By Katherine Gibson (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 16, 2013
While most of us were stuffing ourselves with turkey this Thanksgiving, a small group of 12 people were up at Hope’s Kawkawa Lake taking in an intensive weekend of writing.
Hosted by Michelle Vandepol and Allison Kilgannon through UFV’s continuing studies program, the Writers’ Weekend gave individuals ranging in age from 16 to 71 the opportunity to find encouragement and workshop their creative works in a safe environment.
“When you’re coming together as writers there’s a little bit of fear involved in it – it’s hard to say where people are at in their confidence level,” Vandepol explains. “We can have people who have done readings [and] people who have never shared their work with anyone, but we’re excited to try and make this as least scary and most exciting for everyone.”
Beyond creating an avenue for personal writing, Vandepol also notes that this event is about building community and giving participants a break from their everyday lives.
“[We’re] doing outdoor pizza oven baking, [taking] kayaks out, and we have [writing] workshops too,” Vandepol continues. “I think writers will be super excited to come here because it is such an artsy place and it’s a bit of a destination. People are coming out from Abbotsford and beyond, so that way when they come here they’ve had a little holiday removed from their everyday life.”
The event also gives participants an opportunity to learn skills relevant to future success within the writing business. As 16-year-old Hunter Ramey, the youngest participant of the weekend, explains, the event has helped her acquire knowledge surrounding her aspirations to be published.
“I want to get something published in the future and I’m really working towards that,” she explains. “[Writers’ Weekend] really helps you develop your story writing and novel skills – you get to discover things that you didn’t know before.”
While the weekend was about polishing writing skills, for 71-year-old Bill McGladdery the event was also about learning to believe in his own creative abilities.
“I’m not that confident in my own imagination – I wasn’t even sure that I had one,” McGladdery explains. “But Michelle [and Alison] are so encouraging – it’s just nice to know that you’re doing something right, and that’s an invigorating part of [the weekend].”
Vandepol hopes that the success of the weekend carries over into the future, giving new batches of writers the opportunity to take part in similar events.
“We’re hoping in the future to do some one-day Saturday events because we’ve had feedback from people who were saying, ‘Oh, I would love to do that, but my schedule doesn’t allow me to stay there for that whole time,’ or, ‘That’s a bit too much for my student budget,’” Vandepol concludes. “We are also totally thinking huge-scale too: a writers’ festival would be like pie in the sky down the road – it would just be awesome.”
