Workshop: Finding Your Inspiration and Point of View
With Francine Cunningham
Do you know why you are writing? What is your unique point of view?
In this workshop, author Francine Cunningham will guide you through the essential questions she asks herself before starting any writing project. Through guided writing exercises you will come away from with a fresh poem or start of a story or essay that will have yourself, your story, and your point of view as a writer rooted in the centre of it.
This workshop will help you recognize your inspiration to continue to fuel your writing practice and keep your passion for the craft sustained.
$50 ($45 in a bundle)
Suitable for:
Emerging writers finding their voice and point of view and writers who need a bit of spark to get re-motivated as to why they started writing in the first place.
What to prepare:
You do not need to prepare anything in advance, but please come with a notebook, pen or pencil. Also, please feel free to also have on hand pencil crayons, or markers, or paint—if you wish to add flourish to your poetry or prose that we write during the workshop. Ideally some blank white sheets like copy paper would be good too if you have them on hand, if not regular notebook paper will do.
Francine Cunningham is an award-winning writer, artist and educator who spends her summer days writing on the prairie’s and her winter months teaching in the north. Francine is a member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta but grew up in Calgary, Edmonton, and 100 Mile House, BC. Francine is also Metis, and has settler family roots stretching from as far away as Ireland and Belgium. She currently resides in Alberta but previously spent over a decade calling Vancouver her home.
Her debut book of poems On/Me (Caitlin Press) was nominated for The BC and Yukon Book Prize, The Indigenous Voices Award, and The Vancouver Book Award. Her debut book of short stories God Isn’t Here Today (Invisible Publishing) is out now and is a book of speculative fiction and horror and was longlisted for The inaugural Carol Shield’s Prize for Fiction. Her first children’s book What if bedtime didn’t exist (Annick Press) will be out in 2024. Francine also writes for television with credits including the teen reality show THAT’S AWSM! among others and was a recipient of a Telus StoryHive grant. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have also appeared in The Best Canadian Short Stories, The Best Canadian Non-Fiction, in Grain Magazine as the 2018 Short Prose Award winner, on The Malahat Review’s Far Horizon’s Prose shortlist, and on the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize longlist among others.
You can find out more about her at www.francinecunningham.ca
God Isn’t Here Today
Written by Francine Cunningham
Published by Invisible Publishing
For fans of Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen Russell, the stories in Francine Cunningham’s debut collection God Isn’t Here Today ricochet between form and genre, taking readers on a dark, irreverent, yet poignant journey led by a unique and powerful new voice.
Driven by desperation into moments of transformation, Cunningham’s characters are presented with moments of choice—some for the better and some for the worse. A young man goes to God’s office downtown for advice; a woman discovers she is the last human on Earth; an ice cream vendor is driven insane by his truck’s song; an ageing stripper uses undergarments to enact her escape plan; an incubus tires of his professional grind; and a young woman inherits a power that has survived genocide, but comes with a burden of its own.
Even as they flirt with the fantastic, Cunningham’s stories unfold with the innate elegance of a spring fern, reminding us of the inherent dualities in human nature—and that redemption can arise where we least expect it.