Workshops
I’ve had the pleasure of facilitating these original, insightful and fun workshops for many participants and organizations, including The Alexandra Writer’s Centre, Off Topic Publishing, and The Crowe Collective.
Interested in hearing what past participants have to say about their workshop experience? Check out my Testimonials page.
Interested in getting in on the creative action? Follow me on Instagram, the best place to learn about the dates and times of upcoming workshops.
Are you part of an organization that would like to add one of these workshops to your offerings? Reach out to me.
Let’s chat!
More Than a MILF: Writing Sex and the Aging Female Body
What do aging women want? A break from monogamy and domesticity? Casual young lovers of all genders? A hotel room of their own? Or something more significant? Indeed, recent literary fiction suggests that the answer lies in a combination of the above – and more.
This course introduces texts starring a variety of unruly literary female protagonists who are honouring their older selves with swagger – at a time when their newly seemingly invisible bodies are sagging in surprising places. How do these works disrupt reductive and often cringey tropes featuring aging women as MILFS? How can we use these texts as springboards to (re)write our own no-longer-young bodies and desires – with a difference?
Participants are invited to get experiential, nonfictional, and playful as they respond to tailored prompts specifically designed to help them create a draft of their own. They are invited to share their work and will receive feedback that will allow them to walk away with an enhanced ability to write insightfully about sex and the aging female body.
Texts that we will explore include: Gu-Byeong-mo’s The Old Woman with a Knife, Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man, Marie Mitsuki Mockett’s The Tree Doctor, Susan Minot’s Don’t be a Stranger and Miranda July’s All Fours.
What About Me? From Memoir to Autofiction
Memoir is often praised as the genre that can best capture and convey the truth of a writer’s life. But this premise and promise can feel faulty and constraining. This course looks to autofiction as an alternative way to tell stories linked to the self. It asks: What is autofiction? How is autofiction different from memoir or creative nonfiction? What personal, political, and literary purposes might it serve?
In order to answer such questions, this course introduces participants to the strengths and limitations found in some key contemporary memoirs, and then it shifts to exploring recent contemporary autofiction. It shows how autofiction allows authors to question the boundary between truth and fiction, construct alter egos, re-imagine life events, reconfigure form – and create the most compelling literary, political, and philosophical chaos.
Participants will be given tips, tricks, and relevant prompts designed to enable them to craft their own autofictional slice of life, which they may share with others in the group. I’ll also provide generous and insightful feedback. Participants will learn how to turn themselves into a main character, introduce other relevant characters, and recreate compelling conflicts and themes. For the final two classes, participants are invited to submit a polished piece of autofiction in advance to the group in order to receive the most extensive commentary possible.
Some of the works we will explore include: Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be, and Fatima Daas’ The Last One.
Isn’t it Ironic? Writing from the Edge of Irony
Irony is in the very air we breathe. It’s in the memes we consume and share, the reels we watch, and the comment sections we love to hate. But what is it really? What can it do, undo, or fail to do? How, and where, can we use irony effectively to make our own writing more powerful?
In this workshop, I suggest that irony’s political and literary promise lies in how it enables writers to remain attuned to nuance – to create in the spirit of contradiction, double-vision, oscillation, and fluctuation. Irony delights in uncanny twists and turns, satire, and serious play. It operates silently in the space between what’s said and what’s meant. With irony as a guide, writers can engage in juggling acts that disrupt clichés and breathe fresh life into viewpoints that may feel old and stale. Irony is, however, unruly: it can misfire and perpetuate the very ideas and situations it’s meant to call into question. Yet, writing with irony is worth the risk.
Come join me to learn more, and most importantly – to write!
Beyond Bitches, Witches and Karens: Aging Women Write Back
Do you remember the last time you were called a bitch? A witch? Or, worse, a Karen?
This workshop explores the ways in which words are used as weapons against women, especially aging women. Although more space is indeed opening up for midlife and older women to be seen and heard, society still dictates that such women be likeable, desirable, and pliable – that they age gracefully or disappear altogether.
This course highlights works by writers such as Toni Morrison, Afia Atakora, and Alice Hoffman to explore how gendered stereotypes and archetypes can be reclaimed and disrupted. Participants are given space and tailored prompts to write their aging body as the main character of their story in ways that are unapologetic, disruptive, and resistant.