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In Conversation with Kristin Kraus and Robert de la Chevotière

Date:
Time:
-
Venue:
Dartmouth Book Exchange
Location:
1187 Cole Harbour Road, Dartmouth. More info
Link:
https://dartmouthbookexchange.ca/events/
Calendar:
Community event, Member-organized event

On Friday, October 2nd- 6:30pm-7:30pm– In conversation with Kristin Kraus and her novel, They Didn’t See the Flowers, and Robert de la Chevotière (The Twelfth House)

They Didn’t See the Flowers
Someone beats an elderly patient in his Halifax hospital bed one winter night. Next, he’s abducted, but why? There was more than one person who hated him, and it’s up to Buddy, a young police officer on the rise, to solve the case. Whodunnit, and why? They Didn’t See the Flowers is a story of families, crimes, and justice, and it all plays out among the complex, interrelated histories of the Indigenous, the Black Canadians, and the British settlers in Nova Scotia, Canada past and present.

The Twelfth House
The vengeful spirit of an unborn child draws her father from the Bight of Biafra onto a slave ship bound for the harshly colonized Caribbean island of Dominica in this lush historical novel infused with magical realism and rooted in West African mythology for readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer and River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer.
Etta is an ogbanje, an unborn soul trapped in a cycle of conception and death in the wombs of one family. A gifted siren in the twelfth house of the zodiac—the house of secrets, of dreams, and of death—her voice unleashes ethereal songs that consume listeners with fear. Her desperate desire to live compels her father, Bako, into the hands of his captors of the coast of 18th-century Benin and carries him on a harrowing journey across the Atlantic to enslavement on a sugarcane plantation in Dominica. Bako’s defiant spirit—and Etta’s fervent wish to be born—soon lead him to escape into the mountains. There, he has a fateful encounter with the Kalinaga woman named Mary who will ensure Etta’s birth into the mortal world. But the child Etta bears physical scars of her many spiritual deaths, bringing her father to suspect the truth of his daughter’s origins. As the landowners and tradesmen who enslave Etta’s people feel her wrath and inflame rebellion, Bako fears it is the rebellion within which is the gravest.

Please preregister at 902-435-1207 to monitor our numbers.

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Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) uses the following terms to describe writers’ experience levels:

  • 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, writing for children, writing for young adults, and others) 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.

Occasionally, WFNS uses the phrase “emerging and established writers/authors” to mean ‘writers and authors of all experience levels.’

The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the above definitions. A workshop’s participants should usually have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with info, strategies, and skills that suit their experience. 

For “intensive” and “masterclass” 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 uncertain about your experience level with respect to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca