Writing Personal Stories & Other Nonfiction offered Wednesdays online and Thursdays in person in Burlington, September – October

Writing Personal Stories & Other Nonfiction

Offered at two times:

Online: Wednesday evenings 6:30 – 8:30
September 27 – November 29, 2023 {or to Dec 6 if it fills up} No class Oct 18

And

In-person: Thursday evenings 7:00 – 9:00
Sept 28 – Nov 23 {or to Nov 30 if it fills up} No class Oct 19.
Burlington Anglican Lutheran Church, 3455 Lakeshore Rd, Burlington, Ontario (Map here)

If you want to write any kind of true story, this course is for you. Personal stories will be front and centre – we’ll look at memoirs, travel writing, personal essays, family history – but we’ll also look at writing feature articles, creative nonficti0n and other more informational writing. 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.

For each session, we’ll also have two published authors as a guest speakers:

For both the Wednesday and Thursday sessions of this course, one of our guest speakers 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.  

Jennifer has also written five articles for Canadian Yachting magazine and has been published numerous times on Quick Brown Fox. For more on Green Ghost, Blue Ocean visit the distributor, Nimbus Publishing, here, to read one of Jennifer’s articles, see here, and visit her website  here.

For the online, Wednesday evening session, we’ll also have Wendy Kitts, who lives near Moncton, New Brunswick. Wendy has been a freelance writer since 2000, and has written over 200 articles for local, national, and international publications such as Reader’s Digest, the Los Angeles Times, and the Globe & Mail. 

She was a regular contributor of children’s book reviews to the Globe & Mail, Canadian Children's Book News, Atlantic Books Today and the New Brunswick Reader (Telegraph Journal) where she wrote a weekly column for five years.

Wendy is also the author of ten nonfiction books. She wrote nine for the US Library & Education market for grades two through twelve, and one trade book, Sable Island: The Wandering Sandbar (Nimbus, 2011 – see here) for 7-12 year-olds. Sable Island was nominated for several readers’ choice awards including the Silver Birch and made two annual lists: Top Five New Brunswick Books by CBC-Radio and Top 100 Gift Books by the Globe & Mail. At the workshop, Wendy will talk about how she broke into writing at the age of 42 with no prior background in writing and how she built a career as a fulltime writer including writing (and pitching) personal essays, feature stories, and nonfiction books.

For the in-person session on Thursday evenings in Burlington, we’ll have Kira Vermond, an award-winning writer with over 2,000 articles to her name. She has been a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, CBC and Today's Parent. 

Kira is the author of seven nonfiction books for young readers, including: Trending: How and Why Stuff Gets Popular, a book that digs into the psychology and fallout of fads and that makes kids think. At the class, Kira will talk about the art of writing and pitching feature stories and nonfiction books. {Yes, nonfiction for kids and grownups goes through much the same process.} 

Visit Kira’s website for her kids’ books here, her website for her journalism and copywriting here, and see links to many of her articles {for grown-ups} here.

Fee: $220.35 plus 13% hst = $259

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

See all of Brian’s upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and weekend retreats here.