Going Under the Words
As part of the Victoria Festival of Authors, I’m delighted to be leading a 2 ½ hour master class on revision on October 18th, at 9:30 am. If you are in Victoria, or can make the trip for this workshop, I hope you will come for this deep dive into the most creative, rewarding and harrowing part of writing a book! Please bring 3 pages of a work in progress. More below, with a link to register.
Going Under the Words: The Art and Craft of Revising
Camosun College Lansdowne Campus, Victoria, BC
Sunday, October 18 • 9:30 AM – 12 PM
Workshop by Shaena Lambert
Revision is the longest, most creative, and most intense phase of writing a book. It’s the place where a thin draft thickens, where multiple revelations take place that make a work sing. Join award-winning author and highly-regarded mentor Shaena Lambert, as she takes writers step by step into their writing—teaching crucial revision tools that enable writers to redraft with confidence and excitement. Learn how to “slide sideways” into your work-in-progress in order to go deeper, how to find the living core of action in your manuscript, and how to create a “juicy larder” of materials in a process of free-form thickening. Participants will explore Lambert’s revision tools, learning playful ways to give depth, surprise, and meaning. Please bring three pages of a work in progress.
In Conversation with Ruth Ozeki
Also at the Victoria Festival… October 18th. I’m thrilled to be moderating this conversation about the story form, and Ruth’s unique take on it, and her new collection, The Typing Lady, where auto-fiction meets fiction…Ruth’s book is enchanting and very funny. I hope you can be there! Get tickets through the link below.
Langham Court Theatre, Victoria, BC
Sunday, October 18 • Starts at 7:30 PM
Moderated by Shaena Lambert
What happens when Ruth Ozeki—novelist, film-maker, memoirist, and Zen Buddhist priest—turns her focus to short stories? Her new book The Typing Lady has won stellar reviews, with her “atmospheric tales that radiate with intelligence and wit” (Publishers’ Weekly). Join Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki, and award-winning novelist and short story writer Shaena Lambert, as they explore the electricity of the short form, its constant lure for novelists, and how stories can dive deeply into the most difficult questions of today, surfacing with joy and humour. This is an exploration of craft, politics, metafiction, the writing life—and the powerful Zen of Ruth Ozeki’s unique writing and process.
Get tickets at Eventbrite.
When Life Meets Fiction
I’ve just begun to read these 3 delicious books for the Vancouver Writers Festival, a panel called True Life Fiction. This event promises to be a candid, deep and intimate conversation. There is always such a fascinating territory, where life meets art. Hope you can join us!! October 23rd at 5 pm on the Revue Stage at Granville Island. Event description and link to tickets below.
True Life Fiction
Is it fact, fiction, or a malleable third category, somewhere in between? Three authors join us with standout works of autofiction, offering a kernel of truth, a dash of myth, and a profusion of luminous writing. Shani Mootoo offers her most intimate work yet in Starry Starry Night, following a young girl and her family as they navigate life in 1960s Trinidad during its movement for independence. In Ten Clear Days, Eric Beck Rubin shares the extraordinary story of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, who requests medical assistance in dying in her final days. Damien Wilkins joins us from New Zealand with his award-winning novel Delirious, in which an aging couple faces questions about how to care for others and our many past and present selves. Moderated by Shaena Lambert.
Participation of Eric Beck Rubin made possible thanks to the generous support of Sam Znaimer in memory of award-winning novelist Nancy Richler. Damien Wilkins’ attendance generously supported by Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.
Get tickets for this event on the Vancouver Writers Fest website.
Literary Giants in Short Form
I’m thrilled to be moderating what I expect will be a powerful, funny and riveting panel on the short story for this year’s Vancouver’s Writer’s Festival, with renowned writers Jonathan Lethem, Andre Alexis and Curtis Sittenfeld. Here is the description from this year’s program. I hope you can join us! You can connect to buy tickets through this link.
Three luminaries of contemporary literature grace our stage with their new short story collections that brilliantly reflect the tensions and foibles of our modern lives. Hear from three acclaimed authors at the height of their powers: André Alexis (Other Worlds), Curtis Sittenfeld (Show Don’t Tell), and Jonathan Lethem (A Different Kind of Tension). Moderated by Shaena Lambert.
Launching Story House Narrative Services
Beginning in winter, 2025, Shaena is thrilled to be collaborating with award-winning and critically acclaimed authors Caroline Adderson and Paul Headrick, in STORY HOUSE, providing narrative services to fiction and creative non-fiction writers. More info on the Mentoring & Teaching page.
A fascinating conversation with Heather O’Neill at the Waterfront Theatre
Talking about the genesis of her latest novel, The Capital of Dreams, powerful mothers, defiant daughters, the creation of artistic selves, and how O’Neill’s own childhood on the streets of Montreal influences her fiction… “women never liked being mothers,” the daughter in The Capital of Dreams muses, “they only liked the idea of motherhood beforehand.”
