Vancouver Manuscript Intensive 2008

With Betsy Warland

and guest mentor
Shaena Lambert

The 2008 Vancouver Manuscript Intensive will begin in early January and run through end of May . VMI is a unique intensive. We begin by working with your entire manuscript, as contrasted to installments that eventually may add up to your entire manuscript by the intensive’s completion. Betsy introduced VMI in 2007. She had full enrollment of five writers who made significant strides with their manuscripts.

Betsy is pleased to announce that VMI 2008 will include Shaena Lambert as fiction mentor. For the past three years, Shaena has been a mentor in the Humber School for Writers Correspondence Program. She is excited by the prospect of also working face-to-face with local fiction writers.

In 2007 Shaena’s novel Radiance was published to critical acclaim by Random House in Canada and by Virago Press in the United Kingdom. Her book of short stories, The Falling Woman (Random House Canada, 2002), was chosen as a best book by the Globe and Mail, shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and published in Canada, the U.K and Germany. Her stories have appeared in Toronto Life, Image (Dublin), The Journey Prize Anthology and many prominent literary magazines. Please see her website at: www.shaenlambert.com.

Betsy has published ten books of poetry and creative nonfiction. Her most recent books are a long poem and essay on poetry, only this blue (The Mercury Press, 2005), and a memoir, Bloodroot – The Untelling of Motherloss (Sumach Press, 2000). Betsy has been teaching creative writing nationally and internationally for over twenty-five years and has offered a manuscript consulting service for emerging writers and authors for two decades. Betsy is the Director of The Writer’s Studio at S.F.U. Please see her website at www.betsywarland.com.

Writers and authors with whom Betsy and Shaena have done manuscript development, have gone on to publish books, win, or be short-listed for such prizes as the CBC Literary Competition, the Surrey Writers’ Guild International Competition, the Trillium Book Award of Toronto, the Griffin Award, the Maritimes Poets’ Corner Award, the Pat Lowther Award, the Canadian Jewish Award in Poetry.

Examples of manuscript aspects we will focus on during VMI are: how to shift from the page-by-page focus of an early draft to the whole territory of a manuscript; how to identify what each narrative’s requirements are; how to locate the reader by finding your story’s strongest beginning; how to deepen your character's psychology and uncover hidden motives; how to assess and correct proximity problems from the micro (line/sentence) to the macro ( the manuscript’s over-all form).

Betsy will work with creative nonfiction; poetry; cross-genre narratives; autobiographically-inspired prose, and innovative, or lyrical fiction. Betsy will work with a group of 4 - 5 writers.

Shaena will work with short stories, innovative or lyrical fiction, novella, and the novel. Shaena will work with a group of 3 writers.

We will consider offering VMI at a distance for writers who don’t live in Vancouver, as long as they are able to travel to Vancouver for most consults and group meetings.


What does VMI include

• An initial full reading and assessment of your manuscript
• Five in-depth consults
• Four group meetings
• A final progress assessment and plan for proceeding

Group meetings will not be workshop sessions but rather discussions led by your mentor about formal and structural concerns; breakthroughs you have had with your manuscript; short talks on craft or exploratory exercises, as well discussion on publishing, the business of writing, and a general exchange of ideas.

VMI APPLICATION DEADLINE and START-UP DATE

Deadline: your application must be received by December 7th, 2007.

Notification: I will notify you as to whether you have, or have not, been accepted by December 14th, 2007.

Start-up date: we will begin holding individual consults January 7th - 19th, 2008. Our first group meeting will occur third week in January.

Mail your application to:
Betsy Warland
# 105 -1484 Charles Street
Vancouver, B.C. V5L 2S8

Include in your application:

$50 application fee cheque made out to Betsy Warland (this fee is non-refundable but if your are accepted in VMI, it will credited to your tuition)

Either your entire manuscript (if you think it doesn’t make sense to submit a portion of it), OR five pages from its beginning, five from its middle and five from its end (total of 15 pages)

A page summary of how long you have been working on your manuscript, who you have received guidance from about it, how much of it you think you have yet to write, how many drafts you have done (if you have a full manuscript), and what areas you see you need guidance in.

Tuition: $1,400.

If you prefer to pay in installments, Betsy will accept a series of post-dated cheques. Receipts are available.