Writing for Change Workshop
Every Saturday, May 22nd to June 12th 2021
2pm EDT (7pm GMT)
There is no more effective way to soften a heart and change a mind than by telling stories based on your own or an inherited experience. Join Darcie Friesen Hossack, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-Shortlisted Author and Managing Editor of Wordcity Monthly, for our Writing for Change workshop.
In Writing for Change, Darcie Friesen Hossack uses a simple but effective journalistic approach to help writers take their lived and generational or cultural experiences and write them into something deeper. Done well, whether through fiction, memoir or narrative poetry, the specific can become universal, leading to stories with the power for change: whether your readers' or your own.
Please note: the class will be run as a hybrid discussion between Facebook and Zoom meetings.
Digging deep.
In the first class, on May 22, Darcie discusses using a journalistic approach of always asking and deepening the questions of Who Where What When and Why to delve into story elements. This week begins with a look at Who (Who are your protagonist and antagonist, and who made them the way they are?) and Where (which, done right, provides all the metaphor a story will ever need).
Thickening the Plot.
On May 29, in the second class, Darcie will dive deeper into the what. Not only is What a function of the plot, but of every good back story. What happened to cause the situation about which you've chosen to write? Meanwhile, deciding When to set a story, and when other elements took place, and how to bend that timeline, are choices that affects every other story element.
What’s your motive?
In week 3, June 5, we will ask the most important question in every kind of inquiry: Why. Without a motive for every action, which leads to every reaction and thereby creates tension, there is no story. And yet, every Why must be carefully controlled to keep the writer from merely dragging emotional baggage across the page.
Less is more.
This last week is dedicated to tightening your craft. With a look at how to review, rewrite, revise and edit, there's also a checklist to help make sure your story is fully fleshed out and ready to be read.
What will I receive from this workshop?
Four weeks of Saturdays, each starting with a video session of not more than 30 minutes. Following the opening session, Darcie and all participants will meet on a private online forum space to engage with questions and comments. Darcie will counsel participants in their story choices and development for at least two hours following each session, with the forum left open throughout the month.
Bonus readings and writing advice by video from other writers including Kurdish-Canadian author Ava Homa (Daughters of Smoke and Fire), Australian-Viennese auathor Sylvia Petter (All the Beautiful Liars), Romanian-New Yorker poet Clara Burghelea, UNESCO-Rila affiliate poet Mbizo Chirasha, and Canadian memoirists Sheila E. Tucker (Rag Dolls and Rage) and Hollay Ghadery (Fuse).
Commentary on up to 1000 words of your own writing for three weeks, along with space to share your works-in-progress with the groups.
Publication on the IHRAF workshop page, with opportunities to submit your completed work to the IHRAF Publishes journal and associated prizes.
Opportunities to be published in WordCity Monthly, a global online journal dedicated to inclusivity and human rights through literary activism, plus a list of other writing opportunities tailor to literary activism, as well as submit to IHRAF Publishes.
The opportunity to join a writing community of people with similar aspirations.