Two events at the 2024 Vancouver Writers Fest, Oct. 21-27
I’m so delighted to be holding two on-stage conversations at the Vancouver Writers Festival this year. One on short stories — with Caroline Adderson, Shashi Bhat and Aaron Kreuter — where we will talk about the extraordinary range of characters these three authors have dreamed up, the writing of short stories, why the genre can often offer more thrill than a novel, openings and closings — and all things craft and character….
The other event is an hour-long intimate conversation with author Heather O’Neill about all her books, but particularly focusing on the new, and brilliant The Capital of Dreams. Heather O’Neill is the author of a wide-ranging and extraordinary series of novels, from Lullabies for Little Criminals to The Lonely Hearts Hotel, to the fairytale, kafka-esque The Capital of Dreams. I had a deep dive into her work, reading all her novels this fall. It was deep and rewarding treat. Hope you can join us! You can buy tickets and find out more at the Vancouver Writers Fest website.
Event 25: Short Stories, Infinite Identities
Wed. Oct. 23, 5:30 p.m. — Performance Works Theatre, Granville Island
From the VWF program: “Good short stories can share expansive truths with the smallest details. Each of these authors offer mesmerizing insights into what it means to be human in their collections. Bestselling author and Festival favourite Caroline Adderson considers what it means to find happiness — and how we so often seem to understand it through our encounters with others — in A Way to Be Happy. Shashi Bhat shares the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman in the sharply funny Death by a Thousand Cuts. Aaron Kreuter’s Rubble Children tackles Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, Zionism, and anti-Zionism, love requited and unrequited, and cannabis culture, all drenched in suburban wonder and dread. Discover more about the intricate craft of short stories, which offers a necessary tapestry of humanity. Moderated by Shaena Lambert.” GET TICKETS →
Event 44: Heather O’Neill in Conversation
Thurs. Oct. 24, 8:30 p.m. — Waterfront Theatre
From the VWF program: “Few authors can transport us quite the way Heather O’Neill does. Whether gritty, small town Quebec, or strange circuses or — in the case of her latest work — the magical woods of a forgotten country — we are immersed in vivid worlds of heightened emotions and possibility. Savour a conversation with this multi-award-winning author. In conversation with Shaena Lambert.” GET TICKETS →
Journalist and author Sarah Hampson reviews Off the Record
Here’s another great review for Off the Record, this one from noted journalist and author Sarah Hampson in The Literary Review of Canada:
“For her part, Shaena Lambert describes a wonderful childhood memory of a huge red cedar tree in the forest near the family home in West Vancouver. ‘This tree was my first love,’ she writes. Named Monkey Business, it had perfect notches for climbing and boughs that made a comfortable seat, thirty feet in the air. She could see across the woods and watch her mother from afar. The reader immediately understands that voyeuristic habit of a wordsmith and can imagine Lambert up there, with scraped knees, not knowing what she would later become…” READ FULL REVIEW →
—Sarah Hampson, The Literary Review of Canada
Tapping the Stream open for registration
Last year’s writing retreat, Tapping the Stream, at the lush, restorative and deeply creative space Hollyhock, on Cortes Island, was a huge success. Here are some photos of the 7-day retreat, where writers write deeply into their works-in-progress — often making huge creative leaps — host a salon, talk deeply about craft, nurture their creativity and build community. All while letting their hair down, paddling in the bioluminescence, and spending time in the garden. Poets, memoirists, visual artists and musicians (if engaged in a writing project), and novelists. I co-host this annual retreat with renowned teacher and writer Betsy Warland, winner of the Vancouver City arts award and founding artistic director of SFU’s Writers’ Studio.
2024’s Tapping the Stream is now open for registration. It will take place June 21-28. See photos from last year’s edition below, then follow this link to find out more and/or to register.
Off the Record: “A dazzling collection”
“Metcalf’s latest project, the anthology OFF THE RECORD brings together six of the writers with whom Metcalf has worked, in what becomes a dazzling collection of memoir and fiction. If Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page aren’t quite household names, OFF THE RECORD is a powerful argument for just what a mistake that oversight is.” —Robert Wiersema, The Toronto Star
Interview on How I Wrote This
I’ll be interviewed February 8th on the podcast series, How I Wrote This, with writer and host Pamela Hensley. Other authors in the series include: Heather O’Neill, Anita Rau Badami, Mikhail Iossel, Sean Michaels, Baharan Baniahmadi, Kim Thúy, Neil Smith, H. Nigel Thomas, and Michelle Syba. Details at the How I Wrote This website.
Launch of Breathing the Page
I was honoured to participate in the launch of Betsy Warland’s Breathing the Page, a seminal book on writing, along with authors Darrel McLeod and Wayde Compton. If you haven’t read Breathing the Page, it’s a fascinating exploration of the craft of writing. You can watch the launch here: