Online Writing Personal Stories course now offered at 2 times: Thursday afternoons, April 15 – June 24, and Tuesday afternoons, April 13– June

Writing Personal Stories

9 weeks of sharing and writing

Thursday afternoons, 1 – 3 p.m.
April 15 – June 24, 2021 {no class June 10}

Tuesday afternoons, 1 – 3 p.m.
April 13 – June 15, 2021

Offered online and accessible wherever there's Internet

If you've ever considered writing your personal stories, this course is for you. We’ll look at memoirs, travel writing, personal essays, family history ~ personal stories of all kinds. Plus, of course, we’ll work on creativity and writing technique and have fun doing it. 

Whether you want to write a book or just get your thoughts down on paper, this weekly course will get you going. We'll reveal the tricks and conventions of telling true stories, and we’ll show you how to use the techniques of the novel to recount actual events. Weekly writing exercises and friendly feedback from the instructor will help you move forward on this writing adventure. Whether you want to write for your family and friends or for a wider public, don't miss this course.

We’ll have a guest speaker for both classes. For the Tuesday afternoon session, our guest will be Sue Williams. Sue lives in Guelph Ontario with her husband. She worked as an occupational therapist and never dreamt of being a writer. But, after a life altering experience, she found herself with a story she felt needed telling and set about learning how to tell it.

The first of many creative writing courses Sue took was Brian Henry’s ‘Writing Personal Stories’. It was exactly what she needed, and she has never looked back.

Sue’s memoir, Ready to Come About (Dundurn Press, 2019) is endorsed by Miriam Toews, New York Times Best-Selling author of Women Talking, and Cate Cochran, CBC Radio producer of The Sunday Edition. It has been promoted by The Globe and Mail, Canadian Yachting, Good Old Boat, and her professional magazine, Occupational Therapy Now. And it has been a staff pick at many independent bookstores.

Sue is now working on a novel set in the largely invisible world of home care. You can read more about Ready to Come About at Dundurn Press here. 

For the Thursday afternoon session, our guest will be  Jennifer M. Smith, author of Green Ghost, Blue Ocean. This story of Jennifer’s 40,000-mile nautical adventure won the 2019 Pottersfield Prize for nonfiction and was published by Pottersfield Press in 2020. 

Jenifer has also been published numerous times on Quick Brown Fox. For more on Green Ghost, Blue Ocean visit the distributor, Nimbus Pulishing, here, and visit Jennifer’s website   here.

Note: This class will be held live via Zoom. To participate, you'll need Internet access and a microphone and a camera {i.e., a webcam} on your computer, tablet or smart phone.

Fee:  $176.11 plus 13% hst = $199

To reserve your spot, email: brianhenry@sympatico.ca

Instructor Brian Henry has been a book editor and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He publishes Quick Brown Fox, Canada's most popular blog for writers, teaches creative writing at Ryerson University and has led workshops everywhere from Boston to Buffalo and from Sarnia to Saint John. But his proudest boast is that he’s has helped many of his students get published. 

Read reviews of Brian's various courses and workshops here (and scroll down).

See Brian’s complete current schedule here, including online and in-person writing workshops, weekly writing classes, and weekend retreats in Algonquin Park, Alliston, Bolton, Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Caledon, Collingwood, Georgetown, Georgina, Guelph, Hamilton, Jackson’s Point, Kingston, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Midland, Mississauga, Oakville, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, Southampton, Sudbury, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock, Halton, Muskoka, Peel, Simcoe, York Region, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.