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To register for this online event, please visit https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hvROKo1gSu-ZKSdrfj3GIA
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 Elizabeth Haynes. Following the talk is an interview conversation with Margaret Macpherson to dig deeper into the event theme.
Participants are welcome to submit questions in advance of the event to swgevents@skwriter.com.
Writing Travel Memoir
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed.” Pico Iyer
Elizabeth will discuss the elements of travel stories including character, description, theme, voice, mood, and structure. She will provide examples from contemporary literary travel writing. Margaret Macpherson, author of Tracking the Caribou Queen: Memoir of a Settler Girlhood will interview Elizabeth and host a question-and-answer session with the audience.
Presenter
Elizabeth Haynes’ writing has appeared magazines and anthologies, most recently You Look Good for your Age (University of Alberta Press). Her short fiction collection, Speak Mandarin not Dialect (Thistledown Press) was shortlisted for an Alberta Book Award finalist. Her short stories have won the Western Magazine Award for fiction and the American Heart Award for fiction. Elizabeth’s first novel The Errant Husband (Radiant Press) was published in 2021. Elizabeth’s travel memoir, Food for the Journey: a life in travel, is forthcoming from Thistledown Press in 2025. She was the 2023 Writer in Residence at the Calgary Public Library.
Host
Margaret Macpherson is a heart-centred Canadian author from the Northwest Territories, living in Eastern Ontario with strong ties to both Western and Maritime Canada. She has published in multiple genres, and her last book Tracking the Caribou Queen: Memoir of a Settler Girlhood (Newest Press, 2022) garnered both a nomination for Trade Non-fiction book of the Year from Alberta Book Publishers Association and a regional gold Independent Publisher Award for Best Trade Non-fiction title in Western Canada.
Following an English degree from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, and a stint in journalism both at home and abroad, Margaret earned a Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing) from UBC and went on to write and publish three works of general non-fiction as well a biography, Nellie McClung: Voice for the Voiceless (XYZ pub 2004) which won the Canadian Authors Association (CAA) Exporting Alberta Award.
Her first works of literary fiction, a collection of short stories Perilous Departures (Signature Editions, 2004), and a debut novel, Released (Signature Editions, 2007), were both shortlisted for Manitoba Book Awards and the National Re-Lit Prize. Margaret’s second novel Body Trade (Signature Editions, 2011) won the DeBeers Northword Prize in 2012. Macpherson’s ninth book is a collection of interconnecting short stories entitled Tilting Towards Joy.
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