Winning at IFOA

At the Humber School for Writers event at this year’s International Festival of Authors in Toronto, I was pleased to host a short reading by the HSW/IFOA Author for a Day contest winner, Kate Belcher. Kate is a British expatriate, ex-museum curator and ex-clown who placed second in the 2010 Toronto Star Short Story Contest, and was a 2011 CBC Literary Awards finalist. She is currently finishing a children’s novel about a boy who accidentally triggers a nightmare invasion. You can read more about her and her writing here.

Kate’s reading was followed by a talk about writing craft by Suzanne Desrochers, Humber School for Writers alumna, and author of the bestselling novel Bride of New France. Suzanne was remarkably poised and coherent for someone who had given birth to her second child only six weeks before. She had interesting stories to tell about her path to publication, including that she abandoned navel-gazing type contemporary stories in favour of historical fiction, which she researched by taking a master’s degree in history. She is now following up that degree with a Ph.d., beginning work on her second novel, and caring for her young children. Which makes her either an inspiration or a superhuman. Click here for more info about her.

The final part of the event was the flash assessments of manuscript pages submitted in advance by some of the people in attendance. To do this, I was joined by the gracious and thoughtful Kate Cassaday, an editor of Harper Collins Publishers. We did our best not to bruise too many egos in the process – and we did not spend our entire time looking as skeptical as we do in this pic, while entertaining a question from the audience, I think. Our hope was that everyone who attended the event could consider themselves a winner.