writing workshop
Writing Non-Fiction: Writing Life Workshop
Wed, 2011-11-02 22:57 — Ann-Marie Metten
When: Saturday, November 19, 10am to 3pm
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver
Please join writer-in-residence Susan Crean for a writing workshop with a total of 5 participants.
This workshop is directed at writers with some experience who are writing memoir, biography, history, or a combination of these. We will focus on story development, including research techniques and interviewing.
Together we will answer the following questions:
Cost: $125 (includes lunch)
To register, please email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver
Please join writer-in-residence Susan Crean for a writing workshop with a total of 5 participants.
This workshop is directed at writers with some experience who are writing memoir, biography, history, or a combination of these. We will focus on story development, including research techniques and interviewing.
Together we will answer the following questions:
- What are the pitfalls in writing about someone very different from me?
- How do I know what to research?
Cost: $125 (includes lunch)
To register, please email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
Writing Your Family Story
Tue, 2011-10-18 21:21 — Ann-Marie Metten
Writing Life Workshop
When: Saturday, October 29, 10am to 3pm
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver
Cost: $125 (includes lunch)
Are you interested in telling your family story? Perhaps you have begun to write the history of your ancestors and their journey to Canada from China.
Please join writer-in-residence Susan Crean and author Larry Wong for a writing life workshop for unpublished and beginning writers who are writing memoir or personal history.
Participating in this workshop will help writers answer the following questions:
– What do I do about the gaps in the story?
– How do I make it interesting for others to read?
This workshop is open for a total of 7 participants. Participants will submit up to 15 pages of work for discussion during the workshop.
To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
Larry Wong is a local historian and past president of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society, and author of Dim Sum Stories: A Chinatown Childhood, about his childhood in Vancouver’s Chinatown of the 1940s to 60s. Wong’s personal short stories reveal a world filled with people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
Susan Crean is a writer, editor and cultural critic whose most recent book, The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr, was nominated the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 2001 and won the Hubert Evans Prize for Non-Fiction in British Columbia. She is a frequent contributor to magazines such as Geist, This and The Capilano Review. She was the first Maclean-Hunter Chair in Creative Non-Fiction appointed at the University of British Columbia. Susan Crean is currently working on a major book about a head-tax payer, Mr. Wong Dong Wong, whose life she has been researching for the past two years. The book is a large undertaking, and like Crean’s book on Emily Carr, combines the genres of history, biography, journalism and memoir.
When: Saturday, October 29, 10am to 3pm
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver
Cost: $125 (includes lunch)
Are you interested in telling your family story? Perhaps you have begun to write the history of your ancestors and their journey to Canada from China.
Please join writer-in-residence Susan Crean and author Larry Wong for a writing life workshop for unpublished and beginning writers who are writing memoir or personal history.
Participating in this workshop will help writers answer the following questions:
– What do I do about the gaps in the story?
– How do I make it interesting for others to read?
This workshop is open for a total of 7 participants. Participants will submit up to 15 pages of work for discussion during the workshop.
To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
Larry Wong is a local historian and past president of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society, and author of Dim Sum Stories: A Chinatown Childhood, about his childhood in Vancouver’s Chinatown of the 1940s to 60s. Wong’s personal short stories reveal a world filled with people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
Susan Crean is a writer, editor and cultural critic whose most recent book, The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr, was nominated the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 2001 and won the Hubert Evans Prize for Non-Fiction in British Columbia. She is a frequent contributor to magazines such as Geist, This and The Capilano Review. She was the first Maclean-Hunter Chair in Creative Non-Fiction appointed at the University of British Columbia. Susan Crean is currently working on a major book about a head-tax payer, Mr. Wong Dong Wong, whose life she has been researching for the past two years. The book is a large undertaking, and like Crean’s book on Emily Carr, combines the genres of history, biography, journalism and memoir.
A Short-Story Writing Workshop with Zsuzsi Gartner
Wed, 2011-04-06 11:26 — Ann-Marie Metten
Inviting the Reader In and the Power of Point of View
When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Sunday, June 5
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4
Cost: $135 (includes lunch)
To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
Short fiction’s possibilities are delightful, startling and seemingly endless. Of the vital mechanics of the form (including structure, timeframe and tense choices, narrative momentum, dialogue, character) the single-most important choice you can make in writing short fiction is deciding on what point of view (or points of view) a story should be told from. Your POV choice (together with the more elusive quality of Voice) will dictate HOW you will write WHAT you want to write.
Beginning and emerging writers often adhere unconsciously to a particular POV ― what I call the default mode (and we all have one). During this workshop you’ll discover a multiplicity of POV choices and how a story can radically shift depending on who’s doing the telling or through whose eyes we’re witnessing things from. We’ll also look at The Writer’s Voice and talk about why finding your own voice as a writer is so important.
The second most important decision you need to make is deciding Where and How to begin your story. “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop,” said the king in Alice in Wonderland. We’ll look at why it isn’t that simple when it comes to short fiction.
