised in Jasper, is an author and teacher living in New York City. Since graduating from high school in Jasper, Singh has lived in three major cities, earned two degrees and taught classes to university and prep school students alike. She returned to Jasper in the final week of July to lead a workshop for female writers and to participate in Summer Passages, a reading that coincided with the launch of the newest issue of Uncalibrated, Jasper’s literary magazine.

Singh wants to help develop a stronger literary community in Jasper — to be a source of support in a community that she now realizes did a lot to support her when she was growing up and that she continues to incorporate in her writing.

“Jasper, for me, is the subject of what I write about, even though I haven’t been here for years. When I’m writing, Jasper is very much the place that I conjure up in my imagination,” she says. “When I did return, I remembered how supported I was here ­— it really did something for my sense of accountability to Jasper as a character. I feel really full of gratitude, sometimes it is really important to return to a place. I fell in love with Jasper again, and the people in Jasper as well.”

Singh started a journal while still in high school and looking back, she sees many typical teen themes, but a recurring appearance of race as subject matter.

“I was really focused on race, and on feeling different from others, and that makes sense. We were the only South Asian family in town at that time. There were a few Greek and Italian families, but Jasper was predominantly white.”

Her post-secondary education took her to Montreal and Toronto, where she took women’s studies, English literature and cultural studies at Concordia and the U of T, but despite living in diverse, cosmopolitan cities, she found that race was something that continued to be important in her creative life.

“Absolutely it’s an important part of what I bring to the table, because that table right now isn’t broad enough,” she says. “So long as issues of race are present and there aren’t adequate voices, I’ll continue writing and talking about it.”

It was while attending school in Toronto that Singh determined that writing would be a significant part of her life. While attending a workshop on storytelling, she took the stage in front of the other participants, something that had a dramatic impact.

“I was really transformed by the experience of hearing my own voice filling up an extensive room,” she says. After finishing her bachelor’s degree, she went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York to pursue a Master’s of Fine Arts in creative writing. Lacking the funds to pay her own way through, she “just kept calling” until the institution offered her a bursary.

Since graduating, Singh has taught at Rutgers University and is now on the English faculty at the Collegiate School for Boys in New York, one of the truly elite private schools in the area.

“Teaching and writing are a great partnership for me,” she says. “I can be very insular when I’m writing, and it gets difficult to do that without taking a breath. Teaching gives me that breath, and reading young people’s writing is very refreshing. It’s very rewarding to be involved in people’s lives that way.”

She admits that her position was daunting at first, teaching a very elite group in an all-boys school.

“It was confronting,” she says. “I had to challenge my own assumptions, the ones I made about the boys that turned out to be incorrect.”

Now the challenge has shifted from the classroom to the writing desk, where Singh is trying to complete two projects that have been in progress for some time.

“Writing used to be magic for me, and when I began to study the craft intensely, I began to look at my work with different eyes. Now, I’m having a blast writing again. I’m not as hard on myself as I used to be.”

While her MFA might have made her more self-critical, Singh says it also provided a community of writers to work with, something that she believes to be extremely valuable.

“I would really like to see that kind of community develop here in Jasper,” she said. “A lot of people write, but it just doesn’t occur to people that you can create a community from that. I suspect a lot of people in Jasper are talented writers, but they just haven’t had that affirmation which I have. That’s been more circumstantial than anything to do with ability.”