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Genre

Adam Foulds

I am a poet and novelist originally from the UK, now a Canadian resident. I’ve published four novels and a poetry collection and bunch of other things. I’ve won a number of literary awards, including being shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I’ve taught creative writing at workshops and universities in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

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Heather Fegan

Heather Fegan is a freelance journalist and writer. She is a graduate of the University of King’s College School of Journalism. Heather has been a storyteller since age five, regaling her family with “updates” in her own “Heather Chronicles.” Gutsy, which explores her personal experience of navigating Crohn’s Disease over twenty-five years, is her debut book.

She lives in Halifax, NS, with her husband and two daughters. Follow her chronicles at heatherfegan.ca and @theheatherchronicles.

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Janice Walsh-Cruddas

“Play” is one of Janice Walsh-Cruddas’ favourite words and learning tools and she incorporates it in her writing, teaching, and performance for children and young adults. Her book, Bird’s the Word!, has elicited giggles, questions, and yays from hundreds of budding wonders. She has written and directed over 20 plays, including the NS Human Rights Commission’s award-winning project ARC (Action, Responsibility, Choice), The Kerplunk in the Kingdom, and the Atlantic Fringe Festival hit, A Wee Drop of Aesop. As a children’s programmer with Halifax Public libraries for over 20 years, a former co-host of the radio show “Music for Young Earth Citizens” (with her 6-year-old son), and the founder of MITE Theatre, “Jan-Jan” has helped youth discover delight in Shakespeare, singing, theatre games, and the joyful act of communicating.  She is humbled and grateful to be a Treaty person who writes, sings, reads, and plays in Punamu’kwati’jk (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.)

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Lynette Richards

Lynette Richards has been cartooning as long as she can remember, and recently published her first graphic novel Call Me Bill (Conundrum Press 2022). She is a Craft Nova Scotia Master Artisan, who lives and works in Terence Bay NS, where she operates her business Rose Window Stained Glass. She chose Stained Glass as her professional medium because it was both a trade and an art that has used sequential narration for over 1000 years!

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Linda Pannozzo

Linda Pannozzo is an award-winning author and freelance journalist, with a degree in Journalism from the University of King’s College in Halifax. She is the author of two books: About Canada: The Environment, explores the philosophical, economic, and ideological landscape of our current environmental worldview. She also penned the award-winning The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: An Investigation into the Scapegoating of Canada’s Grey Seal, which looked into the science and politics behind the push for a massive cull of the grey seal population on Canada’s east coast. Over the years, Linda’s articles have appeared in This magazine, The Coast, The Ottawa Citizen, The Daily News, and the The Halifax Examiner. In 2022 Linda started a subscriber-supported newsletter on Substack called The Quaking Swamp Journal, which she describes as commentary, analysis and the occasional deep dive, all in the public interest.

 

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Tyler LeBlanc

Tyler LeBlanc was born and raised in Bayswater, a tiny fishing village on Nova Scotia’s south shore. He studied International Development Studies (with a focus on colonial history and political theory) and Journalism as an undergraduate and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from the University of King’s College in Halifax, NS. Acadian Driftwood (Goose Lane Editions 2020), his first book, won both the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, and the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing at the 2021 Atlantic Book Awards.

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Teresa LaBella

Teresa LaBella grew up in Davenport, Iowa where the Mississippi River runs east to west. Her relentlessly Irish grandmother taught her to read fortunes with playing cards, tell a good story and brew a perfect pot of tea.

The people she interviewed as a journalist and met in her work in the arts and with nonprofit organizations colored her future fiction writing canvas and sharpened her love for storytelling.

Teresa published her first contemporary romance novel Reservations in 2013. Two more novels, Heartland and Belonging, a novella Love Unlikely and four short stories compiled for publication in Tales from Heartland complete the New Life in Love family saga series.

Her first novel in The UnMatchables romantic suspense series Danger Noted published in October 2020. Capital Strings, the author’s uniquely-Canadian political thriller, published in April 2021. Danger Revealed, the second novel in The UnMatchables series, was published by Purple Porcupine Publishing in July 2023. The author’s short story Fireflies was included for publication in the Writers on the Avenue Anthology Roads We’ve Taken, published in 2023 by Pearl City Press.

Teresa resides and writes from her home along Nova Scotia’s south shore.

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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