Thanks to support of the Rozsa Foundation, we have contracted facilitators in four rural or remote regions to organize events for writers and establish a stronger WGA presence in the regions. If you would like to get in touch with any of our faciliators, please let us know and we will make it happen.
Please join us in welcoming the new reps!
- Airdire – Vivian Hansen
- Fort McMurray – Dorothy Bentley
- Grande Prairie – Sue Farrell Holler
- Lethbridge – Michelle Greysen
Lethbridge
Michelle Greysen is a long standing WGA member and past WGA board member and also past board member and National President of PWAC (Professional Writers Association of Canada). With a background in corporate newspaper and magazine publishing she has been a professional freelance writer for a few decades with many national bylines and cover stories to her credit. Although a non-fiction freelance writer for hire, her love of writing is fiction and poetry. She has a published poetry chapbook, First New Forbidden True, and has had multiple published fiction works in The Prairie Journal, each garnering nominations for awards. Michelle has spent time at Sage Hill Writing and a residency at Wallace Stegner House. When not writing Michelle is an award winning busy Realtor in Lethbridge and southern Alberta. This spring Michelle will revive the writing group she started in Lethbridge years back and through support of the WGA will be the area designated WGA Regional Facilitator focusing on supporting writers and growing WGA membership across the southern province.
Grande Prairie
Grande Prairie author Sue Farrell Holler is passionate about writing, learning, and connecting people, particularly in the arts community. A journalist by profession she has written hundreds (probably thousands) of articles for newspapers and magazines, a weekly newspaper column, short stories that have appeared in various anthologies, and four books for children. Her latest book Cold White Sun was a finalist for a 2019 Governor General’s Award.
Fort McMurray
Dorothy Bentley knew she was a writer at a young age. Her mother took her to the library on Saturdays which is where she came to love books. But it was in her school library, as a kindergartener, where she decided she would like to be a writer.
Her first love was writing picture books. As a teen, she began to write short stories and poetry, and she wrote reams and reams and reams of poetry. She also began to experiment with novel writing.
For a long while, she has written non-fiction articles and columns, as well as producing non-profit newsletters, magazines, website and blog content, and social media feed. Now, she has added back her first loves– picture books, poetry, short stories, and novel writing.
She imagined Summer North Coming in 2015 and it was one of the winners of the Words In Motion Poetry Contest held by the Arts Department of the Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which is way up north in Canada’s sub-arctic region. You can find it by zig-zagging north-east on the Alberta map until you get just past Grassland. Then you take a hard left and drive for another million years; but you must stop before you get to Woodbuffalo National Park. If you see a sign for that, you’ve gone too far.
Soon after, she decided it would be fun to learn about poetry and novels at university. She has been going to school (mostly virtually) ever since. While she loves being challenged to expand her reading tastes and hone her analytical writing skills, she hopes she won’t misplace her freewheeling creativity while un-dangling modifiers and un-splicing commas.
Airdrie
Vivian Hansen has published poetry, creative nonfiction, essays and memoir in Canadian journals and anthologies. She has three full-length books of poetry: Leylines of My Flesh (Touchwood Press), A Bitter Mood of Clouds and A Tincture of Sunlight (Frontenac House). Chapbooks include Never Call It Bird: A Melody of AIDS, and Angel Alley: The Victims of Jack the Ripper. Past publications have included “Bedstemor, Woman of Letters” in Our Grandmothers, Ourselves, and “Flatline Across the Prairie” with Legacy Magazine. Recent nonfiction “Hundedagene and the Foxtail Phenomenon” was published with Guernica Editions in Coming Here, Being Here. A memoir, “Telling,” appears in Waiting (University of Alberta Press) Her essay “Where We Surfaced” is in the 2019 Short Éditions with the Calgary Public Library. “Design Charette for Blakiston Park” was published with Loft 112.
Vivian teaches creative writing with the University of Calgary, Alexandra Writers Centre and Mount Royal University. In 2019 she was a mentor for the Author Development Program with Alexandra Writers Centre, and Borderlines Writers Circle with AWCS and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. She won the 2017 Teaching Award from the University of Calgary in Professional and Continuing Education. Vivian holds a BA in English from the University of Calgary, and an MFA in Creative Writing with the University of British Columbia.