“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
The Drink the Wild Air winter/spring youth writing retreat is a great time to reconnect with the WordsWorth community, make new friends, tell and create stories, and, most importantly, write! Time will be spent outdoors so we can burn extra energy and drink in that wild air!
Drink the Wild Air is a Creative Writing Retreat for Youth ages 11 – 19. This year we will come together at Camp Kannawin to take workshops with working professionals, play games, share our stories, our songs, our poems, and our art. Join us on March 13th for orientation, and on March 14th and 15th for a weekend of creative razzmatazz, hijinks, capers, and general hullabaloo! Our faculty has now been selected and you can read more about them below.
Date: March 13-15th, 2026
March 13th: Orientation
March 14th – 15th: Camp Days
Location: Camp Kannawin (near Sylvan Lake). Please note: Drink the Wild Air takes place In-Person. At this time, we do not have online or hybrid participation.
Price: $240.00 CDN
Limited Bursaries are available to partially cover the costs of participation.
Registration: Opens Wednesday, December 10th at the link below (or scroll down)
Deadline: February 26th, 2026
Participation is capped at 25 people, so please register as soon as possible to guarantee your spot.
Faculty
We are pleased to welcome several community leaders and talented writers to lead our weekend. Ting Pimentel-Elger, Kim Firmston, and Bertrand Bickersteth will be joining us to share their expertise. Read below to learn more about them and their sessions!
| If you cancel: | You will receive: |
| On or before February 27, 2026 | 100% of the registration fees refunded |
| Between February 28 – March 6, 2026 | 50% of the registration fees refunded |
| After March 6, 2026 | No refund |
Bertrand Bickersteth is the author of The Response of Weeds, the winner of several awards. His forthcoming collection, Canadian Colored, will be published by NeWest Press in 2027. His nonfiction work, Numinous Animal, will be published by Athabasca University Press in 2026. His current project features poetry about Black Cowboys from Alberta, for which he is designing a font based on their historic cattle brands. He lives in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary) and teaches at Olds College.
Nature is a wonderful muse. But it is also “naturally” contradictory. It is orderly and chaotic. It has patterns and it is random. It destroys and it creates. At the heart of this contradiction are humans. We are seen as separate from nature and often act against it. But at the same time we are a part of nature and we are joined to its endless cycles. In this course we will use poetry to harness our understanding of nature: we will explore unexpected unions, give voice to our unvoiced selves, and honour the generative/destructive landscapes of our identities.
Kim is the Youth Program Director and an instructor at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre (AWCS) in Calgary. They are also an absolutely mad writer who has written a bunch of YA books, two award winning documentaries, a handful of short stories, one poem, and plays which have taken to stage around the world. They love nothing better than writing with others and have even created a collaborative publishing company which only publishes books written by two or more youth. Although Kim is VERY old now (they rode to school on dinosaurs, uphill both ways), they are still having an amazing number of grand adventures to add to their innumerable stories.
Work together to make a whole world from map to society, and everything in between. Then make your own characters to live in the world and create lore. Afterwards you can use this knowledge to build your own robust world to tell stories from.
Ting’s body of work represent diversity and multifariousness, intermixture of words, images, moves (including dance & yoga), languages, cultural traditions and a variety of innovation and invention and tons of fun. She embraces openness, diversity, equity, inclusivity and is a certified trauma-informed Yoga instructor.
Her recent visual and literary arts collaborations were with the Alberta Filipino Journal, Arts from the Unknown, Polyglot Magazine, Hungryzine, and more.
When Ting isn’t interpreting for the Canadian government or engaged in development work or volunteering as a Sign Language interpreter, she advocates for self-care through activities such as yoga, intuitive arts, sound bath, walking with puppies, hugging trees, or foraging in the nearby forest.
Ting will be leading a multi-faceted workshop. Stay tuned for more details!
