Translating the Body

This writing workshop will begin by exploring passages from texts that work with the body, including the ways our bodies can be sites of history, pain, trauma, disease, and discomfort. Texts we would examine include Ruth Ozeki’s The Face: A Time Code; Roxanne Gay’s Hunger; Ocean Vuong's On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”; Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor; Porochista Khakpour’s Sick; Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body; and River Halen’s Dream Rooms.

After sharing and discussing these texts, the group will be offered writing prompts to help reflect on what stories we tell ourselves about our bodies and/or what stories other people have told them about their bodies.

We will then work with interactive tools (e.g., handheld mirrors, phone cameras, stethoscopes, magnifying glasses, makeup, body paint, and so on) and with further writing prompts to start untangling, rewriting, and reclaiming those narratives.

Presented by Eliza Robertson, April 2024 writer-in-residence at Joy Kogawa House.

Eliza Robertson's 2014 debut collection, Wallflowers, was shortlisted for the East Anglia Book Award, the Danuta Gleed Short Story Prize, and selected as a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her critically acclaimed first novel, Demi-Gods, was a Globe & Mail and National Post book of the year and the winner of the 2018 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize.

She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and the University of East Anglia, where she received the Man Booker Scholarship and Curtis Brown Prize. In addition to being shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and Journey Prize, Eliza’s stories have won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and 2017 Elizabeth Jolley Prize.

Originally from Vancouver Island, Eliza lives in Montreal.

Eliza Robertson will live and work at Joy Kogawa House in April 2024 while continuing a novel-in-progress, When Women Were Waves.

Host or Publisher Historic Joy Kogawa House Society