Writersfest 2019

Home again, home again, hot diggity dog, as my daughter used to say.

If you’re a writer, or have writing aspirations, and you live within travel distance of Kingston, Ontario, I strongly urge you to start saving now to attend the Kingston Writersfest in 2020.

There were two parts to the festival: onstage events such as literary talks, workshops, readings, literary dinners, and lectures; and a writing retreat filled with master classes. I took part in a two-day package which included an awesome room in the Residence Inn by Marriott, and six master classes.

The classes were two and a half hours each (with a break part way through). The first one was “Choosing Your Words,” run by poet Lorna Crozier. She talked about word origins and the difference between Latin based words and Anglo Saxon based words, and the appropriate uses of each. We heard about verbals versus verbs and how they applied to both poetry and prose.

The next class was “The Decisive Moment” by Voaden prize winner Damian Tarnopolsky. Using Shakespeare’s Richard III as an example, we discussed pivotal changes in character and why they’re important. We dissected Act I, Scene ii to discuss event, structure, pulse, and outcome. Then we applied what we learned to an exercise in improv.

The final class of the day was “Writing Character and Voice,” offered by Erika Behrisch Elce. We learned what exactly voice is and the little things that bring a character to life, how dialogue is not a character’s voice, but reveals a character’s voice.

Whew! What a long day!

The next day started with “To Be Here: The Writing Place” offered by poet and creative writing teacher Tanis MacDonald. I have to admit, of all of the classes it was the one that least interested me when I read about it, but it turned out to be my favourite. I think we did more writing – creative, not just note-taking – in this class, and although I came away with a poem I’m pretty happy with, much of what we learned can be applied to prose as well.

After this came “Beyond the First Draft: Polishing Your Work,” which was mostly a lecture by Rabindranath Maharaj. A lot of what he talked about was information I already knew, but there was enough new information to keep me happy. I couldn’t help thinking how useful a writing friend of mine would find this class, and just before the class ended I looked across the room and there she was, sitting at another table.

She was in the area for family reasons, and escaped just long enough to take in this one class. Talk about a coincidence! She had to rush back to her family, but we made a coffee date for when we got back home so we could talk some more about the class.

I was pretty much done for the day at this point and I chose to skip the last class, which was “Yoga and the Art of Relaxed Writing.” Instead I wandered around the city, stumbled across an outdoor fleamarket where I snapped up a couple of amazing finds, got myself a coffee and the most wonderful almond croissant ever, and took them down to a little park near the water. I tell you, I found that far more relaxing than any yoga would have been.

So yeah, I’ll definitely be going back next year. But next time I’m going for the whole thing.

Prompt of the Week

Once again instead of picking a prompt to work on this week, I’m going to list the generators and let you pick your own. I’m not sure if I’ll get to a prompt this week myself, but hopefully I still post something on Saturday. Maybe the poem I wrote at the retreat. :-)

The Story Shack
The Plot Generator
Writing Exercises and Prompts
Springhole
Seventh Sanctum
RanGen