If you'd like to develop your writing skills, please join the "In Search Of The Lost Places" writing workshops offered by our Fall 2018 Writer-in-Residence, TRISTAN HUGHES.
WHEN: Every Wednesday
2:30-4pm
September 26 to October 31, 2018
WHERE: CCWOC Creative Communications Studio
Room 390A University College
220 Dysart Road
U of M Fort Garry Campus
In Search Of The Lost Places
‘… for most novelists the art of writing might be defined as the use to which we put our homesickness. The instinct to memorialise one’s region, one’s family, one’s past is so strong that without it many writers would be rendered paralyzed and mute.’
Joyce Carol Oates
This workshop will explore the different ways we can discover and use the stories, histories and places that have shaped us to inspire our fiction (as well as how fiction can help us to give a voice and shape to those stories, histories and places). The instinct to memorialise, as Joyce Carol Oates suggests, is an integral part of the creative act and process - a set of footsteps for our imaginations to follow. Our perception of the past is often profoundly rooted in a sense of place – or a sense of lost or half-forgotten places - and writers will be encouraged to explore the potential of imaginatively recovering and recreating them. The workshops will draw on our own memories of these lost places, as well as the wider history of the regions, landscapes and communities of which they are a part. Writers will be asked to experiment with using various historical sources for their writing - family and oral history, historical documents and accounts, anecdotes and objects – in order to create both historical fictions and fictions based on their own histories.
Week 1 - Sep 26: Following Footsteps.
Week 2 - Oct 3: Our Own Little Postage Stamps.
Week 3 - Oct 10: Tirwedd and Tirlun: the land and the pictures of the land.
Week 4 - Oct 17: Letting The Ghosts Speak.
Week 5 - Oct 24: Paper Pasts.
Week 6 - Oct 31: Artefacts.