pazofarrell Event

Winter 2023 Season

Wednesday, February 15th

Creating Content for Video Games: 2:30 – 4 PM @ 4th SPACE Concordia

Curious about writing for video games? Writers Read has you covered. Get the perspective of four minds on working in the video game industry as writers, on entrepreneurship, on effective dialogue, on written versus visual storytelling, on building a ludic plot, and much more. Panelist include Osama Dorias, Ashley Obscura, Maize Longboat, and Jill Murray. The panel will be moderated by Paz O’Farrell.
Time will be allotted for attendees to ask the panelists questions.

All are welcome. No registration required. This event will be live on Zoom, and recorded in 4th Space’s YouTube channel.

Poetry Reading: 6 – 7:30 PM @ EV 1.615

What better way to recover from Valentine’s Day than a poetry reading? Liz Howard and Juliane Okot Bitek will read from their work and participate in a discussion on new directions in Canadian writing and in the teaching of creative writing. Liz Howard will join the Department of English as a tenure-track faculty member as of June 2023; Juliane Okot Bitek recently joined the faculty at Queen’s University as Assistant Professor of Black Creative Writing.

Thursday, February 16th

Writers Read presents Liz Howard’s Writing Masterclass!

Liz Howard is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. She is the 2023 Shaftesbury Creative Writer-in-Residence at Victoria College in the University of Toronto and will be joining Concordia University’s Department of English as an Assistant Professor of creative writing in June 2023. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.

The Masterclass will take place on Thursday, February 16th, from noon to until 2 PM. The location is in Concordia’s John Molson Building, MB 2.130 (Floating Box).

Note that capacity for this event is limited to thirty. All are welcome. Registration link: https://forms.gle/88Y38QqFaWV2Debk9

pazofarrell Event

Fall 2022 Season

Writers Read is back in-person! Follow us on Instagram @writersreadconcordia for reminders closer to each event’s date. All can be found at Concordia’s Events calendar.

Thursday, October 20th

Reading and Q&A with Xochitl Gonzalez

10 – 11:15 AM at LB 322. 

In honor of Latin-American Heritage Month, the U.S. Consulate in Montreal is sponsoring a talk by The New York Times best-selling author Xochitl Gonzalez. Gonzalez is the author of the novel Olga Dies Dreaming, and a graduate from Iowa’s MFA. Josip Novakovich will hosting the reading, and there will be space for questions from the audience.

New Grub Street: Non-Fiction Panel

12:30 – 2 PM at Floating Box (MB 2.130) in the John Molson Building.

Join us at Concordia for New Grub Street, a Non-Fiction Panel. Panelists Durga Chew-Bose, Perry King, and Taras Grescoe will cover writing on food, sports, and travel, among others, and discuss the intricacies of their careers in non-fiction. There will be a Q&A session moderated by Haley Mlotek.

This event is free and open to the public. Note that capacity is limited to fifty attendants. Registration link: https://forms.gle/Nji6LzhJQs8R25D36

Tuesday, October 25th

Reading and Q&A with Kasia Van Schaik

7 PM at LB 320.

Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the linked story collection, We Have Never Lived on Earth, and the poetry chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country. Her writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, The Rumpus, Maisonneuve Magazine, Electric Literature, the Best Canadian Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. A postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, Kasia is currently working on a book of cultural criticism entitled Women Among Monuments and is also co-editing an essay collection, Shelter in Text, which interrogates the relationship between the physical and textual spaces we inhabit. Kasia lives in Tiohti:áke (Montreal).

“My collection of linked short stories We Have Never Lived On Earth explores the constraints facing young women at the beginning of the 21st century, which include the feminist backlash of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the growing recognition of climate disaster. The main character, Charlotte, arrives in Canada as a young girl in the late 1990s where she must learn to navigate sexuality, friendship, gendered violence—both internalized and externalized—and cultural alienation during these formative years. But the world around her is in trouble as well. Earthquakes, wildfires, disappearing islands and animal species, wounded sea creatures, trash-strewn shores and rising levels of microplastics make up the environments and textures of these stories. With this book, I want to reflect on how our sense of threatened ecological futurity echoes and amplifies the precarious position of being a woman in the world.”

Tuesday, November 8th

How to Make Money (and Ideally Have a Little Fun) Writing for the Screen with Arthur Holden

12 – 1:30 PM at LB 322. 

Arthur Holden will briefly talk about the distinction between writing scripts for theatrical release and writing scripts for TV in its various forms: free broadcast, cable networks and online subscription (ie. Netflix).

Focus will be placed on:

– writing animation scripts for kids’ TV

– writing made-for-TV movies

– adapting non-English-language productions for broadcast in dubbed versions.

Holden will touch on working methods, the operative differences between purely creative writing and writing-for-hire, and writing for series TV. Questions are encouraged. There will be an opportunity for students to talk about their own script ideas – or ongoing projects – and to discuss possible strategies for developing and selling those ideas in Montreal and the wider world.