Don’t Quit Your Day Job…Yet: Freelance Writing for Print and Internet
2025-04-02 19:00 - 21:00, 2025-04-09 19:00 - 21:00, 2025-04-16 19:00 - 21:00, 2025-04-23 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Online via Zoom
The Internet has boosted demand for articles, photo features, website text, and niche content for both online and print outlets. The technical skills to post, blog, tweet, and upload are common – especially amongst the younger generation!

Less common, however, is the combination of these skills with the ability to write clear, concise, targeted, interesting, and well-structured prose suitable for small screens, short attention spans, F-pattern skim reading, and search engines.

Conducted by a professional journalist, author, freelance writer and PR lecturer, this workshop is designed to enhance the communications skills of freelancers, publicists, bloggers, and other writers. It will also help you acquire the business and survival smarts you’ll need if you want to earn money from your writing.

Variations of this workshop have been delivered online and live, for credit and non-credit purposes at McGill University, UCLA, Shaanxi University, and various arts groups.

Through discussions, examples, simulation exercises, and peer review, workshop sessions are conducted in a “real-life” context that aims to get participants published after the course.

Exercises are written and reviewed during sessions to mediate feedback and prepare participants to work within time limits. The instructor will set a main homework assignment, to be reviewed before it’s submitted for publication:

A third-person profile, based on an interview, which describes an interesting person, their occupation and achievements.

or

A researched, first-person narrative analyzing a subject of topical interest.

Sessions will cover all aspects of choosing, planning, pitching, writing, and editing the article.

Participants enrolling in this workshop should have a clear idea why they want to write, what they want to write, and for whom. They should also consider whether they intend to sell their writing to external outlets, give it away, or use it for personal, career/business development.

Workshop schedule

Week 1

Course introduction

Overcoming writer’s block and generating story ideas

Choosing the right topic at the right time

Differences between print and online writing

Week 2

Analysis of techniques, tone, and content of publications

Inverted pyramid writing

Researching and selecting relevant material

Search engine optimization

Online vs print reading patterns

Week 3

Writing catchy leads, headings, and subject lines

Basic writing structures

Show don’t tell – writing for the senses

Similes, metaphors, allusions, and other writing devices

Cutting jargon and superfluous words

Week 4

Interviewing techniques and psychology

Turning an interview into a profile

Use of quotations

Choosing a publication for your article

Pitching stories

Week 5

Working with editors

Building your network

Caption writing

Sourcing, choosing, and editing pics

Travel writing

Week 7

Writing as a business

Quoting for jobs

Tax and invoice issues

Marketing

Self-publishing, hybrid publishing

Week 8

Course review

Preparation to submit workshop article for publication

Book Launch: One in Six Million by Amy Fish
2025-04-03 17:00 - 19:00 | QC
Thursday, April 3, 2025, 5:00–7:00 pmGelber Conference Centre (5151 Côte Ste Catherine Rd)

Meet Montreal author Amy Fish and receive a signed copy of the book.

Discover the remarkable journey behind One in Six Million, a true story about genealogist Stanley Diamond Z”L and how he traced a Holocaust Survivor’s lost identity.

Montreal author Amy Fish will share the heartfelt experiences and extensive research that went into crafting her latest book. In conversation with Montreal broadcaster Natasha Hall, the event will bring history to life in ways that promise to inspire and resonate with our guests.

WestmountLittéraire | WestmountLit
2025-04-03 19:00 - 20:30 | Westmount Public Library, 4626 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Westmount, Quebec, H3Z 1G1, Canada
Thursday, April 3, 2025, 7:00 pm ET

Meet three acclaimed authors for a literary soirée of readings and discussion.

Featuring authors Megan Durnford, H Nigel Thomas, and Sivan Slapak.

Register for free on Eventbrite to reserve your spot.

