Go ForWords

Come write with Sue Reynolds and Vicki Pinkerton. Experience how an AWA workshop experience can support the development of your voice and your stories while you support the invaluable work AWA does worldwide.

For more information or registration, email admin@awacanada.ca or go to www.amherstwritersandartists.org

Dates & Times:

Sat. October 7 – Mount Albert 10am-12:30

Wed. October 11 – Oshawa/Whitby – 7pm-9:30 

Registration fee:

A Voluntary Donation to AWA

– All donations appreciated.

Suggested donation $30.

Invite your friends!

To register for one of the workshops, please fill out the form at the bottom of the page.

Outcomes:  If you choose, you may select a piece you write in the workshop to be published on the AWA International blog.  (www.amherstwriters). But most importantly, your donation will help train and bring AWA to more people.

More about the Amherst Writers and Artists Method:

This method is used effectively with experienced writers as well as beginners – with writers who have confidence, as well as those who are uncertain. In ongoing workshops it is being used to access the largely unheard voices of marginalized individuals from all walks of life.

AWA facilitators write in schools and groups everywhere. You can find them writing in prisons, in palliative care facilities, with street people, in shelters, with residential school survivors, with seniors, psychiatric inpatients and LGBTQS2 youth. There are facilitators working with survivors of sexual abuse, sex trade workers and with those with substance abuse issues.

While the AWA method is not therapy, it is therapeutic and has great healing potential for writers from all backgrounds. Anywhere there are writers or people in pain, AWA is there.

The AWA method also emphasizes writer’s craft: authors using the AWA method have published major works and taken top prizes and awards in the U.S., Canada and Ireland.

There are approximately 1400 facilitators worldwide who have completed the AWA training in writing workshop leadership. Each facilitator brings their own passion to their work.

To register for one of the workshops, please fill out this form:

 
When you’ve registered you can make your donation online if you choose using this PayPal button. OR you can bring a cheque to the workshop, or do an etransfer.
 

This button will open a portal with a donation of 1.00 and a quantity of 1. Change the quantity to the number of dollars you would like to donate, hit “Tab” or “Enter” so the dollar figure adjusts to the new quantity, and then click the yellow and blue Paypal button to go to the Paypal Portal and complete your payment.

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Here is a snapshot of the reach and power of the AWA Method:

• Vicki Pinkerton leads writing workshops with the Nuntut Gwit’chen people north of the Arctic Circle.
• Jill Goodacre writes with First Nation adults and intergenerational survivors who suffer from the legacy of Indian Residential School trauma in British Columbia.
• Mary Tuchscherer travels to Limbe, Malawi, and writes with teachers and AIDS orphans
• Aaron Zimmerman offers writing workshops with the incarcerated men at Rikers Island, and in methadone clinics, homeless shelters and afterschool programs in Brooklyn, New York
• Mary Kim Kaylor leads a writing workshop in a high security hospital with patients and guards in Lake Oswego, Oregon
• Kate Murphy writes with the blind at the Royal National Institute of Blind People in Northern Ireland
• Katie McCleary offers workshops with hundreds of teens in Sacramento, California

and of course, I’ve been writing for 13 years with women (and occasionally men) incarcerated in the Lindsay Correctional Centre in Ontario. And here in Toronto the Toronto Writers’ Collective are doing terrific work offering free workshops for the last three years to a wide range of marginalized and silenced populations.

This list is both small and huge: small in representing only a fraction of the people that AWA reaches; huge in that it represents the power of what we do.

We who write together know that as our words arrive on the page, we are deeply connected to who we are and to each other. We also know listening to others and being listened to in return is profound. We gave each other this gift, and AWA made it possible.

If you can’t join us but would still like to support the work we do, you can donate here:

This button will open a portal with a donation of 1.00 and a quantity of 1. Change the quantity to the number of dollars you would like to donate, hit “Tab” or “Enter” so the dollar figure adjusts to the new quantity, and then click the yellow and blue Paypal button to go to the Paypal Portal and complete your payment.

Thank you so much!

Click here to go to Paypal and pay the registration fee of $110.00 plus HST.

We look forward to spending a day with you in deep presence and reflection.

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CANCELLATION POLICY:
If we receive your cancellation notice up to five days in advance of the retreat, (for instance, if the retreat is on a Saturday, we must hear from you by midnight on the previous Sunday) you may choose to apply your deposit to a future retreat or receive a refund (minus a $20 administration fee).

If you cancel with less than five days notice, (in the example above, for instance, it would be anytime Monday or later) and your spot cannot be filled from a waiting list, no refund will be made. However, you are permitted to sell or gift your spot for that date to another person. If you do this, please email or call Sue (905-985-8389) right away to provide the contact information of your replacement. Since Sue provides lunch, it is important that she know of any dietary restrictions etc.

NOTE: *If a retreat is cancelled for any reason, such as severe winter weather creates dangerous driving conditions, Sue will email and call all registered participants. In this situation, participants may request a full refund or transfer their payment to a future retreat date.