First Writing Workshops for MY LAKESHORE - MY HOME Were Incredibly Exciting!

Bringing people together and helping them share their art is something that I’m passionate about.  This week, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do that as I led two writing workshops for MY LAKESHORE - MY HOME.  

Everyone was coming together to develop personal material for the festival because it will be a celebration of THEIR experiences and THEIR stories so, I didn’t want the participants to feel isolated or to simply sit and write.  I felt that it was important, not only to spark their creativity, but to create a sense of community and communal experiences in the room.  So, rather than start off with a seated writing activity, I chose to bring everyone together with a theatre warm-up game that had us moving and laughing and sometimes even trying to remember our own names.  From there, I asked everyone to chose, from a series of photos taken in the Lakeshore area (storefronts, parks, playgrounds, the war memorial, the lake, the sky, a painted mural, and more), one that resonated with them.  After a moment of thought, each writer turned to another and shared why they had chosen that particular photo - their personal connection to something in the photo.  Then, they swapped photos, moved through a simple chain dance to someone else and used this new photo as a jumping off point into a new story.  As they did this a few times, it was exciting to hear the animated conversations and to see people coming together, laughing and connecting over something in each photo.    From here, we moved on to using the photos as ‘personal muses’ and the spark into our personal stories, real or imagined.  This universality of shared experience is a huge part of what I hope this festival will be, and I can’t wait to hear the stories that emerge over the next two weeks.  Our second workshop in the series is scheduled for  March 29^th, again at the New Toronto Library.  Contact us through our website if you’d like to join.