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Meet the inaugural Elizabeth Venart Prize recipient

Emerging writer Trina Warner from Chester, NS, has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Elizabeth Venart Prize. The prize comes with a $1,000 cheque from the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS), free registration for a WFNS creative writing workshop, and advice from a professional author through WFNS’s Coffee Chats program.

A speech-language pathologist, Trina has worked on the South Shore of Nova Scotia for past 20 years. From an early age, she found adventure, friendship, solace, and guidance in libraries and books. For just as long, she has written privately as a means of self-discovery and self-expression, but the bulk of her writing has been for academic or professional purposes.

It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that she decided to explore writing creative non-fiction. Her submission to the Elizabeth Venart Prize was the product of writing workshops she’s taken through the University of King’s College and the WFNS. She plans to use the Elizabeth Venart Prize to foster her creative writing practice.

Trina lives with her husband, young daughter, and excitable six-month-old golden retriever, Rosie. Beyond books, Trina believes in the transformative power of stories and the courage it takes to tell them.

Introduced earlier this year, the Elizabeth Venart Prize was created by the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia board to support emerging writers whose work-in-progress shows promise and career-advancing merit. The prize aims to help finance the time, space, and professional development required to write, to revise and edit, and/or to submit work for publication. Submissions will be open on an annual basis to women and writers of other marginalized genders.

The prize is named for Elizabeth Venart (1937-2008), a wife and mother. She began writing seriously only later in her life, and finding the time to do so was difficult while raising a family and running a farm.

Sarah Venart, daughter of Elizabeth and herself a poet, remembers her mother being “most satisfied and content when she was producing words in her writing room with her chosen view of apple blossoms and the sipping hummingbirds.”

The Elizabeth Venart Prize endowment was built through donations by the Venart family, contributions from the WFNS, and the generosity of WFNS members.

In aiming to make the prize sustainable, WFNS has continued fundraiser efforts—most recently through the sale of Promptly: a miscellany of writing tips & tales from Nova Scotian authors and through Promptly: the workshop, to be held virtually from November 23 through December 14 and led by several contributors to the Promptly book.

Beautifully designed and printed by Gaspereau Press, Promptly is available through the online WFNS Gift Shop and at independent bookstores in Halifax & Dartmouth (Bookmark, King’s College Bookstore, Trident Books, Venus Envy, and Dartmouth Book Exchange), on the South Shore (LaHave River Books, Block Shop Books, Lunenburg Bound, and Otis and Clementine’s), and in Sydney (On Paper Books).

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Simultaneous Submissions

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) administers some programs (and special projects) that involve print and/or digital publication of ‘selected’ or ‘winning’ entries. In most cases, writing submitted to these programs and projects must not be previously published and must not be simultaneously under consideration for publication by another organization. Why? Because our assessment and selection processes depends on all submitted writing being available for first publication. If writing selected for publication by WFNS has already been published or is published by another organization first, copyright issues will likely make it impossible for WFNS to (re-)publish that writing.

When simultaneous submissions to a WFNS program are not permitted, it means the following:

  • You may not submit writing that has been accepted for future publication by another organization.
  • You may not submit writing that is currently being considered for publication by another organization—or for another prize that includes publication.
  • The writing submitted to WFNS may not be submitted for publication to another organization until the WFNS program results are communicated. Results will be communicated directly to you by email and often also through the public announcement of a shortlist or list of winners. Once your writing is no longer being considered for the WFNS program, you are free to submit it elsewhere.
    • If you wish to submit your entry elsewhere before WFNS program results have been announced, you must first contact WFNS to withdraw your entry. Any entry fee cannot be refunded.

Prohibitions on simultaneous submission do not apply to multiple WFNS programs. You are always permitted to submit the same unpublished writing to multiple WFNS programs (and special projects) at the same time, such as the Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Program, the Emerging Writers Prizes, the Jampolis Cottage Residency Program, the Message on a Bottle contest, the Nova Writes Competition, and any WFNS projects involving one-time or recurring special publications.

Recommended Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) recommends that participants in any given workshop have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their career stage. The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the following definitions used by WFNS.

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
  • Early-career authors: those with 1 or 2 book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short-form publications.
  • Established authors: those with 3 or 4 book-length publications.
  • Professional authors: those with 5 or more book-length publications.

Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and writing for children and young adults) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

For “intensive” and “masterclass” creative writing workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If you’re uncertain of your experience level with regard to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca