We are proud to announce this year's instructors for Wordsworth 2017.
More names and course descriptions will be added as they are confirmed!
David Wilson (B.Mus, M.Mus) is a Singer, Conductor, Voice Teacher, Yoga Instructor, Breath Therapist, and soon-to-be-author. He is recognized across Canada as a leading authority on the use of yoga and breath therapy to aid proper singing and speaking technique. He has conducted in the styles of choir, opera and musical theatre, including RENT. As a singer David sings in both the classical and musical theatre genres, most recently for "Into the Woods", and at the University of Alberta's "A Musical Feast". David currently enjoys teaching voice for Grant MacEwan Theatre Arts, Edmonton Musical Theatre, Cowtown Opera Summer Academy and the University of Alberta. At his Edmonton teaching studio David offers Professional Voice Lessons, Functional Vocal Transformation, Movement Re-Education, Confidence/Empowerment Training, and Body, Breath & Voice Integrative Therapy. He tours regularly, offering workshops to singers, actors, teachers and professionals on vocal power and respiratory health. He is currently working on a DVD/book entitled The Wilson Method for Voice. His website is body-breath-voice.com. David is thrilled to be part of the 2017 WWKK family this summer.
Isaac Bond has been touring, teaching, and organizing spoken word for five years. Born and raised in Saskatoon, he grew up writing and performing. In 2013, he founded Write Out Loud, a collective of spoken word artists that partner with schools and other community based organizations. In 2013 and 2015, he was a member of ensembles for the Victoria Spoken Word Festival. In 2015, he directed the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.
Richard Kelly Kemick's poetry and prose have been published in magazines and journals across Canada and the United States. His debut collection of poetry, Caribou Run, was published March 2016 and selected by CBC as one of the season’s Must Read Collections. He won a National Magazine award in 2016 for One-of-a-Kind feature.
Check out these courses, being offered during week one of WordsWorth! (July 9 - 14, ages 12 - 14)
Cathy Ostlere - Quirky Characters: Bring a list of your favourite quirky characters to this class. Psychopaths? Mathletes? Awkward misfits? Unapologetic divas? Or animals? Together we’ll explore ways to make fictional characters leap off the page. We’ll use different voices, create unique backstories and talk about why characters need high stakes to create drama. And we’ll try to slay the cliché!
Colin Martin - Mashic Spudatos: Train-riding wizards, space dragons, talking cats, mutants, zombies, sometimes the best stories are the ones that ask "what if?" and then answer that question using science, or magic, or both. We're going to look at stories that don't follow the rules and create worlds where anything can happen and probably does.
Johnny MacRae - Adventures in Slam-land: In this course, we'll grow from our first steps into the land of spoken word (or slam) poetry to stepping on stage with one fully-realized spoken word poem of our own. Beginning with an introductory workshop to introduce fundamental principles of spoken word writing and performance, this series of workshops explores devices (i.e. personification, extended metaphor) and structures (i.e. beat poems, persona writing) that are useful crafting good spoken word pieces. We'll also play around with poetry as a group activity, writing pieces in tandem with other poets.
Kim Firmston - Mad Skills AKA Build Your Tool Box: A great writer needs to hone many skills to put what is in their imagination onto the page. In this class you will not only get the tools you need but learn how to use them with great dexterity. Experiment with world building, description which will suck the reader into your story, creating new tech/magic/or other in story items or events (think Quidditch), play with advanced tenses and points of view, learn how to tackle editing and finishing, and how to eventually get that creation published. This course comes with the additional bonus of – if you need it, we’ll cover it. No tool will be left in the tool shed. You be given them all and become the master of Mad Skills.
Leif Ingebrigsten - Let's Write a Song!: What makes a great song? What’s the structure of a song? How can we use the structure of songwriting to tell a great story? All of this and much more as we breakdown song genres and structure to each write solid lyrics for an original composition! Not musical? No problem! Lots of great lyricists aren’t musicians at all! We can still create great work using these simple tools!
Marcello Di Cintio - A Sense of the World: In this creative nonfiction course, we will use our senses to seek out the stories in our everyday lives, and to translate the world around us into art on the page. Our eyes, nose, fingers, tongue and ears will guide us to the narratives that surround us. After all, our worlds are full of characters, scenes and stories. Let's use our senses to find them.
Paul Zits - Isn't a Poem Just a Collection?: Every writer is a collector of sorts. Overheard conversations, striking images, half-remembered dreams, can all be collected and put to use. If you’re looking to find your voice, you often need look no further than at what you accumulate. While learning the fundamental techniques of the craft of poetry, this course will teach you how to collect like a writer. Learn how to use found material, cut-ups & collage to create unique works or use these same techniques as a way to enhance your writing, and develop your creative voice.
Here are the courses being offered during week 2! (July 16 - 21, ages 15 - 19)
Cailynn Klingbeil - Journalism 101: In an age of fake news, come discover the importance of writing that is accurate and engaging. We’ll focus on fundamental skills involved in reporting and writing stories for print and online publications. Learn what makes the news and where to find story ideas, hone your aptitude for interviewing, craft compelling ledes that draw your readers in, and learn how to work with editors — as well as under deadlines. By the end of the week you’ll have written articles, and developed new expertise that will enhance any kind of storytelling you undertake.
Cathy Ostlere - La Vita Nuova: In this class we’ll be using Dante Alighieri’s book The New Life (published in 1295) as the model for creating a text using both poetry and prose. The poems we write will create a frame story about an experience from our own lives. The prose sections will link the poems with commentaries that explore our beliefs, philosophies, ideas, dreams and attitudes towards our writing. Our work during this class will engage the lyrical writing brain and the analytical eye.
