What: Dear Reader: Letter-Writing as Inspiration for Creative Writing series of workshops by Maria Saba
When: Two Thursdays, May 27 and June 24, 7 to 8:15pm
Where:  On Zoom
Cost: $15 each (or free for members)

Author Maria Saba in collaboration with Historic Joy Kogawa House is pleased to present two writing workshops. The first is an exercise in reflection and connection through the lost art of letter writing. The author will invite participants to write letters to those near and far or bring old letters and talk about them while exploring and/or developing the potential stories within them.

In the second workshop, those interested in presentation will read their letters along with local writers and poets, whom the author will invite for an evening of reading and conversation, to be held on Zoom. Authors Nilofar Shidmehr and Aislinn Hunter are confirmed as guest readers on June 24. Please join us!

Maria Saba, writer-in-residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House

Maria Saba is an Ottawa-based writer, storyteller, and arts educator born and raised in Iran. She has published three books and more than a hundred articles, interviews, and stories on four continents. Maria’s short story collection, My First Friend, was a semi-finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, and the title story, published in Scoundrel Time, won the Editor’s Choice Award and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her novella, The Secret of Names, was longlisted for the 2020 Disquiet Literary Prize.

Maria Saba is writer-in-residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House in May and June 2021. While living at the house, her creative work is to review and revise a novel based on letters and diaries the author kept during a period of one-and-a-half years when she lived as a stateless person in Turkey. Through this work of fiction, Maria Saba gives voice to the experience of statelessness and sheds light on collective history via a personal one.

With support from The Writers Union of Canada National Public Reading Program.