WWC2026 - Masterclass - Strategies for Surviving Feedback
Sunday, August 16, 2026 | 3pm-5:45pm
Hyatt Regency Calgary - Bannerman
with Christine Tsai Taylor and Finnian Burnett
NOTE: Have you registered for Festival Pass? You MUST have a pass to enter a masterclass. If you haven't yet, choose the appropriate ticket combo below to purchase a pass with your masterclass.
Writing feedback is hard to come by and can be rated on a scale between encouraging and soul-crushing. Critical feedback, the kind that pushes you to dig deeper into a piece you just poured your heart and soul into, can feel the worst. It can make you question your skills, your purpose, and your relationship with the reader who dared to tell you what they thought. It’s natural for defenses to go up, to assume the reader misunderstands your writerly purpose or fails to appreciate your creative endeavors. But what if you could accept or even appreciate the kind of feedback that makes your stomach turn?
What if you can learn to value the discomfort of receiving notes that leaves you feeling awful? Clarifying the role of feedback in your writing process and a developing a method to ask for and receive notes on your work can help. Preparing yourself for how to use feedback to improve your writing can make you a better writer and preserve a few relationships along the way.
In this seminar, two writers will share strategies for surviving and thriving when feedback hits hard.
Finnian Burnett is a writer whose work explores the intersections of the human body, mental health, the gorgeousness of human complexity, and gender identity. They are a recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant and a finalist in the 2023 CBC nonfiction prize. Finnian is a staunch supporter of emerging writers and encourages all writers to experiment with their writing, to get weird with it, to learn how to use words in a way that showcases their own unique and glorious voice.Finnian’s work appears in Writer’s Digest, Geist, Pulp Literature, CBC books, See You Next Tuesday, and more. Finnian’s novellas-in-flash, THE PRICE OF COOKIES and REDSHIRTS SOMETIMES SURVIVE are available from Off Topic Publishing. Finnian lives in British Columbia and enjoys walking, Star Trek, and cat memes.
Christine Tsai Taylor is a Dutch American Taiwanese writer and storytelling consultant who has called Edmonton home since 2021. After nearly twenty years in Europe, she was thrilled to build a life and find writing community in a country with loads of English language bookshops. She’s embarked on several writerly adventures including pretending to be a writer for a year (it works) and finding a supportive writing community. The good news is, she might have found her voice in 2025. The bad news is, it’s still a whisper. She’s hoping to turn the volume up in 2026 and start collecting enough rejections to merit a nail to stab them on. Awarded a 2024 Individual Exploration & Experimentation Grant from the Edmonton Arts Council, she serves on the Litfest board. Her personal essay about the lessons learned from seeing people in blackface in a Dutch grocery store appeared on HuffPost and her Substack newsletter is Wonderings.
