SPRING FEATURE WORKSHOP - Overcoming Our Fears to Write Powerful Stories
May 13, 2023 | 10am-3pm
Treehouse, 4th Floor, cSpace Marda Loop
1721, 29th Ave SW, Calgary
MEMBER PRICE: $180.00 (with member coupon AWCSM25)
NON-MEMBER PRICE: $240.00
Our fears can stop us from finishing a book, or even starting it. We may feel we need to stick to writing only what we know, and write from personal experience, but then worry about what Mom will think. And we so often avoid our protagonist’s conflicts, for the same reasons we avoid our own. The result: passive protagonists and wandering storylines. Author and writing coach Gail Anderson-Dargatz will draw from more than twenty years of experience as a writer, teacher and developmental editor to explore the many ways we avoid conflict in our projects and our writing lives, and offer solutions that will help kickstart your writing and help you develop your project to the fullest.
This event takes place in person at the Alexandra Writers Centre @cSpace Marda Loop.
GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ’s first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the UK’s Betty Trask Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Vancity Book Prize. Her second novel, A Recipe for Bees, was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Spawning Grounds was nominated for the Sunburst Award and the Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award and short-listed for the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Fiction. Her thriller, The Almost Wife was a national bestseller in 2021, and her most recent novel, The Almost Widow, is out in May 2023.
Gail also writes young adult and hi-lo books for the educational market. Her book Iggy’s World was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and shortlisted for the Chocolate Lily Book Awards. The Ride Home was short-listed for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize, as well as the Red Cedar Fiction Award and the Chocolate Lily Book Award.
She taught for nearly a decade in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of British Columbia and now mentors writers online. Gail Anderson-Dargatz lives in the Shuswap region of British Columbia.