Born in the UK and raised in northern British Columbia, Patricia Robertson has lived in Spain, London, Yukon, and elsewhere. Her third fiction collection, Hour of the Crab, was named co-winner of the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction at the 2022 Manitoba Book Awards. Her first collection, City of Orphans, was shortlisted for B.C.’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her fiction and essays have been nominated for the CBC Literary Awards, the Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, and three National Magazine Awards, and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. In 2018 she was the winner of the International Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in Poetry (UK). She has served as writer-in-residence at libraries and universities across Canada, and currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg.
A variety of topics offered. One example is:
“STORYING UP”: WHY WE NEED STORIES
We tell stories all the time, to ourselves and each other, in order to make sense of our lives and the world. It is stories, more than language, tools, or intellect, that make us human. But at the same time we are dismissive of our imaginative powers. “It’s just a story,” we say. We have yet to fully appreciate that the stories we tell ourselves matter, profoundly. The Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea says, “I came to believe ... that the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing, and that thing was: story.”
A variety of topics offered. One example is:
Sentence By Sentence: The Journey of the Story
___________________________________________________
It’s a misnomer to describe writing as “discovering what you want to say.” The fact is that you don’t know what you want to say in advance of the journey. You’re taking a leap into the unknown. All you know is what to take with you—your laptop, a cup of coffee, and your imagination. Believe it or not, whole novels have been written using this method. As the American novelist E.L. Doctorow said, "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
Join Patricia Robertson, author of three critically acclaimed short story collections, for a writing workshop in which you'll start a story with a writing prompt and learn strategies for how to keep going.
Variety of topics offered. Usually a discussion of fiction and my own approach followed by a short reading and a short writing exercise for students.
