Yvonne Trainer Workshop This Weekend in Sackville

Award-winning poet, Yvonne Trainer, will be in Sackville this Saturday December 10th to give a writing workshop at the Struts Gallery Artist-Run Centre, 7 Lorne Street, from 1-4 pm.

The poetry workshop will explore six or more aspects of the craft of writing and create rough drafts of six poems that participants can take away and continue to work on. The workshop will include an introductory Q&A and cover topics such as from abstract to concrete, writing from the inside out, finding your voice, forms your teachers never taught you, entering the mysteries of the meta-forest, Ghost poems, and things you always wanted to know about poetry and were afraid to ask.

Registration fees for the workshop are $25 for WFNB members and $30 for non-members. Everyone is welcome. Interested participants should contact Underhill at 536-0461 or email kvu@nb.sympatico.ca or Mary Hutchman at 459-7228 / wfnb@nb.aibn.com.

Yvonne Trainer holds a BA from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, an MA in English with a Creative Writing thesis from the University of New Brunswick, and a PhD (completed October 2004) in 20th Century Literature with a special topics area and thesis in Medicine in Canadian Literature, from the University of Manitoba.

She has published one chapbook and four books of poems. Frontenac House in Calgary, Alberta published the latest collection, Tom Three Persons, in 2002. Yvonne was also the recipient of the Edmonton Arts Trust Fund Award for Writing in 2002. In 2003 she was a guest poet at the Alden Nowlan Literary Festival in Fredericton. Recent publications of several individual poems appear, or will appear, in various literary anthologies such as Writing the Terrain, U of C Press (2005), Listening With the Ear of the Heart, St. Peter’s Press (2004), and A Portrait of [b]ill [b]issett, Nightwoods Edition forthcoming 2006.

Recent interviews, in which Yvonne discusses meetings with poet Alden Nowlan, occur in Patrick Toner’s Alden Nowlan: If I Could Turn and See Myself, Gooselane Editions, and Gregory Cook’s One Heart, One Way: Alden Nowlan: A Writer’s Life, Pottersfield Press. Recent interviews dealing with the making of Tom Three Persons appear in Prairie Journal Literature (Calgary) and Filling Station (U of C). A long interview centering on Yvonne’s writing life, including her early years on the prairie, is available in Rags (The Mud Larks Writing Group) 2005.

Yvonne presently teaches English Literature part-time at the University of Alberta (Augustana campus). She is also researching and creating a pictorial, poetic, and historical long poem sequence on the life of Dr. Brett, an early physician in Alberta, plus writing Ghost poems.