Fall Fair Coming Up in Saint John

WFNB Fall Fair
Saint John Arts Centre
20 Hazen Ave
Saturday November 18th

12:30-2PM Alistair MacLeod, Transforming Personal Experience
2- 2:30PM Coffee & refreshments
2:30-4:30PM Jeanette Lynes, The Poem as Argument
2:30- 4:30PM Decima Mitchell, The Play’s the Thing: An Introduction to the Form


Registration fee $25 for members, $30 for non-members.

Author Alistair MacLeod’s workshop is “Transforming Personal Experience, how the writer uses various techniques to transform personal experience into fiction.” MacLeod spends his summers writing in a clifftop cabin in Inverness County, Cape Breton, where he was raised.
In the spring of 2000, MacLeod retired from the University of Windsor, where he was a professor of English.
He published two collections of short stories: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). In 1999, MacLeod’s first novel, No Great Mischief, was published to great critical acclaim, winning numerous awards, most notably, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

In the workshop “The Poem as Argument,” Jeanette Lynes will focus on the function of argument and statement in poetry. Participants will consider, for example, how the ‘argument’ of a poem can provide its structure, and how statement, woven through the poem in concert with imagery, can sharpen the speaker’s stance towards his or her material.
After considering sample poems and discussing aspects of rhetoricity and writing poetry, hands-on exercises intended to sharpen awareness of argument and tone will be given. Some source material will be provided.
Lynes is the author of three collections of poetry. Her most recent, Left Fields, was short-listed for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her fourth book of poetry is forthcoming from Wolsak and Wynn in 2008. She is an Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

In “The Play’s the Thing: an introduction to the form” Decima Mitchell uses a hands-on approach. Through a series of exercises, Mitchell will guide participants through characters, description, action, conflict, exposition and all the parts of a successful play.
Mitchell has been writing plays since 1992. Subjects have included conjoined twins, the trials of family members of a gifted child, a convenience store hold up, and an alien visitor. This past summer, she was a winner in the NotaBle Acts One Act Playwriting Contest with What You Can Do, which revisited a NB murder trial of the 1930’s.
Most recently, she has collaborated with a musical composer to produce Shards, a one act Operetta, focusing on the contrast between public and interior expressions of emotion among characters involved in a domestic crisis.