Events & Workshops

Note: A captioned video will be uploaded to YouTube following the event.

This event will be recorded and made available on the SWG YouTube channel following the event: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRAIIcrpQW0NcY6ZM0GGSzw

To register, please click https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_At6gZ6wnTZCDwSxHBeUIZA

First Draft: Conversations on Writing is an online talk series that dives into themes that affect our writing lives. Writing helps us to understand things and to communicate these findings to our audience, even if our audience is ourselves. Sometimes we are driven by these themes, other times they’re the things that hold us back – what we learn through the process can be revolutionary. The quest to be understood unifies all writers.

This event features a 15-minute talk presented by Arthur Slade around the theme of grit. Following the talk is an interview conversation to dig deeper into the theme, hosted and moderated by Brenda Niskala.

Participants are welcome to submit questions in advance of the event to swgevents@skwriter.com.

Inner Grit: Adapting to the changes this writing life throws at you

Writers, like octopi, must learn to adapt to the world around them. That includes adapting to the suggestions an editor gives you about your perfect prose or poetry. Or adapting to the rapid changes in society and the even more rapid changes in the publishing world. Everything seems to be moving at light speed. How do we learn to move at the same speed? Or how do we slow it all down so it makes sense? Arthur Slade will delve into a few of the ways in which an author can adapt and thrive.

Presenter

Arthur Slade was raised on a ranch in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. He is the author of twenty-nine novels for young readers including The Hunchback Assignments, which won the prestigious TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and Dust, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. He lives in Saskatoon. 

Host and Interviewer

Brenda Niskala grew up in the Coteau Hills. She worked for Saskatchewan publishers for 27 years. She has also been a labour rep, a crisis counsellor, a lawyer, a writing instructor, and a writer in residence. Her recent books include How to Be a River (Wild Sage Press, poetry), Of All the Ways to Die (Quattro, novella), and For the Love of Strangers (Coteau Books, linked short stories). In progress is a historical adventure that takes place in northern Europe in 1065.  An excerpt from the novel appears in Wanderlust (Thistledown Press, anthology). 

Brenda served on the first board of the Saskatchewan Book Awards, the first board of Sage Hill Writing, the first board of Access Copyright (CanCopy), and on the boards of the Saskatchewan Arts Alliance, the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, and the League of Canadian Poets, the Cathedral Village Arts Festival, and the Regina Arts Commission, among many others. This service along with the writers groups she has been involved with over the years in Saskatoon, North Battleford, Prince Albert, La Ronge, and Regina, have shaped her as a writer and as a person. 

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