During this workshop you’ll do writing exercises, as well as read your work out loud and discuss your writing with the class. I will provide a mini course pack that we’ll use for examples and inspiration and that you are welcome to take home with you.>
Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the critically acclaimed story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth (Key Porter), the just-published Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (April 2011, Hamish Hamilton / Penguin Canada), editor of the BC Book Prize–nominated Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow (Douglas & McIntyre), and the fiction editor of Vancouver Review. Her fiction has been broadcast on CBC and widely anthologized, most recently in Best Canadian Stories: 2010. A new story appears in the May 2011 Walrus magazine. She is on faculty this spring with the Banff Centre’s writing program and is an adjunct professor in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She lives in East Vancouver, with two men, one tall, one small.
To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca.
When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Sunday, June 5
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4
Cost: $135 (includes lunch)
To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
Short fiction’s possibilities are delightful, startling and seemingly endless. Of the vital mechanics of the form (including structure, timeframe and tense choices, narrative momentum, dialogue, character) the single-most important choice you can make in writing short fiction is deciding on what point of view (or points of view) a story should be told from. Your POV choice (together with the more elusive quality of Voice) will dictate HOW you will write WHAT you want to write.
Beginning and emerging writers often adhere unconsciously to a particular POV ― what I call the default mode (and we all have one). During this workshop you’ll discover a multiplicity of POV choices and how a story can radically shift depending on who’s doing the telling or through whose eyes we’re witnessing things from. We’ll also look at The Writer’s Voice and talk about why finding your own voice as a writer is so important.
The second most important decision you need to make is deciding Where and How to begin your story. “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop,” said the king in Alice in Wonderland. We’ll look at why it isn’t that simple when it comes to short fiction.
During this workshop you’ll do writing exercises, as well as read your work out loud and discuss your writing with the class. I will provide a mini course pack that we’ll use for examples and inspiration and that you are welcome to take home with you.>
Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the critically acclaimed story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth (Key Porter), the just-published Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (April 2011, Hamish Hamilton / Penguin Canada), editor of the BC Book Prize–nominated Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow (Douglas & McIntyre), and the fiction editor of Vancouver Review. Her fiction has been broadcast on CBC and widely anthologized, most recently in Best Canadian Stories: 2010. A new story appears in the May 2011 Walrus magazine. She is on faculty this spring with the Banff Centre’s writing program and is an adjunct professor in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She lives in East Vancouver, with two men, one tall, one small.
To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca.
Writing Fiction: The Ins and Outs, the Whys and Wherefores, of Research
Wed, 2011-03-09 16:32 — Ann-Marie Metten
Writing Workshop
When: Saturday, March 26, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4
Cost: $135 (includes lunch). To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
At some point, all writers find themselves turning to a variety of sources to build a story and to ensure its accuracy. And when they do, they may find themselves asking some or all of the following questions:
– What sources should I use and to what ends? What should I be aware of when interviewing people for a story?
– Is researching for non-fiction different from researching for fiction?
– When, if ever, is it acceptable to change the facts, to alter geography, for example, or change history?
– When should I stop researching and start writing?
– How do I make sure that my story is accurate?
Workshop participants will explore the research component of excerpts from published works and works-in-progress. They will brainstorm story possibilities drawn from a variety of sources including their own lives. Participants are invited to bring their own research conundrums to the workshop, whether in the form of an idea, notes on the page, or a short piece of writing.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have begun at least two new stories, and will have several strategies in place to follow through with development, research, writing, further research, and fact checking.
Maggie de Vries is an award-winning writer who teaches in UBC’s Creative Writing Department and Masters in Children’s Literature program. In 2005, she was Vancouver Public Library’s first writer in residence.
When: Saturday, March 26, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue Vancouver, BC V6P 2N4
Cost: $135 (includes lunch). To register, email kogawahouse@yahoo.ca
At some point, all writers find themselves turning to a variety of sources to build a story and to ensure its accuracy. And when they do, they may find themselves asking some or all of the following questions:
– What sources should I use and to what ends? What should I be aware of when interviewing people for a story?
– Is researching for non-fiction different from researching for fiction?
– When, if ever, is it acceptable to change the facts, to alter geography, for example, or change history?
– When should I stop researching and start writing?
– How do I make sure that my story is accurate?
Workshop participants will explore the research component of excerpts from published works and works-in-progress. They will brainstorm story possibilities drawn from a variety of sources including their own lives. Participants are invited to bring their own research conundrums to the workshop, whether in the form of an idea, notes on the page, or a short piece of writing.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have begun at least two new stories, and will have several strategies in place to follow through with development, research, writing, further research, and fact checking.
Maggie de Vries is an award-winning writer who teaches in UBC’s Creative Writing Department and Masters in Children’s Literature program. In 2005, she was Vancouver Public Library’s first writer in residence.
