Telling the Stories of Our Lives
A workshop with Wayne Grady
Pre-registration required
COMING SOON
Early bird rate (until May 17) $30.00 per registration
Regular rate $40.00 per registration
Almonte Readers & Writers is pleased to present the June series of Art of Writing workshops and courses exploring aspects of creative and technical skills development in literary arts, offered as part of the 2025 Lanark Lit Festival of Writing.
Overview
Memoir is a form of Creative Nonfiction. It differs from autobiography by employing writing techniques generally associated with the writing of fiction: effective dialogue, careful scene setting, and especially characterization. We write memoir not simply to give the facts of our lives, but to tell the stories of our lives.
The key to good memoir writing is Character. Memoir writers tend to make two mistakes when writing about real people. One, because we know so much about the people we're writing about, we put in too much detail, much of it irrelevant. Or two, we do the opposite: we neglect to include enough details to make the character come alive on the page. In this workshop, through discussion and writing exercises, we’ll find the delicate balance of details and writing techniques that bring our characters — and their stories – more vividly to life.
What will we do in this workshop?
Participants will engage in a directed discussion about the nature of creative nonfiction as it relates to memoir. The Facilitator will lead this discussion, and will also provide in-class exercises and hand-outs, with the goal of helping the Participants to improve their writing skills in general, and their memoir stories in particular.
Who is this workshop for?
This workshop will be useful for anyone attempting to write a literary memoir – short or long form. The Facilitator will assume a familiarity with the memoir genre and a moderate writing level in the Participants, but even beginning writers will leave the workshop with a sense of what memoir is, and what kinds of elements go into writing a good literary nonfiction story.
About the instructor:
Wayne Grady is the author of 16 books of nonfiction and three novels, and has edited four anthologies of short fiction and eight collections of nonfiction. For 11 years he taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, specializing in Creative Nonfiction, and he has also conducted creative writing workshops at Sage Hill and Kingston WritersFest, as well as while writer-in-residence at Campbell River, BC, and Whitehorse, Yukon Territories. His novel Emancipation Day won the 2013 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and he is the recipient of four Science-in-Society Awards, an Outdoor Book Award, and a Governor General’s Award for Literary Translation. His essays and stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, as well as twice in the annual Best Canadian Essays.
Wayne lives in Kingston, Ontario, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with his wife, Merilyn Simonds.
The 2025 Lanark Lit Festival of Writing is presented by Almonte Readers & Writers thanks to the generous funding support of Lanark County, the Municipality of Mississippi Mills, the Perth & District Community Foundation, and the Elizabeth Kelly Library Foundation, with community partnership from the Mississippi Mills Public Library, the Perth & District Public Library, Mill Street Books, and the Almonte Writers Guild
