Talk * Laugh * Share at Write on Bowen 2011

By Richard Labonté

Shelley Harrison Rae (pictured)Neil McKinnon, Norma Charles, Ainslie Manson and Cynthia Nicolson are all at Write on Bowen this year

If you can talk, you can write. If you can spin life’s whimsical moments into stories that make friends laugh, you might want to incorporate humour into your writing. And if you want to try crafting prose for children or young adults – perhaps the toughest audience of all – you could turn your hand to picture books or YA novels.

Ambitious? Absolutely. But those disparate options for encouraging and engaging the writer within are among the eclectic offerings of Write on Bowen, coming soon for a fourth year – July 8 -10 – to Artisan Square.

Shelley Harrison Rae, author of Life Leaves Stains and an instructor at The Wordlink Lounge on the Sunshine Coast, believes that “when you talk, you don’t stop to choose the perfect word.” Her workshop will encourage want-to-be writers to break through their inhibitions in order to start telling stories.

Neil McKinnon will explore how to transform everyday experiences into comic prose

In his workshop, Neil McKinnon, author of Tuckahoe Slidebottle – droll portraits of the denizens of a small Canadian Prairie town, and a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Humour Award – will explore how to transform everyday life experiences and the world at large into comic prose. Writing what makes people laugh out loud, or even smile quietly, is serious work, but McKinnon aims to put the fun into funny.

Three writers of books for an audience ranging from toddlers to teens will shift the focus from imagining a whole book to creating powerful scenes within a book – the elements of drama that propel a story and hook readers into following the plot and the characters.

Norma Charles is the author of three picture books and 15 novels for young readers, most recently Chasing a Star; Ainslie Manson has 11 titles to her credit: three biographies, three picture books – including Boy in Motion: Rick Hansen’s Story – three history books, and two YA novels, and is completing a companion to Boy in Motion, about wheelchair-bound Hansen’s twenty-fifth anniversary of his inspirational world tour; and Cynthia Nicolson, retired from 20 years of teaching at BICS, has written 16 information books for children, with fiction in her future.

Full festival passes and other ticket options for 16 workshops and for Opening Night readings from Annabel Lyon (The Golden Mean) and Timothy Taylor (The Blue Light Project) are now available on our main website.