WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px
WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px

Genre

Whitney Moran

As the managing editor of Nimbus Publishing and Vagrant Press, Atlantic Canada’s largest independent publishing house, Whitney has over ten years’ experience reviewing, critiquing, and acquiring submissions for publication. She also regularly produces developmental, substantive, line, and copy edits for hundreds of novels, from mystery and thriller to literary fiction, as well as middle-grade and young adult fiction. Her authors have produced critically acclaimed and award-winning books, among them Sheree Fitch, Rebecca Thomas, Briana Corr Scott, Jo Treggiari, Tom Ryan, Harriet Alida Lye, Stephens Gerard Malone, and Alan Syliboy.

Whitney is particularly interested in stories that centre women, nonbinary, and non-gender-comforting characters, and subject matter that challenges romantic and bucolic representations of Atlantic Canada, and celebrate voices and stories from communities historically underrepresented in publishing.

Whitney Moran Read More »

Briana Corr Scott

Briana was born in Salem Massachusetts in 1981.

She made her first picture book in 1988 for a contest, at the age of seven. Her incredible first grade teacher, Mrs. Chronholm, noticed how much she loved to draw and write and encouraged her to enter the contest. Although Briana did not win, she experienced a process that has stayed with her into adulthood.

In 2013, Briana reconnected with this childhood dream while drawing with her children at the kitchen table. She had been working as a fine artist since her graduation from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005. As the primary care giver for her growing family, she felt an increased constraint on the time she had to make her large still life oil paintings. This frustration, combined with two bouts of postpartum depression, landed her in a deep artist’s block in 2010.

In 2013, something shifted. She drew a paper doll and cut it out for her daughter to play with. This simple activity created a joy that changed the course of her life. Briana felt a reconnection with her inner child, which ignited a new energy to create and share work that was inspired by her own childhood memories. Artful play, living close to the sea and in the woods, and re-imagining fairy tales became source material for her projects. Briana started this new path by making illustrations inspired by these childhood experiences, and vowed to follow her curiosity without question from then on. She broke her three year artist’s block when she created paper dolls as art kits, and she has been designing and selling them for a decade.

Through the years, the paper dolls turned into characters for picture books, as well as puppets for stop motion animations.

Following her curiosity without question led Briana to Sable Island, which became the subject of her first paper doll picture book published by Nimbus Publishing in 2018. Since then, Briana has relied on the ideas of play and curiosity to explore other themes, and she has created the images and words for eight books with Nimbus Publishing in a short five years.

Her stop motion animation titled “The Happy Island,” combined her words, paper doll puppets, and oil painted landscapes to tell the story of how she creates her art in her new found “happy place” and was screened at the Lunenunburg Doc Fest in 2021. Her short animation called “Little Islands,” soothed the souls of lonely children after being featured on CBC during the Covid 19 pandemic. She has retold the story of Thumbelina in her picture book “Wildflower,” illustrated mermaid babies in her board book “Mermaid Lullaby,” and reimagined the “Twelve Days of Christmas.” The repeating patterns of her paper doll’s clothing and the endpapers of her books have become a line of wallpaper. Her second picture book titled “The Book of Selkie”, was short listed for the David Booth Poetry prize for Children in 2022.

Briana has shown her work in solo and group shows in Halifax and Boston, and her illustrations have appeared internationally in online features, films and magazines. As wonderful as all this is, the best place to find her is in her happy place, wandering the shore with her paints, writing stories by the sea.

Briana Corr Scott Read More »

Robin Metcalfe

A writer, Queer activist and community historian of Acadian and Newfoundland heritage, Robin Metcalfe has published journalism, cultural criticism, short fiction and poetry in international periodicals and anthologies. He won the 2000 Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for a National Magazine Award in 2004. He lives in Weijuik/Sheet Harbour Passage.

Pronouns: he, him

Robin Metcalfe Read More »

Rosalie Osmond

Rosalie Osmond is a writer and lecturer who was educated at institutions in three countries (Acadia University, Bryn Mawr College, and Cambridge University) and has spent her life divided between the two sides of the Atlantic. She has taught English literature in universities in both Canada and the U.K. In 2009 she and her husband returned to her hometown of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, thus giving a certain symmetry to an otherwise rather haphazard career.

She has published five books—three histories of ideas and two works of fiction—as well as numerous articles, both academic and popular. At present she is working on a sequel to her first two novels. Since winning the 2019 Rita Joe Poetry prize, she has also been encouraged to continue writing poems.

She has three children and six grandchildren, all of whom love to visit Nova Scotia in the summer. When not writing she is usually engaged in one or her other two passions—music and gardening.

Rosalie Osmond Read More »

Jeff Miller

Jeff Miller is the author of the award-winning creative nonfiction collection Ghost Pine: All Stories True (Invisible Publishing). His stories have appeared in several anthologies and he frequently publishes criticism. He holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. As a creative writing educator, he has lead workshops in Montreal, Halifax, and Calgary, and worked as a high-school writing mentor and university teaching assistant. He lives on the Eastern Shore.

Jeff Miller Read More »

Nina Newington

Nina Newington’s first novel, Where Bones Dance, won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Georges Bugnet Award for Novel in 2008. Guernica Press is publishing her second novel, Cardinal Divide, in September 2020. She is currently finishing a memoir about living illegally in the US for twenty years.

A former Kennedy scholar with an MA in English Literature from Cambridge, she makes her living designing gardens and building things. She is an active member of Extinction Rebellion in Annapolis County. English by birth, she and her American wife immigrated to Canada in 2006. They raise sheep on unceded Mi’kmaw territory near the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.

Nina Newington Read More »

Kayla Hounsell

Kayla Hounsell is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author. Her book First Degree: From Med School to Murder: The Story Behind the Shocking Will Sandeson Trial, is a true crime book based on a story she covered as a reporter for years. Published by Nimbus Publishing, it was a finalist for an Atlantic Book Award for Non-fiction writing. Based in Halifax, and originally from Newfoundland, Kayla has also worked in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ottawa, Rwanda, South Sudan, Liberia and the U.K. First Degree is her first book.  

Kayla Hounsell Read More »

Andy Verboom

Andy Verboom is publisher of Collusion Books, co-founding editor of long con magazine, and author of six poetry chapbooks, most recently DBL (knife fork book, 2020).

His poetry has won Frog Hollow’s Chapbook Contest and Descant’s Winston Collins Prize, been shortlisted for CV2’s Young Buck Prize and Arc’s Poem of the Year, and appeared in CAROUSEL, Prism, The Puritan, Vallum, and elsewhere.

Andy Verboom Read More »

Amy Spurway

Amy Spurway was born and raised in Cape Breton. She holds a Bachelor’s  degree in English from UNB and a degree in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson University. She lives in Dartmouth with her husband and three daughters.

Amy Spurway Read More »

Scroll to Top
WFNS logo ltrmark sticky 100px

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