Monique Gray Smith

About

MONIQUE GRAY SMITH is a mixed heritage woman of Cree, Lakota, and Scottish descent, and a proud Mom of fifteen year old twins. She is an award-winning, best-selling author and sought after consultant. Monique’s first published novel, Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resilience won the 2014 Burt Award for First Nation, Métis and Inuit Literature. She has also published Lucy and Lola, Speaking our Truth, You Hold me Up, and ​Till and the Crazy Eights. 

workshop

Discovering the Stories Within Us:
​Everyone has a story – this is a dynamic workshop to get your creative juices flowing and a way for self-exploration and discovery. This storytelling/writing workshop will begin with ceremony; an integral aspect of honouring and being grateful for the stories that are within us and the ones that will be revealed. Monique will share her journey of how she captures ideas and turns them into stories; including a few readings from her books. We will then move into working with various prompts that can start the writing to flow. There will be time spent focusing on character creation, environment description and effective use of dialogue. The activities are designed to foster creative expression and a sense pride and confidence in writing.

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Kevin Chong

about

KEVIN CHONG is the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novel The Plague. Those titles have been named books of the year by Globe and Mail, National Post, and Amazon.ca, listed for a CBC prize, a BC Book Prize, and a National Magazine Award, optioned for film and TV, and published in he US, Europe, and Australia. His creative nonfiction and journalism have recently appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Rumpus, and the South China Morning Post. He lives in Vancouver with his family and teaches at UBC and the Writers Studio at Simon Fraser University.

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Bruce Chatwin Didn’t Do This: An introduction to travel writing… Junkets, freebies and listicles.
In this two-hour talk, Kevin will explain how he has gotten paid to travel around the world. We will talk about how to get on press trips, different types of travel writing, and how to pitch and write stories.

Yasuko Thanh

about

YASUKO THANH is the author of the recently published memoir Mistakes to Run With (2019). Also a novelist and short story writer, Yasuko previously earned her living as a busker, an opium dealer, a cleaner of goat pens, a Bed & Breakfast operator, housekeeper, and panhandler. She has lived in Canada, Mexico, Germany, Honduras. Thanh completed a Bachelor of Arts as well as a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria. She screams in the punk band 12 Gauge Facial, and lives with her husband, Hank Angel, and her two children on Vancouver Island, BC.

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I Was Here: The Memoir and the Personal Essay
In this workshop, we’ll learn the process of writing from life, including what questions to ask ourselves to best tap into the drama of our lives. Ordinary experiences can be shaped into work with universal meaning, whether writing for ourselves, for family, or with an eye toward publication. To write memoir or personal essay is to welcome and unshackle the storyteller within, giving voice to the human desire inside us to exclaim, I was here! 

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Sheena Kamal

about

​SHEENA KAMAL'S writing has been featured in The Guardian, Bustle, The Irish Times, Writer's Digest and Entertainment Weekly. Her bestselling debut novel The Lost Ones won her a 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, a Strand Magazine Critics Award and Macavity Award for Best First Novel. The sequel It All Falls Down is now available and has been called “a stunning, emotionally resonant thriller” in its Kirkus starred review. Her next thriller in the Nora Watts crime series, No Going Back, and her first YA novel, Fight Like A Girl, will both drop in 2020. She holds an HBA in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness.

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How to find your voice as a writer:
This practical workshop, led by bestselling and award-winning thriller author Sheena Kamal, will teach you how to discover your own unique writing voice and provide examples of methods to sustain it throughout a project. It will help you discover what you, unique soul that you are, bring to the page—and how to fall in love with your own words. (Crazy, right?!) 

Grant Lawrence

about

GRANT LAWRENCE is the author of three best-selling books: Adventures in Solitude (2010), The Lonely End of the Rink (2013), and Dirty Windshields (2017). Grant Lawrence is the only author in the history of the BC Book Prizes to win the Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice twice. In 2014, Lawrence won a Canadian Screen Award for hosting the CBC Beetle Roadtrip. At the CBC, Lawrence is known mostly for his work with the ground-breaking Radio 3, having hosted the first-ever original CBC podcast which championed Canadian independent music from 2005-2017. He is also a weekly columnist for the Vancouver Courier and Vancouver Is Awesome, the lead singer of the Smugglers since 1988, and the goalie for the Vancouver Flying Vees beer league hockey team. Grant Lawrence is married to musician Jill Barber and they live in Vancouver, BC, with their two children.

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The Story: Tips, tricks, and trade secrets on creating the best story possible 
Join master raconteur Grant Lawrence for this lively, positive, and very useful writers workshop that will help you craft your best story possible, whether it be fiction or non-fiction. Grant Lawrence is an award-winning storyteller on various different mediums: radio, podcasts, television, live presentations, and in his series of creative non-fiction memoirs. In this not-to-be-missed session, Grant will guide you through many of his tried and true practices that will help you create, edit, organize, and ultimately deliver a story that your readers will remember, because great stories are always retold.

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Thompson-Nicola Regional Library Writer in Residence

about

The Thompson-Nicola Regional Library is in the process of selecting their first Writer in Residence! We are excited to have them be our 6th and final author at this year's festival.

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Coming soon!