Shut Up & Write! with QWF (In Person)
2025-04-04 12:30 - 15:00 | QWF Office, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1X4, Canada
Friday, April 4, 2025, 12:30 pm–3:00 pmFree, In PersonQWF Office (Room 3, 1200 Atwater Ave., Westmount)

Register for the session by filling out the RSVP form below.

Looking for some dedicated, quiet writing space?

Join us for an in-person Shut Up & Write session at the QWF office!

Do all that writing you’ve been meaning to do, and meet a few of your fellow QWF members. Using the Pomodoro technique, participants write in 25-minute bursts, with 5-minute breaks in between.

This event is for QWF members only. Not a member? Learn about becoming a member.

Please note that these sessions are designed for silent writing, rather than discussing or getting feedback on work.

12:30–12:55: Writing 112:55–1:00: Break1:00–1:25: Writing 21:25–1:30: Break1:30–1:55: Writing 31:55–2:00: Break2:00–2:25: Writing 42:25–2:30: Break2:30–2:55: Writing 5

To register, RSVP below.

Getting to the QWF Office

Our office is located on the top floor of the Atwater Library and Computer Centre, in Room 3.

Address: 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3Westmount, QC H3Z 1X4

Closest Metro: Atwater Station

Closest Bus lines: 24, 63, 90, 104, 138, 144, 150

Accessibility:

The QWF Office is fully accessible by wheelchair from the side entrance on Tupper Street. Once inside, there is an elevator to the second floor, where the QWF office is.

Learn more about the office location and accessibility.

If you registered and can no longer attend, please email john@qwf.org to notify us.

Systems for Writers
2025-04-05 10:30 - 16:30 | QWF Office, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1X4, Canada
A one-day workshop on time management, organization, and goal setting for writers. This workshop is for writers of all genres who struggle to balance writing with busy lives or to stay organized with their time and their projects. Participants should bring their laptops and any current agenda/calendar systems so that these can be used during the workshop.

The workshop will begin with self-reflection prompts and exercises to help participants create “goal pyramids” that clarify and prioritize long-term writing and publication goals. We’ll also work to define clear goals for participants’ current projects and break these into small, realistic action steps. We’ll explore various organizational and time-management tools in both digital and analog formats, including timers, spreadsheets, calendars, bullet journals, and project notebooks. Participants will learn practical strategies to boost creativity, stay on track with writing projects, and reduce stress, procrastination, and perfectionism. Essentially, this workshop will provide support, tools, and strategies to help participants gain more control over their time and their projects.

Rebecca Morris is a Montreal writer, editor, and teacher whose debut novel Other Maps was released in September 2024 with Linda Leith Publishing. Rebecca’s short stories have won the Malahat Review Open Season Award for Fiction and the Humber Literary Review’s Emerging Writers Fiction contest, earned Honourable Mention in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction contest and been long-listed in Room Magazine‘s fiction contest. A Banff alumna and a reader for the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize, Rebecca teaches writing workshops at the QWF and the Thomas More Institute as well as schools and communities across Montreal.

Workshop: Embodied Writing with Maya Khamala
2025-04-05 14:00 - 17:00 | Studio 414, 10 Avenue des Pins West #414, Montreal
All are welcome! Limited spots.

~Writing, breathwork, meditation & optional sharing circle~

Writing happens in the body. The more you engage your senses, the stronger your language. Whatever emotions you spill onto the page are deeply rooted—at the cellular level.

We contort ourselves into painfully disembodied shapes in order to summon words, and yet the body remains our deepest source of truth. What if we gave in to our bodies instead? What words might surface? What untapped potential might emerge?

Get out of your head and into your body so you can write with vital presence. Our bodies hold so many stories that long to be told. Breathing life into those stories has the potential to be a deeply empowering and healing act.

If you’ve never done breathwork or meditated before, it really doesn’t matter. If you’re not a writer, that’s ok too. This workshop is for writers wanting to enhance or expand their practice, non-writers interested in exploring their potential, and anyone who feels called to investigate the relationship between body and language.

