Hand on my heart: a Canadian doctor’s awakening in Afghanistan
Join Maureen Mayhew on a voyage to remote corners of Taliban-occupied Afghanistan. Her new memoir examines cultural assumptions around gender, tradition and belief as she reflects on life-changing experiences working as a foreign female in one of the world’s least understood countries.
Maureen Mayhew is a family doctor, a clinical professor at UBC, and a certified leadership coach. She spent a decade supporting Afghans to rebuild their shattered healthcare system, and to improve maternal and child health.
Free but space is limited; contact the Library or register online. Also accessible live via Zoom from the Library’s website.
This anthology by local authors is a beautiful collection of poetry and prose, writing from life experience, excerpts of childhood memories to summer jobs and everything in between.
Authors include:
Anne Miles
Anne Simonet
Atma Frans
Carol Stewart (In Memoriam)
Del Lobo
Denise Olson
Dennise Dombroski
Maggie Guzzi
Sherryl Latimer
Free but space is limited: contact the Library or register online. Also accessible live via Zoom from the Library’s website.
Grief can be a challenging companion. This fall, a small but brave and mighty group met weekly with facilitator David Roche to write about engaging with their grief, to connect with each other, and to find their own voices. Readers will include Joan Bech, Betty Bronson, Lynn Chapman, Tara Flynn, Brian MacKenzie, Kate McLaughlin, Kenn Quayle, and Audrey Spiller. Come listen as the group’s participants share their heart-felt and moving stories.
Free, open to all, but space is limited: register online. Also accessible live via Zoom from the Library’s website.
Presented in partnership with Sunshine Coast Hospice Society, with support from the Town of Gibsons.
Weekly to Nov 23. Could you write a novel in a month? Try the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge: sign up online at www.nanowrimo.org
Whether or not you take the challenge or sign up for NaNoWriMo, you’re invited to Come Write In for some quiet writing time here at the Library every Thursday in November. Work on any writing you wish, with wifi, tea, and encouragement from your fellow writers.
Facilitator: Marissa Fischer
FREE, drop in, no registration required.
The countdown to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has started. Nine more sleeps! Join us to write every day for the month of November again this year with the goal of writing 50,000 words in one month (genre is up to you). Optional prompts will be given. Sign up at sunshinecoastwritersandeditors@gmail.com
Come join us for our 2nd Birthday celebration, brief AGM, launch of our literary magazine as a bound copy, calendar reveal, and a discussion with Jan DeGrass on the literary legacy of the Coastal authors. Birthday cake will be served.
Caitlin Hicks as ANNIE SHEA, performing excerpts from the comedy SIX PALM TREES her award-winning novel A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE and her latest 1968 sequel, KENNEDY GIRL. A stand-up show celebrating the beloved character who is the feature of the three works. Signed copies of both novels will be available for purchase at the event.
Creative Writing Workshops with Fran Bourassa
Monthly on the third Thursday, 3:00-5:00 pm
Calling all poets, writers, and would-be writers of all ages and experience levels! Bypass your inner “editor” to find your authentic voice. Practice “free writing” short pieces from “word whip” prompts, that elicit memories, emotions, and powerful ideas for poetry and stories. This method is quick, powerful, and everyone can enjoy it. Teens and adults welcome.
Fran Bourassa is an award-winning poet and contributing writer to numerous anthologies, including Breaking the Surface, Pacific Poetry Anthology, Force Field: 77 BC Poets.
Free but space is limited (in person only). Registration is recommended; register online or call the Library 604-886-2130.
Join us for a special presentation by local artists and authors from this summer’s 2nd Annual Art & Words Festival. Artists and writers paired together to prompt each other’s creativity, resulting in stunning art and accompanying literary works, that were published in the Art & Words Anthology 2021-2023. Selected writers will read from their works. Tea and baked goods from Sandy’s will be served. Free but space is limited. Registration is required. Contact the Gibsons and District Library. For the entire month of September, selected works from the show will be on display at the library.
The Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society has an exciting September Meeting lined up after our summer hiatus:
– A brief AGM
– A presentation about the science of aromatherapy based on the book, Scent and Soul: The Extraordinary Power of Scent by Rohanna Goodwin Smith.
– Q&A with Robert Mackwood, Seventh Avenue Literary Agency
– Authors & Artists Photo Day. Time to update your headshot? Book a professional headshot with photographer Michael Gurney
Author Jan DeGrass and writer Mark Cameron entertain you with a reading from their latest works at this year’s Art & Words Festival at the Gibsons Public Market at 3:30 p.m. Jan reads from her latest historical novel–a tale of three war brides who arrived in Canada in 1946. She’s also got some funny stuff to share and Mark is always entertaining with his writing. Both are appearing courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts and The Writers’ Union of Canada.
Vince R. Ditrich of Spirit of the West fame and author of the humorous series The Liquor Vicar, The Vicar’s Knickers, and the upcoming The Vicar’s Vortex (February 2023), will be presenting the SCWES Book Awards for BC Authors. He has circled the world, earned more than a dozen gold and platinum albums, and been enshrined in several Halls of Fame.
Vince will come from Vancouver Island to do a reading, and sales and signing from his books. He will be the emcee of our first annual SCWES Book Awards for BC Authors.
Catherine McNeil (Cat Mac) will be performing at the Art & Words Festival in the Atrium of the Gibsons Public Market.
She is the author of under the influence (Bedazzled Ink) 2016 which won Milieu’s National Emerging Writers Competition. She has been widely published in literary magazines, including Event, Queer Chroma, Sinister Wisdom, and the Capilano Review, and in anthologies throughout Canada, the United States & England for the past thirty years. emily & elspeth was released by Dagger Editions in 2023. She lives in Halfmoon Bay, BC, with her dog, Gaia and her cat, Lavender. She is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.
Practice and polish your five-minute elevator pitch for your book with encouraging feedback and coaching from peers. Bring books to sell and sign. Then stay for our Build-A-Book workshop to create your own chapbooks, mini-books, cards or elegantly designed poems for framing at this workshop. Bring your own decorative paper, or card stock, glue sticks, double-sided tape, embellishments, dried flowers, stapler, waxed binding string, awl, and other book-binding tools if you have them, and your finished printed pages if you have them, or blank pages to make a mock-up. If it’s nice out we will work outside.
Build your own mini-books, cards or elegantly designed poems for framing at this workshop. Bring your own decorative paper, or card stock, glue sticks, double-sided tape, embellishments, dried flowers, stapler, waxed binding string, awl, and other book-binding tools if you have them, and your finished printed pages if you have them, or blank pages to make a mock-up. If it’s nice out we will work outside.
Thursday June 8, 2023
4:00-5:00pm
Community Room at the Sechelt Public Library
Local author Phyllis Dyson will be joining our non-fiction book club for a discussion of her memoir, Among Silent Echoes. Anyone is welcome to join this special book club event. Please call to register.
Storyteller Naomi Steinberg will present her adventure new travelogue memoir about her 382 day solo journey around the planet with no airplane, crossing 18 borders to perform 37 shows – For information contact Mark at mmerlino@prpl.ca
