Writing Characters, Writing the World (#WS7)

Name: Writing Characters, Writing the World (#WS7)
Start: 2025-09-20T08:30:00-04:00
Location: Kingston Marriott, 285 King Street E.

Schedule

Sat, 20 Sep, 2025 at 08:30 am

UTC-04:00

Location

Kingston Marriott, 285 King Street E. | Kingston, ON

When writing fiction, every author faces the challenge of bringing characters to life and moving them through a lively world. The world isn’t static; it comes to life through how it’s observed and who does the observing, what this person is doing and feeling as they observe the world through specific lively, sensory details.
This engaging workshop, suitable for novice, emerging, and experienced writers, will provide participants with tools to concentrate on the quality of attention they bring to their writing practice.
- How do we bring characters, protagonists, those not like us, even the non-human to the page and make them feel animated and alive?
- Lively presences draw in your reader, so how do we do this with desire, respect, humility, not assumptions or appropriative privilege?
- The workshop will involve discussion of these issues and plenty of in-class writing, including point-of-view and noticing exercises
During the course of the workshop, Catherine will explain how to use point-of-view, techniques of imaginative noticing, and keeping characters and the world in motion to create liveliness and life-like-ness on the page. Participants can expect an exciting variety of in-class prompts that focus on attention, motion, and specific noticing.
About the Author
Catherine Bush is the author of the story collection, Skin, and five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards.
Praising her new story collection, The Miramichi Reader states, “There is a tenderness in these stories, not drenched in sentimentality, but constructed on a real, human foundation. Skin is at once fresh and vibrant while being a culmination of decades of practice and craft.”
Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and a Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and a Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire’s Head; the national bestselling novel The Rules of Engagement; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award.
When asked in an interview what inspired her to start writing, Bush replied, “I started writing because I needed to find a way to give words to things that hadn’t been given words: family stories and sometimes not even stories but the complex web of emotions that being in a family, any family, arouses. Fear. Loss. Wonder.”
An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.
Fee: $100