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Please join writer-in-residence Susan Crean and author Larry Wong for a writing life workshop for unpublished and beginning writers who are writing memoir or personal history.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.