Put Personality in Your Writing: A Workshop with Lawrence Hill

Friday, September 14, 2012 - 4:00pm

Wintergreen Studios
9780 Canoe Lake Road
Township of South Frontenac, ON
K0K 3N0

Spend a unique and nourishing long weekend taking part in a creative writing workshop led by writer Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes, the winning selection for CBC Radio’s Canada Reads in 2009.

It is not necessary for you to have written a great deal before the workshop, but you should be prepared to write, to interact with the other participants and to be open to learning more about writing. If you have a literary project on the go, or even if you have an idea about something you would like to write, so much the better.

The workshop will include explicit instruction on various techniques, encouraging participants to make good use of voice and point of view in their writing. Attention will also be paid to plot, dialogue, narrative description and how to bring your writing to market. Regardless of whether you are interesting in writing a novel, short stories, or non-fiction, this workshop is for you!

The workshop will begin with dinner on Friday September 14, when Lawrence Hill will meet with the entire group and invite participants to speak about their own expectations for the workshop. At that time, he will draw up a schedule for meeting participants individually over the weekend. If you bring to the workshop a sample of creative writing (up to ten double-spaced pages), as well as a short description of your project and your own writing background and future creative plans (no more than one page), Lawrence will read it before he meets with you individually. He will also read and offer constructive comments on new writing that emerges during the workshop. On Monday, which is the final morning of the workshop, participants will be invited (but not required) to share their creative writing with the group in a supportive, respectful environment designed to encourage the continued act of writing.

About the Instructor

Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants — a black father and a white mother — who came to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C. On his father’s side, Hill’s grandfather and great grandfather were university-educated, ordained ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His mother came from a Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois, graduated from Oberlin College and went on to become a civil rights activist in D.C. The story of how they met, married, left the United States and raised a family in Toronto is described in Hill’s bestselling memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (HarperCollins Canada, 2001). Growing up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the sixties, Hill was greatly influenced by his parents’ work in the human rights movement. Much of Hill’s writing touches on issues of identity and belonging.

Lawrence Hill’s third novel was published as The Book of Negroes in Canada and the UK, and as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand. It won the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award. The book was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award and longlisted for both the Giller Prize and the IMPAC Award.

Tuition: $395. HST extra.

Accommodation and meals for the duration of the workshop (three nights and nine meals): $295 (tenting p.p.), $375 (bunks p.p.), $425 (shared rooms or cabins, p.p.), $495 (double bed, single occupancy), $625 (double bed, shared). For those staying off-site, facilities and meals are an additional $250. Out of town participants wishing to arrive Thursday, September 13 (the night before the workshop begins) should add $95 for the extra night, dinner, and breakfast. HST extra.

Workshop registration closes August 31, 2012.

For more information and to register, please visit the Wintergreen Studios website.