Open House with Kirsten Koza

Start the new season with a bang! Join the WCYR for an open house meeting. WCYR members, friends and anyone interested in writing are welcome. Admission is free (please register below). Come celebrate the successes of fellow writers, enjoy networking and stay for a terrific workshop. This year we have the talented Kirsten Koza visiting to teach us how to:

Get Creative with Nonfiction

Leave your safety nets at home and prepare to write dangerously. We’ll be employing techniques used by method actors on stage, except we’ll be using our pens on the page, in a creative exploration of making nonfiction read like fiction. You’ll be improvising through genres to find the most exciting way to present the truth and your lead character—you. You don’t have to go on an adventure to take your readers on an action-packed head trip, and during this workshop we’ll delve into those head trips.

Kirsten will also answer questions about the rapidly changing writing industry, what publishers and editors are looking for, and what you can do to help make that you.

Workshop will be held on Sunday, September 8th, 2019, from 1:00pm to 4:00pm at the Ray Twinney Complex (Lounge 1) in Newmarket. This is a free event, but please pre-register to assure your seat. We cannot guarantee walk-in tickets will be available. Pre-registration ends September 6^th, 2019. 

Kirsten Koza is an adventure travel writer, humourist, journalist, and author of the memoir, Lost in Moscow: A Brat in the USSR, published by Turnstone and dubbed by CBC radio Canada “the ultimate what-I-did-last-summer essay ever.” She edited the Travelers’ Tales (USA) humour anthology, Wake Up and Smell the Shit: Hilarious Travel Disasters, Monstrous Toilets and a Demon Dildo, during which time she read thousands of story submissions before narrowing it down to the 31 writers she selected to be in the book. She’s had over 75 stories published in books, magazines and newspapers around the world about her adventures and on topics as varied as: tornado chasing, bullfighting, cannibalism, a Kyrgyzstani revolution, going inside the largest Syrian refugee camp, dictators, Putin, gluten, Rasputin and more. She has repeatedly been invited to speak at the American Society of Journalists and Authors annual conference in New York, on the power of social media for writers and making stories go viral. If you visit Kirsten’s website, www.kirstenkoza.com, you can read some of her published work, and you’ll probably see why the executives at Travelers’ Tales publishing house affectionately call her “the Canadian lunatic.”