Our practice will interweave:

Kundalini breathwork

Stretches & movement

Creative writing prompts & exercises

Meditation

An optional sharing & discussion circle

Homemade chai & a sweet treat

What to bring:

Your journal, a pen, comfy clothes & an open mind.

What to know:

Pens & paper will be available, as will floor mats/blocks/cushions if needed. Seating options will include: sofas, chairs, floor mats, etc. There will be space to move around and shift positions as needed.

About the facilitator:

Maya Khamala is a lifelong writer of many stripes. From poetry to grassroots journalism to creative nonfiction, word is her bond. She has collaborated with visual artists at a loss for words, and has worked as a freelance copywriter and editor for close to a decade. She has a shiny little MA in Creative Writing to list among her credentials, and is an emerging novelist to boot. Maya has an extensive background in feminist, anti-racist, climate justice and Indigenous solidarity movements—work that has deeply informed the way she wields words. Aside from being a writer, she is also a Kundalini Yoga teacher offering regular Montreal classes in NDG and the Plateau. She got into Kundalini as a way of healing from childhood trauma and its many lifelong manifestations in her body, as well as to counteract being a writer who sometimes forgets to step away from the keyboard…and simply breathe.

Cost: $85 ($75 early bird rate for first 5 people)Book here: linktr.ee/heartfire.kundalini

Montreal launch of Dreams Before Extinction/Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Anthology
2025-04-06 16:00 - 18:00 | De Stiil Booksellers, 351 Avenue Duluth, Montreal, Quebec, H2W1J3, Canada
Join us for the launch of this stunning anthology compiling ten years of writing and artwork for Montreal-based Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, whose mandate is to bring vision to these burning times. Laura Simms has called the journal “the most important literary magazine today.” Edited by Lise Weil, Gillian Goslinga, Kristin Flyntz and Anne Bergeron, and with a foreword by G.A. Bradshaw, Dreams Before Extinction collects essays, poems and artwork by 67 women—all of it responding to the many forms of devastation we face in these times. Editors and 3 local contributors—Kim Zombik, Yehudit Silverman, Lise Moisan–will read from and converse about the book.
Deena Metzger: “That this anthology comes into the world at a time when the world is darkening so, offers us some ease in our hearts…”
Azul Thomé: “A mycelium , a human humus forest is born!!! Hallelujah ya allah mabrouk!!!”
Wine and refreshments.

Novel Essentials: The Art & Craft of Long-Form Fiction
2025-04-07 18:00 - 20:00, 2025-04-21 18:00 - 20:00 | QWF Office, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1X4, Canada
Have you had an itch to write a novel, but haven’t known how to tackle such a large project? Now is the perfect time to dust off your ideas! This workshop is a boot camp for budding writers eager to turn their novelistic dream into a reality. From iron-clad structures and story tropes to the ins-and-outs of how character motivation pushes a great plot, this 10-week intensive workshop will impart professional tips and tricks-of-the-trade essential to bringing long-form fiction to life.

The workshop will focus on practical knowledge not covered in a typical writing workshop: initial idea development; a deep dive on novelistic structure; how to build the perfect plot; character development and motivation; scene development; and how to handle secondary and tertiary characters, to name a few. Each week, you will learn one or more essential techniques and/or theories, as well as participate in short, practical exercises that will help you build your novel. As you master the elements, you will have opportunities to develop and workshop your original novel concepts.

While an emphasis will be placed on long-form writing, all writers looking to master essential elements of fiction writing are encouraged to attend. You do not require prior workshop experience or an idea for a novel to take this workshop. Participants interested in developing fiction of all kinds are more than welcome!

