Shaping a Story

Shaping a Story: In Conversation with Past Danuta Gleed Award Winner and Finalists
Thursday, May 8, 2025
12:00 pm PDT / 1:00 pm MDT, CST / 2:00 pm CDT / 3:00 pm EDT / 4:00 pm ADT / 4:30 pm NDT
60 minutes
Hosted on Zoom
Live captions available 
Registration: $20 / Free for TWUC Members 
REGISTER NOW

Getting from the beginning to the end. What makes a good story and what makes a strong narrative arc? Join last year’s Danuta Gleed Award winner Lisa Alward, and runners-up Paola Ferrante and Rebecca Hirsch Garcia, for a discussion about shaping a story. Moderated by award-winning author Heather O’Neill, this webinar runs 60 minutes including a Q&A period. TWUC members will have access to a recording of the webinar for 30 days. Non-members will only have access to the live event.
 

Lisa Alward’s short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize and the New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award as well as PRISM international’s Jacob Zilber Prize and longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. She was born and grew up in Halifax and worked in literary publishing in Toronto before moving with her family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, where she began writing fiction at fifty. Her debut collection, Cocktail, was published by Biblioasis in September 2023. It received the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, for the best first collection of short stories in English by a Canadian, as well as the New Brunswick 2024 Mrs. Dunster’s Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Photo: Maria Cardoso.
 

Paola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals (Book*hug Press, 2023), was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, and a Silver Medal Winner in Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards. It was published in the UK by Influx Press. Her fiction has been longlisted for the Journey Prize, and her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (Mansfield Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto, with her partner Mat and their son. Photo: Rob Skuja. 
 

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, Ontario. An O. Henry Award winning author, her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Dark, PRISM international, swamp pink, and elsewhere. Her short story collection The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award. Her debut novel, Other Evolutions, is forthcoming from ECW Press in 2025.
 

Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize in two consecutive years, and has won CBC Canada Reads, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today with her daughter. Photo: Julie Artacho.