Starting in March, we’ll be hosting weekly writing sessions at the McConnell Library. Sessions will be on Tuesday evenings, 6-9 PM and are free to middle and high school students. You don’t need to register, and drop ins are welcome (but do check the website/social media to make sure we are on – we’ll post if there are cancellations).
So what happens in these sessions? We’ll start off with a writing exercise, introducing techniques like freewriting and guided writing and exploring set topics. Then we’ll take some time to work on our own projects, whether it’s something inspired by the exercise or something you’ve been working on long term. During this time, you can talk through your writing with one of the facilitators or just work on your own. At the end of the session, we’ll come back together to talk about our work and share short excerpts if we want.
Once we know who is coming to the sessions, we can play around with the format based on people’s interests. We could do more workshopping of specific pieces, for example, or invite local editors and published authors in for a conversation.
We plan to have the sessions go until sometime in June, as long as we have people attending. Then, in June, we’ll host a coffee house where you can share some of your work. We can also talk about publishing work online or in the local newspaper, depending on what each writer is working on and wants to see done with it.
A couple other notes:
- If you poke around this website, you’ll see that the iCreate Pilot Project is focused on “slow violence,” which means that we’re interested in how what happens in the environment in the long term affects how we live and our quality of life. You’ll see these ideas come up in some of the set topics during the writing exercises, but you aren’t limited to writing about them.
- Because the funding for these sessions comes from a research project, we’ll ask everyone who comes to the sessions to read and sign a consent form. This form lets you know what we get out of holding the sessions, so you can choose whether or not you want to take part. The gist of the consent form is that we get to talk and write about what you think about Cape Breton and the issues that are important to you growing up here, but that you can also ask us not to write or talk about you or your ideas.