Saturday, Oct. 17, Memoir Workshop, Donna Kane, Peace-Liard Arts Council and author of Orrery. Register for this free live online event at bcwriters.ca/events-for-writers, and a Zoom link will be emailed to you. When it’s time for this Federation of British Columbia Writers event, click on the link and follow the prompts to join the conversation!
Everyone has a story, but what makes it worth writing? What makes it worth reading? In this workshop, participants will be given tools to recognize the underlying forces in their stories and to draw them out in ways that deepen, for both writer and reader, the meaning and insights of those stories. – Donna Kane, MFA, workshop facilitator
Donna Kane is a writer living in northern British Columbia. Her poems, short fiction, reviews and essays have been published widely in journals such as The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review, as well as in several anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013), I Found it at the Movies: An Anthology of Film Poems (Guernica Press 2014), In This Together: Fifteen True Stories of Real Reconciliation (Brindle and Glass, 2016) and, most recently, Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (University of Arizona Press, 2020). She has published three books of poetry, Somewhere, a Fire, (Hagios Press, 2004), and Erratic (Hagios Press, 2007), both finalists for the ReLit Award and Orrery (Harbour, 2020). She is also the recipient of the Lina Chartrand Poetry Award (2000) and in 2010 she was a winner in Geist’s Annual Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Her poetry has been featured on CBC’s Daybreak North and North by Northwest, and in 2011, her poem, Summer Solstice, was featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. “The Gaze,” one of the chapters from Summer of the Horse (Harbour Publishing, 2018) was shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest and published in the 2016 summer issue of The New Quarterly. An excerpt from Orrery, was published as a chapbook titled Pioneer 10, I Hear You by JackPine Press in October, 2016. She holds an MFA from UBC. She has also received Banff Writing Studio Scholarships (2000, 2003, 2005, 2011), a Canada Council for the Arts Individual Writing Grant (2008), and several BC Arts Council Creative Writing Grants (2005, 2008, 2015). Kane is executive director of the Peace Liard Regional Arts Council, located in Rolla, BC. Kane also serves, on occasion, as sessional instructor teaching English and Creative Writing at Northern Lights College. While at the University of Victoria, Kane served on the editorial board for poetry at the Malahat Review.
In 2001, Kane established Writing on the Ridge (WOTR), a non-profit society aimed at fostering the arts in northeast BC. Through WOTR, she has hosted nearly 100 Canada Council funded readings, organized the first writer-in-residence program at Northern Lights College (2005 with Jeanette Lynes), and created the Moberly Lake Writing Retreats (1999 and 2000 with mentors Patrick Lane, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky). She co-founded the Festival of the Sweetwater Moon which continues today as the Sweetwater905 Festival, attracting audiences of over 600 to the working farm of Emilie and Larry Mattson in Rolla, BC. This three-day event features literary arts, music, visual art, and film. In 2006, she co-founded the Muskwa-Kechika Artist Camps aimed at raising awareness of the Muskwa-Kechika Management Area. The camps have attracted visual artists from across North America including Derek Houston, Peter von Tiesenhausen, and Brian Jungen, and writers such as John Vaillant, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, Sue Sinclair, and Elizabeth Bachinsky.
In 2009, she received the Aurora Award of Distinction: Arts and Culture for her contributions to the arts in the Peace-Liard area and in 2020 received an Honorary Associate of Arts Degree from Northern Lights College “in recognition for her passion towards the literary arts and her continuing ability to inspire others.” Donna is an area representative for the Federation of British Columbia Writers in the Peace-Liard region.
Her new book of poetry, Orrery, inspired by Pioneer 10 will be out in September with Harbour Publishing.
*This event is subsidized by the Federation of British Columbia Writers and the Province of British Columbia. Donations are welcome here to help cover the costs of special events like this one so more can attend. Thank you for connecting with us!
