A Vocation to Write: Sharing Your Words, Your SELF, with Community
Memoir Workshop, facilitated by paulo da costa.
Memoir as Medicine for the Heart
Writing with candour about family and communities of affection may be a challenging endeavour. Memoir also offers the potential to enlighten and reward past experiences with insight and understanding, illuminating and perhaps even healing the heart. When owning the subjective perspective and experience as your own, writing on difficult and intimate subjects can still prompt feelings of discomfort and pain for all involved. How much should you reveal about your personal history and inner feelings when the web of connections is so complex, and family and community lives intersect in both obvious and unseen ways? Truth, kindness, and revelation are the medicinal ingredients paulo incorporates to honour those he writes about, as well as the wounds he may come upon, in himself and in those unwittingly brought to the page.
Come explore the journey of writing Memoir with paulo da costa, two-time award-winning author of creative non-fiction. His memoir, Trust the Bluer Skies: Meditations on Fatherhood, is forthcoming in 2024 with University of Regina Press.
About the Facilitator
Born in Angola, and raised in Portugal, paulo da costa is a writer, editor and translator living in Canada. He is twice the recipient of the James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction (2023 and 2020), the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region, the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and the Canongate Prize for short-fiction. His poetry, fiction and nonfiction have been published widely in literary magazines around the world and translated into Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese. The Midwife of Torment is his latest book of fiction, and Trust the Bluer Skies: Meditations on Fatherhood, a book of creative non-fiction, is forthcoming in 2024 with University of Regina Press.
Date: Saturday, September 23, 2023
Time: 11am – 12:30pm
Location: In-person
Cost: Free
For more information and to register visit writersguild.ca/alberta-culture-days.
