OTTAWA
INDEPENDENT WRITERS
35 YEARS. OVER 300 MEMBERS. STILL GROWING.
Tuesday, September 20, at 7 p.m.
Show Don't Tell
The Art of Detail with Shyam Selvadurai
OIW is back!
And our 2022-23 season is off to a fantastic start on Tuesday, September 20th, with acclaimed author and novelist Shyam Selvadurai. This workshop looks at how we can engage vivid detail to bring characters and settings to life in our fiction. Shyam Selvadurai's lecture will cover the techniques one might use to create vivid detail. He will also demonstrate how he used these craft elements in excerpts from his new novel Mansions of the Moon.
Shyam Selvadurai's was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He came to Canada with his family at the age of nineteen. His first novel Funny Boy, won the W.H. Smith/ Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Lambda Literary Award in the US, and was short-listed for the prestigious Giller Prize. In 2020, it was made into a feature film by award-winning director, Deepta Mehta. He is the author of Cinnamon Gardens and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, and the editor of an anthology, Story-wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction. His fourth novel, The Hungry Ghosts, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award. Shyam’s new novel Mansion of the Moon, released by Knopf in 2022, is a historical novel about the Buddha’s wife. His books have been published in the US, the UK, and India, and published in translation in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, and Israel.
In 2016, Shyam had the interesting honour of having a spider named after him: Brignolia shyami, a small goblin spider.
OIW monthly meeting will be held via Zoom for the 2022-23 season. Check out our Membership Page to see how you can join. Looking to connect in person? Stay tuned for some face-to-face events planned for this fall.
Photo credit George Pimentel
COMING THIS FALL:
The OIW 2022 Anthology
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." - Joan Didion
We are thrilled to be working on our first Anthology in two year, Ottawa Rising, an anthology of prose and poetry.
A big Thank you! to all OIW members who submitted.
As we prepare for production, we are awed at the incredible talent on show. Over 40 members submitted stories, poems, essays. Well done Ottawa!
Stay tuned for the Anthology, available in Fall 2022.
OUR MEETINGS
MONTHLY MEETINGS
OIW holds nine monthly program meetings from September to June each year on a wide variety of writing related topics, normally with a speaker and plenty of opportunity for questions.
CURRENT MEETINGS
OIW gathers every third Tuesday of the month with presentations starting at 7 pm, lasting until 9 pm. The meetings currently take place on the Zoom virtual platform.
Visit our membership page to sign-up now!
OUR MEMBERS
Meet a few of our writers
Mike Young
Kirk's Landing
Mike was born and raised in Kirkland Lake, a small northern mining town with a nearby First Nations reserve. He grew up with a love of the north, even in the midst of winter, exploring the surrounding woods with his friends, and his grandfather. Kirk's Landing, a crime novel, was his first book. In 2016, he published a sequel, Return to Kirk's Landing.
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Patricia McCarthy
The Crimson Man
Author of the wildly imaginative Crimson vampire series, currently consisting of (6) novels: The Crimson Man, The Crimson Boy, The Crimson Woman, The Crimson Time, The Crimson Crimes, and her latest in the series The Crimson Dream. The Crimson vampire series takes place in Ottawa, Canada.
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Craig Munro
Bones of the Past
Craig has spent his life traveling and moving from one field of work to another. A voracious fan of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, it was only a matter of time before he turned his mind to creating a world of his own. The Bones of the Past is the first installment in the epic fantasy series - The Books of Dust and Bone.
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Melissa Yuan-Innes
Human Remains
Melissa Yuan-Innes (Melissa Yi) is an emergency room physician. Her newest Hope Sze crime novel is HUMAN REMAINS. THE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, a previous Hope Sze novel, was selected by CBC Radio as a best crime novel of the season.