David Wilson - The Writer's Voice and Your Whole You: Our faith, courage and tenacity informs our writing. In this class we will explore artistic, empowering and fun disciplines, and then observe how these activities affect our writing. Core-inspired motion, breathwork, meditation, drama games, yoga and vocal empowerment all lead us toward our goals of increased confidence, awareness, inspiration and creativity!
Jani Krulc - Translation: In this class, we will look at translation as reinvention, playing with grammar, syntax, musical notation, and literary genres, reformulating and reimagining to create new work. No knowledge of second or third languages required!
Johnny MacRae - Write Funny: In this course, we'll take a look at the use of jokes as a structural device, through the lens of spoken word (or slam) poetry. Humor can be dangerous - and scary to perform. But used appropriately, humor can elevate anything from a room of people to a ruminating poem. Using foundational improv exercises, we'll create a space conducive to absurdity and risk-taking. Interactive exercises - such as telling jokes in gibberish - will be underscored with critical discussions of humorous thought and word structures, and the manner in which these structures may be employed in poetry. Over the week, we'll play with everything from slapstick to satire to "rhetorical jokes" (or jokes which are not meant to receive laughter).
Marcello Di Cintio - A Sense of the World: In this creative nonfiction course, we will use our senses to seek out the stories in our everyday lives, and to translate the world around us into art on the page. Our eyes, nose, fingers, tongue and ears will guide us to the narratives that surround us. After all, our worlds are full of characters, scenes and stories. Let's use our senses to find them.
Richard Kelly Kemick - Wild Writing: From climbing Himalayan peaks to scaling the big walls of Yosemite, from surfing the BC coast to facing grave peril on Mt. McKinley, we all have stories to tell that concern the great outdoors. Whether it you’re interested in a short story of talking elk or a poem about the roiling river, this course will provide writers with the time and space to explore the themes of nature in their writing. Daily sessions will provide useful discussion and encouragement, while writers enjoy the beauty, peace, and inspiration of the spectacular surroundings that only Wordsworth has access to. All genres are welcome––fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essay, history, biography, or memoir.
Todd Houseman - Writing From the Land: A series of session based taking places outside or as close to the physical, natural land as possible. The course will be focusing on literature from an indigenous perspective, specifically focusing on the stories and works from the plains regions of Canada and the local geography of the camp which is located on the territory of The Blackfoot Confederacy or Niitsitap Confederacy. Throughout the course, the instructor Todd Houseman will share his knowledge of oral storytelling and look at the works of historical and contemporary indigenous authors of both the written and oral works of our land. The goal is to learn to write from a less colonial point of view by understanding the importance of indigenizing or decolonizing the narratives of our land. It is important to note that though Todd identifies as a Cree mixed blood, he is not an Elder and so will not be sharing traditional knowledge. Sit in forest and learn from the land and hear tales of battles old and new, tricksters and magic, love and loss all from the place we call home and enrich your writing with deeper connection to where you are and where you've been!
Here are the courses being offered during week 3! (July 23 - 28, ages 14 - 19)
David Wilson - The Writer's Voice and Your Whole You: Our faith, courage and tenacity informs our writing. In this class we will explore artistic, empowering and fun disciplines, and then observe how these activities affect our writing. Core-inspired motion, breathwork, meditation, drama games, yoga and vocal empowerment all lead us toward our goals of increased confidence, awareness, inspiration and creativity!
Kim Firmston - Magical Realism: What if the everyday world seemed magical and the magical seemed everyday? Well there’s a genre for that – Magical Realism, and it is a beautiful thing. Not only is this exciting genre really interesting, learning it will boost your other writing by just adding a sprinkle of some of these amazing literary techniques. So why not give it a shot and learn all about Magical Realism? A world like you’ve never seen it before awaits you.
Lindsey Walker - Songwriting from the heart, and other strange sources of inspiration: This interactive class will look at the beautiful relationship between music and the written word. Analyze and explore the core elements of songwriting, and the strange places one can find inspiration. There will be opportunities for group work as well as solo discovery, all with music in mind. Students do not need to have any previous experience with music or composing. This class will focus on words, but there will also be a selection of musical instruments available for experimentation.
Louise Casemore - From Page to Stage: Where are YOU in your writing? The best way to truly engage an audience is to write from a place that is personal, informed, and imaginative. This course will outline a specific creative formula to first mine the depths of personal experience, then incorporate research into the writing, and finally round out a piece with pure fiction. We will work towards creating pieces that can be turned into performance poems, solo plays, or something much bigger – encouraging writers to graduate ideas from page to stage in a safe and supported environment.
Simon Rose - Inspiration, Imagination and Invention: A Journey into the Writing Process: These workshops explore the writing process, where ideas come from and how writers turn them into stories. The sessions also examine ways to combat writer's block, the importance of planning and outlines, pacing your story, keeping the reader engaged, and creating memorable characters.
Tim Mikula - Impulse: Armed with nothing but our wits we will be building a metaphorical airplane midflight, never knowing where the final product will leave us. The tenets of improv will be applied to writing, performing, painting, and whatever else we can fathom just to see what happens. Impulse is running full tilt down a pitch black hallway*. Impulse is saying one word without knowing what the next will be. Impulse is failing in as many bizarre and unorthodox ways as possible and plunge the unseen depths of your creativity. *we will not actually run full tilt down pitch black hallways
[…] Note: course originally offered in longer form at Wordsworth Youth Writing Residency 2017. […]