L. E. Sterling (Erin Vollick, also published under L. E. Vollick) is the author of numerous novels spanning contemporary, Young Adult, fantasy, science-fiction, dystopian and romance genres. Her hit series, the True Born Trilogy, was optioned for television, and True Born, the first novel in the trilogy, was recognized internationally with the 2017 Athena Award® in Young Adult literature. With a B.A. and M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in Literature, Sterling taught creative writing and literature for many years. She has appeared at BookCon NYC, the LA Times Festival of Books, and Ad Astra.

Craft Meets Magic: The Alchemy of Short Fiction
2025-04-07 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-04-21 20:00 - 22:00 | QWF Office, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1X4, Canada
Is there an art form more maddening than the short story? Demanding the complexity of a novel, the lyricism of a poem, and the economy of a joke, the work is tedious and the rewards (for most of us) are slim. Still, for us cursed few, the short story is an addictive nut to crack. After all, there’s little more thrilling than the prose of a writer who can do more with a handful of pages than most can do with 300. The complexity of a novel! The lyricism of a poem! The economy of a joke!

Join us, if you dare, for an 8-week workshop where participants will share and critique each other’s work with an eye towards craft. Specifically, we will ask ourselves questions like, “What are characters made of?” “How is a plot built?” “Do I really need to describe everything?”

Equally important to studying these questions will be putting them aside, as we celebrate and cultivate the magic that makes art artin the first place–that intangible whatever that defines our passion for fiction. After all, what else do we have to keep us warm as we trudge through draft to draft?

As time allows, we’ll also read stories by published authors like ZZ Packer, Donald Barthelme, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joy Williams, and George Saunders. Participants will be asked to read and prepare responses to a short story (distributed from me by email) prior to our first meeting.

Frankie Barnet is the author of Mood Swings (McClelland & Stewart), which was a finalist for the Grand prix du livre de Montréal; Kim: A Novel Idea (Metatron); and An Indoor Kind of Girl (Metatron). Her work has appeared in places such as PRISM International, EVENT, Joyland, The Erotic Review, and Biblioasis’ Best Canadian Short Stories Anthology. She has an MFA from Syracuse University and lives in Montreal.

"Flying Soulo" Book launch & Workshop
2025-04-08 18:00 - 19:30 | The Segal Centre for Performing Arts, 5550 Westbury Avenue, Montreal, QC, H3W 1M7, Canada
Join us at the Segal Centre for Performing Arts for the exciting book launch and workshop of “Flying SOULO” with Award-Winning Director / TV Host Tracey Erin Smith!
Dive into the world of creativity and inspiration as we celebrate the release of this profound and practical book. Connect with fellow story enthusiasts, meet the author, participate in an engaging workshop that will ignite your imagination and you’ll leave with a polished piece of writing.
Tracey will also sign your brand new copy of her book!
Don’t miss out on this unique event that promises to be a blend of learning and fun!

So You’ve Written a Novel – Now What?
2025-04-08 18:00 - 20:00, 2025-04-15 18:00 - 20:00, 2025-04-22 18:00 - 20:00 | QWF Office, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1X4, Canada
The first time I typed THE END on a manuscript, I didn’t know what to do next. There’s a lot of information and encouragement on HOW to write a book, but not a lot on what to do after you’ve written the thing. And the advice you find online can be woefully misleading, confusing, or at its very worst —fraudulent.

This 8-week workshop aims to fully lay out the roadmap to traditional publishing for someone who’s finished, or is close to finishing a fiction manuscript. The journey of getting your story from your laptop to an actual book you can pick up at Indigo follows a very specific series of steps. From landing an agent, to signing with a publisher, to contract details, this course will take you, in minute detail, through every step, with a centerpiece intensive workshop formulating your all-important Query Letter, along with details on crafting your logline and your pitch kits.

Designed for absolute newbies to the world of publishing, this workshop will offer you tips and tactics to maximize your chances at every step, and by its end you should have the knowledge and confidence to approach this perilous enterprise knowing exactly what you need to do next. Because typing THE END is only the beginning.

