Writing workshop inspires

Photo: Contributed

Two local women recently launched Raise Your Voice, a self-paced online creative writing workshop.

The online workshop launched in June as it's meant to focus on helping students feel inspired, and make their writing “gutsy, gorgeous and urgent.”

“There’s such an amazing creative momentum and energy out there among women artists, and summer can be such a pensive, tense time for both teenagers and twenty-somethings—it’s the perfect space for writing through angst,” says Kerry Gilbert, a poet and creative writing instructor at Okanagan College.

“We wanted to introduce students to a real range of writers who are pushing boundaries in all kinds of ways and who students may not be familiar with," says Natalie Appleton,  who focuses on memoir and literary non-fiction. "We wanted to focus not on devices like plot, but themes that are really relevant to them: courage, love, vulnerability, etc., and give them the creativity tools to harness that electric creative energy young women."

Each of the 12 Raise Your Voice thematic lessons includes writing prompts, creativity challenges, writing exercises, and readings and interviews with edgy authors across genres and via multi-media.

Each lesson could take a few hours to complete and can be done at each student’s own pace.

The two women also created Storymakers, a place where young women gather to uncover and use their writing voice in powerful ways and discover boundary-pushing new writers; to reach higher alongside a community of like-minded writers.

Each of the lessons for Raise Your Voice are downloaded online but students are encouraged to go offline to do the exercises and tap into their creativity free of screens and distractions.