Borderlands: A QWF Springtime Writing Workshop in the Eastern Townships

Borderlands are in-between places, neither here nor there, yet shot through with newness, variability, and change. Borders can be physical or spiritual. They can feel exciting or uncomfortable. They hold an element of uncertainty.

This writing workshop takes place over two three-hour Saturday sessions in Sutton, Quebec. Sutton is a few minutes from the US border, whose troubled or untroubled status has known eras filled with bloodshed, sorrow, and filial love and has experienced complex tensions today. Those of us who once crossed that border for an ice cream cone and a joyful waterfall swim may have a very different relationship with it now.

Similarly, our own interior border crossings are fertile with meaning: perhaps you are navigating a border between youth and age, or between health and frailty. Maybe you are in a process of losing or seeking something that profoundly affects how you are positioned in the world. Or maybe the past and the future have begun to feel intertwined instead of delineated, thus altering time itself.

This writing workshop will give you space and time to think and write about borderlands—interior or exterior—in your current experience. We will use conversation, art supplies, writing prompts, and writing materials to compose fluid-genre writing that helps us inhabit the uncertainty of the in-between places in our lives, with curiosity and hope rather than resistance or fear. Please bring coloured pens or pencils and something on which to write, such as paper or a notebook.

Once you have registered, please send a brief description of no more than 250 words of a place you know or remember—a place that makes you feel something—to riley@qwf.org. The subject line should read “For Kathleen Winter.”

Kathleen Winter writes novels, short stories, memoir, and essays. These include the novel, Annabel, and the Arctic memoir, Boundless (Anansi), both of which won or were shortlisted for multiple Canadian and international awards. Her latest novel, Undersong (Knopf Canada), is inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s late unpublished diaries. She is currently working on a book of poetry about a local mountain and its non-human voices. Winter was born in the U.K., grew up in Newfoundland, and in 2010 moved with her family to Montreal. For the past five years she has lived in Sutton, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.