Fall Features
Fall Features
Hello everyone! We have exciting news for the fall…
VMI Q&A
Sunday, Oct 16 at 12pm PST
Are you curious about how VMI’s mentoring options can support your work-in-progress? Do you have friends who have been asking about the program?
Directors Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Rachel Rose are hosting an info session on Zoom. We’ll discuss the differences between the Six-Month Intensive, VMI Pro, VMI Wosk Fellowship, our two SOLO options, and field your questions. Applications for the Six-Month Intensive and VMI Wosk Fellowship are due November 9 so this is a great chance to find out about our applications process, programs, and mentors. Please share widely with anyone who may be interested!
RSVP to info@vancouvermanuscriptintensive.com for the link
VMI Newsletter
We are so pleased that the interest in our VMI newsletter is growing, and hope it will be a resource to support and celebrate your accomplishments and publications. Alumni and current students, send us your news! We also want to hear from our mentors about all your creative writing accomplishments, not just book or journal publications: If you are writing for radio, TV, doing podcasts, hosting interviews–send it along. Just be sure it is in the second person, as the examples below illustrate. Please feel free to share the newsletter with your contacts, whether or not you have something to promote this time around, in order to support your colleagues at VMI.
Please email your news to rachelshashiwrites@gmail.com in this format and only this format:
(Your name) has a new book out (title). May be purchased through the publisher (link attached at the end).
(Your name) has a publication forthcoming in (publication journal). Link attached at the end.
(Your name) is reading with (individual names) as part of the (series name). Link attached at the end.
We regret that we will not be able to edit emails not sent in this format for inclusion in the newsletter.
VMI at Writers Fest
Saturday, Oct 22 at 5pm
The Nest, Granville Island
Blending Genres (Event 66) with Tara McGuire, Stuart Ross, and recent VMI mentor Jónína Kirton hosted by VMI director Elee Kraljii Gardiner.
Special note: At the end of the event the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award will be introduced by Rachel Rose and presented by judge Susan Olding. Tickets here.
About the Blending Genres panel:
If the combination of nouns in Stuart Ross’s latest work, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, feels strange, it perfectly summarizes the theme of tonight’s event. Each author is a marvel at combining the unexpected—either writing in many genres across works, or blending multiple genres into one book. We delve into these kaleidoscopic offerings before a ceremony for the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award. In addition to poet and essayist Stuart Ross, we’re joined by Jónína Kirton, who merges poetry and lyrical memoir in Standing in a River of Time. Tara McGuire, meanwhile, offers a poignant, moving elegy to her son lost to an overdose with a first- and third-person memoir-fiction hybrid in Holden After and Before. Celebrate craft—and the next Warland winner—with these talents.
VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
On Oct 22 at the Vancouver Writers Fest’s Blending Genres panel, VMI director Rachel Rose will introduce the award and invite judge Susan Olding to the stage to announce the winner.
The finalists, from a field of nation-wide submissions, in alphabetical order are:
My Mother, My Translator by Jaspreet Singh (Véhicule Press)
Remnants by Céline Huyghebaert, translated by Aleshia Jensen (Book*hug Press)
Whitemud Walking by Matthew James Weigel (Coach House Books)
Susan Olding’s comments about these extraordinary books are here:
The field of submissions prompted a list of three titles deserving honourable mention:
David Bradford’s Dream of No One But Myself (Brick Books)
Tanis MacDonald’s Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (Wolsak and Wynn)
Stuart Ross’s The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press)
You can read Susan’s comments about these notable books here:
Canadian publishing is producing fascinating work and we are happy to support it. Thank you to Susan for her careful reading, and to the award’s namesake, Betsy Warland, for opening doors for the hybrid text.
Wishing you well with your writing—we hope to see you soon!
Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Rachel Rose