06/18/2026
Four Exceptional Workshops. Four Remarkable Writers. Ten Seats Each.
Dear Festival Friends,
Every writer knows the peculiar terror of the blank page: that snowy field where one must either build a world, invent a person, commit to a sentence, or quietly reorganise the spice drawer. This year’s Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival offers a much better alternative: four intimate, three-hour workshops with four extraordinary writers who have spent their careers proving that writing is not magic exactly, but a disciplined form of enchantment.
These workshops are designed for writers at every stage: the beginner with a notebook full of sparks, the veteran with a manuscript in revolt, the poet who has wandered into prose, the novelist who suspects their characters are withholding information, and anyone who wants to spend a few hours in the company of writers who know how stories breathe, misbehave, and finally come alive.
Susan Juby’s Character Building Bootcamp is led by one of Canada’s great comic observers of human oddity. A Leacock Medal winner, beloved novelist, mystery writer, teacher, and champion of “odd ducks,” Juby has an enviable gift for creating characters who are funny because they are true, and true because they are never merely funny. Her fiction moves with wit, generosity, and precision; she knows how to make a character memorable without turning them into a gimmick, and how to let humour open the door to pathos. For writers struggling with flat protagonists, sulking sidekicks, or villains who mostly twirl moustaches, this is bootcamp with a humane drill sergeant.
Maria Reva’s Creating Tension through Character Networks offers a rare chance to learn from a writer whose fiction is as formally inventive as it is emotionally exacting. Reva’s work has been nominated for the Booker Prize and appeared in major literary journals and anthologies. Her fiction moves brilliantly between satire, history, politics, absurdity, and moral seriousness. In Good Citizens Need Not Fear and Endling, she shows how characters press upon one another, conceal and reveal one another, and create the charged atmosphere in which plot becomes inevitable. Writers interested in structure, stakes, ensemble casts, and the beautiful trouble caused by human proximity will find this workshop especially rich.
Loghan Paylor’s Worldbuilding Through the Senses: Writing Fantasy Fiction draws from the richly embodied imagination that gives The Cure for Drowning its power: a world felt through weather, water, memory, longing, fear, and the complicated question of what it means to belong. Paylor’s acclaimed debut, and winner of Canada Reads 2026, is a sweeping, tender, historically grounded novel infused with magic, longing, q***r love, non-binary life, and the search for a truer place to belong. For writers of fantasy, speculative fiction, historical fiction, role-playing narratives, or any story that asks readers to step into another world, this workshop promises practical craft and imaginative expansion.
Wendy Wickwire’s Animating the Creative in Creative Non-Fiction brings participants into the company of a historian and storyteller whose work has reshaped conversations about British Columbia, Indigenous-settler relations, oral history, landscape, memory, and belonging. Her award-winning At the Bridge reflects decades of patient research and narrative care; her long collaboration with Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson stands as a profound model of listening, responsibility, and literary stewardship. For writers of memoir, biography, history, place-based writing, essays, and documentary prose, Wickwire offers insight into how facts become narrative without losing their ethical weight.
Each workshop is limited to just ten participants. That means these are not distant lectures from a stage, but small-room encounters: close enough for questions, conversation, shared pages, and the kind of practical insight that can alter the course of a draft.
Come with curiosity. Come with a notebook. Come with a problem your writing has been politely refusing to solve. Choose the workshop that calls to you, and give yourself an afternoon in the company of a writer who can help you hear what your own work is trying to become.
Workshop spaces are limited. Please visit the Festival Workshops page and register soon.
Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival
