Autumn Life-Writing Workshops
This autumn, I'm offering a series of four 90-minute online life-writing workshops designed to help you discover stories in the photographs, places, routines and objects of your life.
Each workshop combines a guided activity, time to write, and an opportunity to share what emerges. No writing experience is necessary, and each workshop stands alone—come to one, a few, or all four.
90 minutes | Online via Zoom
Pay what you can. Suggested contribution: $15–$40 CAD per workshop, taxes included. Choose the amount that works for you.
The Geography of Childhood: Mapping Your Childhood Stories
Every childhood has a geography—the rooms, streets, yards, schools, hiding places and neighbourhoods where our early stories took place.
Where did you feel at home? Where weren't you supposed to go? What route did you take to school? Where did you play, hide, wander, visit, or dream? Sometimes following the map of where we lived leads us back to stories we'd forgotten were there.
In this workshop, you'll create a simple map of the places you remember from childhood—not an accurate or artistic map, but a map made from memory. We'll follow what appears, notice what draws your attention, and see where the stories are waiting.
Saturday, October 10 at 12:00 noon ET
Heirlooms and Family Treasures: Writing the Stories Behind the Things We Keep
Some objects stay with us. They are handed down through generations, tucked into drawers, packed carefully through moves, or given a place of honour in our homes. They may be valuable—or worth almost nothing to anyone else.
Why do we keep the things we keep? A grandmother's mixing bowl, an old letter, a piece of jewellery, a recipe written in someone's handwriting, a souvenir from a long-ago trip—ordinary objects can become containers for people, places and moments we don't want to lose.
Bring an object you have kept, and we'll look beyond the thing itself to the world that surrounds it. Who held it before you? Where did it live? What has it witnessed? What memories does it carry? We'll use those details to find the story behind why this particular thing matters enough to keep.
Tuesday, November 10 at 3:00 p.m. ET
Beyond the Frame: Writing from a Photograph
Every photograph holds more than the camera captured.
A photograph freezes a single moment, but our memories extend beyond its edges. We may remember who took the picture, what happened just before or afterward, the room beyond the frame, the people who aren't pictured—or something we understand about that moment now that we couldn't have known then.
Bring an old photograph—of yourself, your family, a place, or an ordinary moment—and we'll use what we can see, what we remember, and even what we don't know as a doorway into story.
Thursday, November 26th at 11:00 a.m. ET
Ordinary Things: Finding the Stories Behind the Routines and Rituals of Family Life
The ordinary things we do again and again have a way of becoming invisible. We sit down to Sunday dinner, take the same summer trip, follow the same bedtime routine, celebrate the same holidays—until we stop noticing the details.
Looking back, those ordinary moments can tell us a great deal about the families we grew up in: who did what, what mattered, what was expected, what was never said aloud, and how it felt to belong.
In this workshop, we'll return to the routines and rituals of family life and look more closely at one of them. Who was there? What always happened? What did the room smell like? What were the rules nobody needed to explain? By reconstructing the ordinary details, we'll see what larger story might have been hiding inside them all along.
Tuesday, December 8th at 6:00 p.m. ET