For over fifteen years, I’ve been running creative writing workshops on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, at universities like the University of Victoria, the University of East Anglia, and the University of King’s College in Halifax, and in community ventures like the London Short Story Festival and the Quebec Writers Federation. Before all this teaching, I sat in workshops on the other side of the table, learning what I could from writers and teachers who gave more to me and my peers than they had good reason to. That’s the kind of gift you can never pay back, can only pay forward. Thus.

NarrativeWorks was born out of a desire to provide the rigour of an MFA-style workshop without the MFA-style cost. These workshops hinge on small group size (8 writers max) and thoughtful feedback—that is, on the attention to a story and a writer that each story and each writer deserves. Groups meet once a week for nine weeks (with a break in the middle), and every session is devoted to two stories. All group members submit twice, but everybody reads, in depth, 14 stories from writers with similar energy and drive. You’re likely to produce a publishable-quality story, but you’re guaranteed to learn something about your own creative process, and this—the process, not the product—is what you’ll carry with you to future endeavours, whatever they may be.

My teaching philosophy is “High Rigour, Low Stakes.” The writing matters—we treat it that way—but this is about building a practice, trying things, sharpening your voice (whatever that may be), and finding a writing process that works for you. In addition, you’ll find a community of writers who want to be writers: avid readers, bookworms, engineers with novels in the closet, lovable nerds.

I’ve edited over 970 stories since I started doing this; my students (and former members of this workshop) have published novels, won awards such as the Journey Prize, and landed funded spots at programs as prestigious as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But more importantly, they’ve found a way to sustain their creative life, which, nowadays, is harder than it ought to be, or maybe ever has been.