There is no submission required prior to the first session, but participants will be expected to write loglines and query letters and share them with the group as the workshop progresses. They will also be expected to read and critique each other’s work.

Toronto-born, Montreal-based writer and illustrator Sherwin Sullivan Tjia has written many odd and eclectic books. Their 2005 collection of pseudohaikus, The World is a Heartbreaker, was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s A. M. Klein Award. Their 2010 graphic novel, The Hipless Boy, was a finalist for the Doug Wright Award for best emerging talent, as well as being nominated for 4 Ignatz Awards. Their 2011 Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style book from the POV of a housecat entitled You Are a Cat! won that year’s Expozine Award for best English-language book. Their latest graphic novel entitled Plummet is about a woman who wakes up one day to find herself in literal, perpetual freefall. It was optioned for animation and named one of CBC Books’ “Top 20 Graphic Novels of 2019.”

Make It Make Sense: Writing Memoir
2025-04-08 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-04-15 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-04-22 20:00 - 22:00 | QWF Office, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1X4, Canada
Writing a story about something that really happened seems like it should be easy: after all, compared to something like fiction, a lot of the work is already done for you. You already know what happens! But as anyone who has attempted to make art about their own life and experience can attest, the practice can feel a lot more complicated when you actually get down to it. Life doesn’t always make sense — but a good story has to.

Led by Tara McGowan-Ross, the author of the Hilary Weston Prize-shortlisted memoir Nothing Will Be Different, Make It Make Sense is a workshop that engages directly with the complicated questions that can impede creativity when writing about real life. What makes memoir different from other kinds of nonfiction? Why does writing about yourself honestly so often feel like lying through your teeth? What are the ethics of writing about other people? And what gives me the right, in our complicated global environment, to take up space telling my own story at all?

This workshop aims to foster a sense of confidence and capacity in a genre that is both highly marketable arts entertainment and powerful personal reflective practice. Participants will be asked to think critically about memoir from the perspective of both writer and reader in a discussion-based environment that features short lectures, collaborative dialogue, peer editing, and revision to foster a sense of ease in one of the most fraught and risky modes of self-expression.

Make It Make Sense is designed for writers of all skill levels who feel they are psychologically blocked in their memoir-writing practice. Participants will be encouraged to develop a solid foundation of confidence and understanding so that they can live with the sense of uncertainty (or even danger) that often makes this genre so challenging and exciting. Participants will be required to write a short piece for peer editing and workshop with their cohort and encouraged to revise that same piece based on feedback. Not all revised pieces will be workshopped.

Listening for the Poem
2025-04-09 18:00 - 20:00, 2025-04-16 18:00 - 20:00, 2025-04-23 18:00 - 20:00 | QWF Office, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1X4, Canada
This workshop engages poetry through a listening practice.

Listening shifts attention away from prosaic sense-making and toward poetic meaning-making. Through listening, we can quiet our inner editorial voice, make unexpected leaps of thought, create new patterns of association, and attune to the fullness—the timbre, tone, and sway—of any given moment.

Developing a listening practice also carves out dedicated time, space, and attention for writing. Listening permits an encounter between you and your voice, which emerges when you do not self-consciously construct it. Listening halts self-critical chatter, allowing you to tune in to your natural rhythms, embodied knowledge, and inner language.

You will be invited to engage in a directed listening experience, on your own time, before each workshop. During this experience, you will compose the poems that will be brought into workshop, which will be spent reading new poems aloud and providing feedback on one another’s writing. The idea is that you will bring in new work during each session to share, with writing taking place on your own time. Consequently, this is a writing-intensive workshop. Short readings and audio files will be assigned, and participants will need a recording device for one exercise (phone is OK).

The workshop will fully engage the intellect and life experiences of all the writers in the room as we talk shop about craft, poetics, and more. New work is privileged to demonstrate the limitless potential we have within us to create poetry—the potential to hear poetry in everyday life.

