workshops ~ in person
I facilitate in-person writing workshops in Almonte, Ontario. I have designed the workshops for anyone, whether they consider themselves a writer or not. If you would like to know more, please sign up for my newsletter or send me a message.
Upcoming workshops
My body, the earth
Dates: October 6, 13, 20, 27; November 3, 10, 2026
Time: 6pm – 8pm each day
What is this writing workshop about?
Stories are about relationships – the connections and interactions we have with ourselves, other people, places, animals, trees, plants – everything we choose to write about. Both stories and relationships matter for how we feel and engage in the world. Writing has the ability to transform our stories and, in turn, how we are in the world. This is for those who have a desire to seek stories of kinship with and reverence for the land. Perhaps you want to write about your favourite tree that gives you solace, the water that knows you best, the shoreline you have witnessed change over time, and of course how your body is entangled in it all. Together, we will study the craft of writing, hone the tools to write our stories, and play with writing and stories in a way that is delightful and nourishing.
What will we do in the series?
Read and discuss the tools used and effectiveness of 1-2 short examples of writing per week;
Generate six new pieces of writing (approx. 500 words each) that you can keep in a short form or grow into something longer;
Share two new pieces of writing produced for the workshop with group;
Receive supportive group feedback on all submitted pieces of writing;
Receive supportive annotated feedback from the facilitator on the two shared pieces;
Ease any pressure you have to ‘produce’, but also track the stories that have been nudging you to be written;
(Re)Discover your delight in writing!
Who is this series for?
If you have ever wondered what you might ask a monarch butterfly or how to write like water, this workshop is for you. These exercises can be done for those writing non-fiction or fiction. This series is for those who seek to publish and those who seek to write for the sake of writing.
Cost: $280
Location: Almonte (address to be shared upon registration)
PAST WORKSHOPS
PLAYING WITH FORM II* - a 6-week Writing Workshop
What is this writing series about?
How we tell a story is as important as what we tell in a story. This workshop guides beginning through seasoned writers to play with the ‘containers’ of their stories and generate new approaches for the stories they need to tell.
Playing with the structures of our stories can often lead us to frame stories we previously deemed ‘undeserving’ of telling and give containers to stories we did not yet know needed to be told. This workshop will help writers refine the tools needed to open doorways for their stories and find new shapes in which to their stories.
Beginning on Tuesday, April7th, I will be starting a 6-week writing workshop called Playing with Form II*. This series is for any level of writer. We will be reading examples of published writing as well as creating new work. What I love about studying structure is that, as writers, it gives us or reminds us of different ways of approaching our stories. Finding new ways to tell stories and surprising ourselves with our writing is where the delight lives.
* If you have taken a Playing with Form workshop in the past, these are all new prompts and readings.
For the Love of Lists - a 6-week Writing Workshop
What is this writing series about?
A list can be more than something we take to the grocery store or a tool we use to prioritize our day. In creative writing, lists can do much heavy lifting, giving order to chaos, condensing and prioritizing large swaths of information, aligning our purpose, giving boundaries to what we want to share with our readers, providing a starting point, and making us feel a sense of accomplishment. Using list-structures can also make writing a novel-length project or a chapter or a poem more accessible. The simple structure of a list does not lessen the depth of a story, but can often enhance it. Here is one of my favorite list-structured books: I Am, I am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell; and poems: The Soils I Have Eaten by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Things you Didn't Put on Your Resume by Joyce Sutphen.
Sometimes the tool of using a list in creative writing can be overt. Other times, it is embedded as a story within a story. A list can also be ninja-like: readers may not always pick up on the fact that they are reading a list. A list structure is one of the containers that holds space for a good story and sometimes, as a writer, a container is all we need to know is how to begin.