My Interview on Cabin Tales

My Interview on Cabin Tales

Last year, author Catherine Austen began a spooky new podcast for kids and adults called Cabin Tales, which I highly recommend. Catherine is a Canadian author of many excellent books, including including Walking Backward, My Cat Isis, 26 Tips for Surviving Grade 6, 28 Tricks for a Fearless Grade 6, and All Good Children. Please check out her books!

Now, you can listen to Catherine’s interview with me on Cabin Tales. It includes my advice to young writers with writer’s block, and tales of terror from my childhood. (Yes, I was afraid of closets. Maybe I still am.)

My Interview on Cabin Tales

Cabin Tales: A Spooky Podcast for Kids

It was great fun to be part of Cabin Tales, a spooky new podcast for kids and adults.

It’s a new project from Catherine Austen, author of many books including my personal favourite All Good Children.

Each episode of Cabin Tales focuses on one aspect of creative writing, such as setting. They include original spooky stories, excerpts from creepy classics, and writing tips from authors like me. The stories are deliciously monstrous – ones you might tell around a campfire to scare your friends – so Catherine warns that they’re not for very young listeners.

Cabin Tales also encourages young writers to share their own stories with fun weekly prompts. I hope you check it out!

Upcoming Talk: SCBWI Canada East Art of Story

UPDATE: Thank you to the organizers of the SCBWI Canada East Art of Story Conference, who have wisely decided to cancel it due to covid-19. I hope to be back as a speaker at a later event. In the meantime, they’re hoping to host online workshops and distance critiques so stayed tuned!

I’m thrilled and honoured to be included as faculty at the upcoming SCBWI Canada East Art of Story Conference. This is an intimate and craft-based conference focused on writing and illustrating for children and teens. I hope you’ll be able to join us.

Date: April 24 to 26, 2020
Place: Albert at Bay Suite Hotel, Ottawa

Applications for the Rising Kite Diversity Scholarship and the Gift of Creativity bursary are available.

You can check out all the faculty and workshops. My talk will be based on my critical thesis and grad lecture I completed during my MFA in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I’m excited to be able to share it with a wider audience.

How To Build Character Cultural Literacy
To reflect the full and varied reality of human experience, all writers need to respectfully and thoughtfully depict secondary characters with a range of cultural beliefs. Even when our protagonists largely mirror us, can we say the same for all their friends?

Each character we create exists within a global village and within a particular nation, neighbourhood, social class, ability level as well as an ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, family, and peer group—each with its own distinct culture. Awareness of our characters’ culture beliefs will deepen their presence on the page.

Using insights from contemporary cultural anthropologists, I’ll introduce tools we can use to identify our characters’ deep-level cultural beliefs, offering insights into their motivations and story arcs. I’ll focus on family culture since that’s where we first learn and express our beliefs, although these tools can be applied to other cultural groups. We’ll also compare our own cultural beliefs to our characters’ to discuss the importance of respecting #OwnVoices, writing within our cultural elements, and avoiding bias through omission.

My Latest Komics

I’ve been having fun drawing my Kan’t Draw Komics, which I started because I’m a terrible artist. You can read more about that in this post. Here are my latest ones.

As author Jane Smiley said, “Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.”

May your story garden thrive!

Personally, I’m not sure the revision stage ever ends. That’s one of the wonderful and challenging parts of writing.

You can read more of my comics on my Kan’t Draw Komics page.

How to Revise a Picture Book (Part 2)

During my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, I wrote about how to revise picture-book manuscripts. I’m happy to share this as a two-part article in the CANSCAIP News.

The first part was published in the Spring issue, and it focuses on beginnings and endings. Now, the Summer issue includes the second part on how to revise the messy middle.

For the article, I visited my local archive—the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books in Toronto—to seek original manuscripts that became acclaimed picture books. I then analyzed how three authors revised their manuscripts, including Kathy Stinson’s Red is Best (illustrated by Robin Baird Lewis, published by Annick Press), Linda Granfield’s The Road to Afghanistan (illustrated by Brian Deines, published by Scholastic Canada), and Paulette Bourgeois’s Franklin in the Dark (illustrated by Brenda Clark, published by Kids Can Press).

Many thanks to the Canadian Society of Children’s Authors, Illustrators and Performers for publishing both parts. Thanks also to Kathy Stinson, Linda Granfield, and Paulette Bourgeois for permission to quote from their archived material. Happy revising!