Jay Ritchie is an English PhD candidate at McGill University and holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Listening in Many Publics (Invisible Publishing, 2024), which was a finalist for the QWF’s A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House Books, 2017). He has taught creative writing at UMass and Bishop’s University. His writing and music have appeared in Maisonneuve, SAND, on CBC Radio One, WMUA Amherst, Frozen Section Radio, at the PHI Centre, and he performs expanded poetry readings using portable cassette players and field recordings.

Book Launch: Cut Side Down
2025-04-11 16:00 | Carrefour interdisciplinaire et interculturel, UdeM, C-8056 au 8e étage du pavillon Lionel-Groulx, Montreal
Friday, April 11, 2025, 4:00 pm ET

Join Jessi MacEachern for the Université de Montréal launch of Cut Side Down.

Reading by Jessi MacEachernVisiting ProfessorÉtudes anglaises

Introduction by Jane MalcolmAssociate DirectorÉtudes anglaises

Shut Up & Write! with QWF (Virtual)
2025-04-12 10:00 - 12:30 | Online – Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link
Saturday, April 12, 2025, 10:00 am–12:30 pm ETOnline via Zoom—RSVP below to receive the Zoom link

Looking for some dedicated, quiet writing space?

Register below to do all that writing you’ve been meaning to do. Using the Pomodoro technique, participants write in 25-minute bursts, with 5-minute breaks in between.

This event is for QWF members only. Not a member? Learn about becoming a member.

The Zoom link will be sent out a day or two before the session.

Please note that these sessions are designed for silent writing, rather than discussing or getting feedback on work.

10:00–10:25: Writing 110:25–10:30: Break10:30–10:55: Writing 210:55–11:00: Break11:00–11:25: Writing 311:25–11:30: Break11:30–11:55: Writing 411:55–12:00: Break12:00–12:25: Writing 5

To receive the Zoom link, RSVP below. You will receive the Zoom link a few days before the session.

Note: RSVPs for virtual Shut Up & Write! sessions close 24 hours before the session begins. If there is no option to RSVP, RSVPs are closed.

Cut Side Down Book Launch
2025-04-13 19:00 - 21:00 | 3714 av Parc, 3714 avenue Parc, Montréal, QC, H2X 2J1, Canada
Jessi MacEachern’s second poetry collection, Cut Side Down, is being published by Invisible in April. A book launch will be held at 7:00 PM on Sunday, April 13 at Bar Milton-Parc Coopérative de Solidarité (3714 Park Ave), a worker-owned and operated bar. Beer, wine, cocktails, and non-alcoholic beverages are available for purchase. Copies of Cut Side Down will also be available for purchase.

Poetry Matters: Scenes of Attunement
2025-04-17 17:00 - 19:00 | Yellow Door, 3625 rue Aylmer, Montreal, QC, Canada
Please join Poetry Matters for “Scenes of Attunement,” a poetry reading featuring Christopher Buddle, Joseph Kidney, and Willow Loveday Little.

When: Thursday, April 17, 5-7pmWhere: The Yellow Door, 3625 rue AylmerLeading from Poetry Matters’ work on “poetic attention,” we’ve invited poets to consider forms of attunement achieved through poetry, and how attunement by way of poetic form might offer modes of response to the constraints of our climate, broadly construed. As the semester comes to a close, we hope this event might provide a study break for those in the midst of exam season! Light refreshments will be provided.

If you would like to attend, but have any concerns about the accessibility of the venue, please email charlotte.frank@mail.mcgill.ca .

Christopher Buddle is an artist, writer, and faculty member in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University. His research and teaching focus is ecology, entomology, and field studies, with an emphasis on the biodiversity of insects and spiders, in a variety of habitats. Buddle’s first creative publication A Portrait of Astonishing Nature (2024) combines poetry, art, and science and celebrates the biodiversity of Creek 53, a section of land located near Hudson Quebec. The Creek 53 Conservancy Trust will be the beneficiary of profits from the sale of this book, preserving the land for future generations.

