The Humber School for Writers returns to the Toronto International Festival of Authors with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will be presented in person and will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft.
Masterclasses include: Beginnings and Endings, with David Bezmozgis; The Score of the Narrative, with Tim Wynne-Jones; Writing Vivid Characters, with Shyam Selvadurai; Writing a Comic Book, with David A. Robertson; Poetry From Artwork, with Omar Musa; and more from Alissa York, Giles Blunt, Téa Mutonji, Wendy Erskine, Anna Moschovakis and Larissa Lai.
All times are in ET.
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome.
How do we experience time? This workshop, led by author Wendy Erskine, will discuss the ideas of time: elastic time, objective versus subjective time, slowed down or sped-up moments of experience, and how we experience time as people. Learn about the temporal structures of literature by examining the unity of time in classical dramas, or expanses of time in 19th Century novels, in addition to discussing chronological versus non-linear narratives. Through a close, collaborative reading of His Mother by Wendy Erskine, and Vanka by Anton Chekhov, workshop participants will learn how there is movement between different timelines. These temporal shifts create meaning and complexity and are important details for writers to manage. This session should enlighten participants to the possibilities time presents within their own work.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: October 1 at 3:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome.
Author and poet Téa Mutonji believes that truth isn’t in the narrative, but the details. This workshop will teach you the steps for writing short stories. Learn techniques to create recognizable landscapes for your characters to exist within, in the limits of a short story format. Using examples from her debut short story collection, Shut Up, You’re Pretty, Mutonji will demonstrate to participants how to create self-contained stories that will still read as one work through thematic connections.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 26 at 5:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome. In this workshop, American-born Canadian novelist and literary critic Larissa Lai will discuss a range of writing techniques that can be used to create historical fiction. She will illustrate the challenges caused by knowing the past, and suggest how to represent it for contemporary readers. Learn what to do with dated language and behaviours, and how to bridge gaps between lot understandings and new ways of knowing.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 28 at 5:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome. Once a piece of writing becomes more than an idea, the process of editing begins. In this workshop, Anna Moschovakis teaches how embodied editing practices can help dislodge habits and fears about messing with what we’ve made. Given that every writer is different and everybody is different, this workshop will offer examples of practices that can be personalized for engaging breath, voice, nerves, boredom, blushing and other somatic experiences to help a text move to its next stage.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 30 at 5:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome. Explore how to reverse-engineer a poem from an image or work of art, with poet and artist Omar Musa. Musa will demonstrate by presenting his work, which combines poetry and woodcut prints, including recent work from his poetry collection Killernova. Participants will then have the chance to practice these techniques by through poem-writing exercises based on artworks.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 23 at 5:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome. This is an opportunity to peek into the world of comic book storytelling, exploring the intricate relationship between text and illustration, with celebrated author David A. Robertson. Participants will get the chance to discover how to visualize stories, write them and explore the technical aspects of comic books.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 24 at 1:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome. Many novels lose steam around their half-way mark, and even more stories could achieve greater impact if they had better pacing. Author Giles Blunt covers the fundamentals of how to structure story elements for maximum effect. If you haven’t started your novel yet, this will give you a basic framework to help design it. If you are already turning out pages, you may find it a useful map to keep you on course.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 27 at 5:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome. In this workshop, author Shyam Selvadurai will look at various techniques that can be used to bring characters alive on the page, both in fiction and non-fiction. He will illustrate with examples from his new novel Mansions of the Moon, and demonstrate specifically how he dealt with certain problems of character that arose in the novel.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 29 at 5:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53
The Humber School for Writers returns to the Festival with a series of daily professional writing masterclasses led by its renowned faculty members and special guests. Each 90-minute class will focus on a specific aspect of writing craft. Sign up for one or attend them all! All writing levels are welcome. In film, background music is used as a tool to set the pulse of a scene, to enhance mood and to create a sense of anticipation. An author must rely on narrative alone to create such resonance and lushness in their work. In this workshop, author Tim Wynne Jones will show you ways in which setting can become more than simply a back drop, and can even become the “music” of a scene. Come learn about the score of a narrative with Tim Wynne Jones.
Ticket Info:
Date & Time: September 22 at 5:30pm ET
Where: Main Loft in Harbourfront Centre
Duration: 90 minutes
Ticket price: $53