Alumni

Activities

The opportunities available for building community extend beyond your year in The Writer’s Studio. Our program has a solid commitment to supporting alumni to create continuing networking, educational and professional activities.

Ongoing activities available to all alumni include: collectiveX (a web-based networking and communication site for alumni); our monthly TWS Reading Series featuring alumni, current TWS writers, local writers and authors on tour; a tri-annual All TWS News Release of TWS writers’ professional accomplishments (now posted on our TWS website); and a TWS fall writing retreat.

The new position of TWS Adjunct Writer enables alumni to return to The Studio to concentrate on completing a manuscript. Adjuncts have more access to one-on-one consults with their mentor, the mentor’s workshoping group, and TWS courses they have not taken.

Another new TWS position is that of Mentor’s Apprentice. This is a 6-month to a year commitment to train with a mentor and gain teaching experience.

These new positions – Adjunct Writer and Mentor Apprentice – are determined on an application basis.

A third kind of alumni activity is those that are periodic or project-oriented. These include: one-off training workshops (such as chapbook-making); weekend intensives of professional workshops and readings; alumni taking on roles in other projects (Word on the Street, the Memory Project); alumni teaching in TWS-sponsored courses (such as the Carnegie Centre); and alumni working on TWS program tasks such as the recent creation of a book production manual for our anthology emerge, and alumni building our TWS website and making our TWS website video. Finally, our alumni also collaborate on their own professional projects, such as setting up a small press, running their own workshopping groups or organizing their own writing conferences.

Testimonials

Transition

I awake January 5th feeling empty inside. It’s snowing. Wet flakes fall like doilies and settle on dead geraniums left in the outside planter, a smattering of white. With no classes to attend, no writing workshops, I consider what to do on this first post-TWS Saturday. Then I remember.

Commencing the second Friday of the month, I will begin hosting a TWS Reading Series. Talk of initiating writing groups, collectively attending readings and courses, spring to mind. Weekends similar to November’s TWS Exchange with discussion groups, workshops, readings, community, make me hopeful.

Five months later, sun reflects off my kitchen window, showcasing bright purple clematis. French doors are open to the spring breeze, the smell of Espresso in the air.

Not halfway through my post-TWS year, yet so much has happened. The TWS Reading Series continues to attract remarkable work from a wellspring of talent. I have joined two active writing groups and have just completed a five-month Manuscript Intensive under the mentorship of author Shaena Lambert. At work on a compilation of poetry and a novel, I also submit regularly to literary magazines. The TWS Advisory Board keeps me involved in the decision making process for an ever evolving program. Next up, the TWS 2008 Weekend Retreat. Things are taking shape, the possibilities are endless.

Jane Mellor
TWS07
Poetry & Lyric Prose

My involvement with the TWS Alumni Community is primarily as the Community Manager of the online TWS networking site. Our online community, collective-X, helps writers stay in touch with each other, connect with others looking or offering writing work, collaborate, and form new writing groups. The online space also allows us to self-organize events such as the recent TWS Exchange ‘07 Conference and the upcoming TWS Alumni Writer’s Retreat. It is a key communications tool for the Alumni group, and a way I can use my skills to contribute to the growing TWS alumni community.

Aileen Penner
TWS 05

One of the biggest gifts The Writer’s Studio gave me was an introduction to the local literary community and I am continually grateful for that. Not only during my year in the program, but afterward through sponsored events such as the Blenz TWS Reading Series, I’ve met many writers from diverse backgrounds who I now number among my friends. Poets. Fiction writers. Crafters of creative non-fiction. Spoken word artists. Memoirists. Biographers. Playwrights. Genuinely interesting people with a common love for the art of words. When I was a student in the program, Helen Sears, an alumna from 2003, hosted the readings. She was warm and inviting and supportive and helped me learn how to confidently share my words with an audience. She made the experience, which can be rather daunting and sometimes nerve-wracking, enjoyable and fun. When health reasons forced Helen to step down, I was honoured to be asked to host the readings for a year. I tried to continue her tradition of nurturing new writers, and I continued to meet new and fascinating people along the way. For me, The Writer’s Studio was an amazing experience I hope to remain part of for many years to come.

John Mavin
TWS 2006

The For-Public-Consumption Version:

What did I get out of The Writing Studio? It’s hard to pin it down. I don’t know whether I’m a better writer (I hope so, but hey, don’t ask me). Certainly, I think more like a writer. TWS offered me my first opportunity to present my writing to a knowledgeable and critical circle of peers, which was both terrifying and illuminating. Some of my TWS group still meet, years later, to share and critique work. Also, I feel like a writer—partly because of the community that TWS opened up for me. I’ve been published a few times, and rejected a lot more. I used my TWS portfolio to get into the Banff Wired Writing program, which connected me to an even wider circle of writers, and gave me the confidence and encouragement to start on a novel. Which is where I am today—mid-novel, slogging away. And I wouldn’t be here (for better or worse) without TWS.

The Honest Version:

If you’re thinking of TWS, don’t, OK? ‘Cause if you go, you’ll start to think of yourself as a writer, and maybe submit your work to the lit-mags, making the competition tougher for the rest of us, and maybe you’ll even get a few published—or you’ll use your portfolio to get accepted into Sage Hill or Banff, and when I applied I just barely squeaked in—one more strong application and I wouldn’t have made it—and now I’m halfway through a novel and the last thing I need is more people clamouring for attention from the agents and publishers. So my recommendation for aspiring fiction TWS-ers is: don’t. Unless it’s for poetry or non-fiction, in which case: go ahead.

Eric Brown
Fiction 2004

I’ve always thought of writing as a solitary and lonely occupation. In fact, being a social person, I used that preconceived notion as one more excuse not to write.

The Writer Studio – apart from curing me of my writer’s block and boosting my confidence – has given me the invaluable gift of a writing community. As an immigrant, I often felt as if I belonged nowhere, a misfit in two countries I called home. My new writing community became my home. I have found my people, and they are into semi-colons and similes, character development and narrative arcs. They read and comment on each other’s work, and they dig literary events, book launches and public readings.

I’ve chosen to stay involved in TWS after graduation because this community keeps me inspired and motivated. It’s my way of making The Writer’s Studio experience last. Since completing the program, I took part in the production of a TWS promotional video, volunteered at the TWS Exchange, and read at the Blenz and Rhizome reading series. Through these alumni activities I’ve expanded my network of emerging and established writers to include TWS alumni and staff from previous years.

I no longer think of writing as purely solitary. In fact, I doubt I would have made such progress in my writing if it wasn’t for the support and help of my new-found community.

Ayelet Tsabari
TWS07