Peter and Meredith Quartermain Writing Workshop
February 17, 2018 @ 11:30 am - 5:00 pm MST
Writing Insurgent Biotext/Memoir: A Workshop
Lunch at 12:30pm
Workshop 2pm – 6pm.
Participants: 12
Writing background: you do not need any prior experience writing memoir, nor do you need to have published anything, but it’s a good idea to have written some kind of text.
Application Process: If you’d like to join the workshop, please send a brief description of your writing background and interests, and a two-page sample of your writing to tiahouse@ucalgary.ca by February 5th noon.
The workshop will explore ways to mine personal experience and create lively, vivid stories. It will also explore how such stories may resist or undermine standard cultural narratives without resorting to expository language. Participants can expect mainly hands-on activities: they will write and read aloud several narratives of their own life experiences. They will hear feedback from Peter and Meredith and other participants, and have an opportunity to discuss editing techniques. Free of charge.
Meredith Quartermain is the author of seven books of poetry and fiction, including Vancouver Walking (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize); Recipes from the Red Planet (finalist for a BC Fiction award); Nightmarker (finalist for a Vancouver Book Award); and most recently I, Bartleby: stories and U Girl: a novel (biofiction based on her 1970s university years). She was 2012 Writer in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library, and from 2014 to 2016, she served as Poetry Mentor in the SFU Writer’s Studio program.
Peter Quartermain is the author of two books of critical essays (Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde; and Disjunctive Poetics) and the editor of several books of poetry and essays, most notably The Collected Early and The Collected Late Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan. Quartermain has spent the last five years completing his memoir, Growing Dumb: My English Education. Parts of it have appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review, The Capilano Review and other publications, and he has shared some of it with audiences in Vancouver, London and New York. For 30 years he taught poetry and poetics at UBC. As 2003 Writer in Residence at Capilano University, he gave the Koerner Lecture on life-writing.