Joseph Kidney holds a PhD in early modern drama from Stanford University and now lectures at Stanford’s Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) program. His poetry has appeared in several publications including Arc, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (in Arabic translation). Kidney has been shortlisted and nominated for several awards and prizes. He won the 2024 Arc Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year Contest, Grain’s 2021 Short Grain Contest, and CV2’s Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster Poetry Prize). In 2024, he served as Deer Lake Artist in Residence. His chapbook Terra Firma, Pharma Sea is available from Anstruther Press, and his debut book Devotional Forensics was published in March 2025.

Willow Loveday Little‘s work has appeared in such venues as The Dalhousie Review, yolk literary, Metatron, HA&L, The League of Canadian Poetschapbook series, Vallum, and On Spec. She published her debut poetry collection (Vice) Viscera with Cactus Press in 2022 and joined the team as an editor in 2024. Willow sits on the board of the English Language Arts Network as a representative for writing.

Short Genre Fiction: From Start to Finish
2025-04-19 10:30 - 16:30 | QWF Office, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Room 3, Westmount, QC, H3Z 1X4, Canada
Whether you’re an old hand seeking fresh inspiration or a newcomer working on your very first short story, we’d love to see you in this workshop!

Rich is the author of 250+ stories; his work has picked up numerous accolades, and has been translated into over a dozen languages and adapted to screen. In this workshop, he distills fifteen years of professional experience into a wide-scope, step-by-step approach to brainstorming, writing, and revising short stories, then homes in on specific techniques and advice tailored to your individual goals.

You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of how short stories come together, new tools in your toolkit, and a renewed zest for writing.

Sample topics:

Gleaning ideas from life, music, art, fiction,

Combining ideas, creating interesting juxtapositions

Plotting

Generating endings

Differentiating characters

Revision and submission

Tips for the daily (or nowhere near) writing practice

Rich Larson was born in Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and is currently based in Canada. He is the author of the novels Annex and Ymir, as well as collections Tomorrow Factory and The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, among them Polish, French, Romanian, and Japanese, and has been adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.

2025 Annual General Meeting
2025-04-22 19:00 | Adair Auditorium, Atwater Library, 1200 Atwater Avenue (top floor), Montreal, Quebec, H3Z 1T4, Canada
The 2025 Quebec Writers’ Federation Annual General Meeting will be held

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 at 7:00 pm EDTatAdair Auditorium, Atwater Library1200 Atwater Avenue (top floor)and online via Zoom

At the meeting, the President will review the year’s activities and the Executive Director will present the financial report. An election will be held for the Board of Directors for the coming year – April 2025 to April 2026. If you wish to nominate someone for a position on the Board, or to put your own name forward, please contact Riley Palanca (riley@qwf.org) and request the Introduction for Potential Board Members document and a nomination form. Completed nomination forms, including the signatures of two other QWF members, must be submitted to Riley by Friday, April 11, 2025.

Please note that you must be a member in good standing to be eligible to run for the board, nominate someone for the board, or vote at the AGM.

Agenda

7:00-7:15: Schmoozing

7:15: Call to order

Report from the outgoing QWF President, Tawhida Tanya Evanson

Financial report, presented by the QWF Executive Director, Lori Schubert

Election or acclamation of new Board of Directors

Parting words from the incoming President, Crystal Chan

Registration

To register, fill out the RSVP form at the bottom of this page. Please indicate whether you will be attending in person or online via Zoom. If attending online, you’ll receive a link to the Zoom meeting a day or two before the meeting takes place.

Registration will close on Tuesday, April 22, at 5:00 pm ET. If you would like to register to attend after registration has closed, please contact John Wickham at john@qwf.org to be put on the attendance list. Please also indicate whether you will attend in person or on Zoom.

If you will be attending online, you will receive a link to the Zoom meeting the day before or day of the meeting, depending on when you register.
