Postcard Fiction is a story approximately 500 words or less. It's a challenge and it's fun. On Sunday Jan. 21 the Flying Medifore reading series is hosting an open mic night for writers who would like to read their stories!

Show up with a story of 500 words or less (2 or 3 stories if you like!) It can be about your vacation, your latest love, your latest heartbreak, a story about times changing, times staying the same...It doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be.....short.

If you have heard about the Flying Medifore reading series but have never been, if you've been trying to write but haven't found a reason, if you would like to say hello to some like-minded writers, come on by. We've been waiting for you!
 
Date: Sunday, January 21, 2007
Time: 7:00 pm.
Location: Zemra Bar Lounge 778 St. Clair Ave. West (just west of Christie)
Contact: Brenda 647-403-5694

COMING APRIL 2007 - Preorder your copy now at Amazon.


An acclaimed novelist’s riveting memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family
Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a twenty-two- year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with children of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the story of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.
Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and emotional intensity of her storytelling, tells how her birth parents initially made contact with her and what happened afterward (her mother stalked her and appeared unannounced at a reading) and what she was able to reconstruct about the story of their lives and their families. Her birth mother, a complex and lonely woman, never married or had another child, and died of kidney failure in 1998; her birth father, who initially made overtures about inviting her into his family, never did.
Then the story jumps forward several years to when Homes opens the boxes of her mother’s memorabilia. She had hoped to find her mother in those boxes, to know her secrets, but no relief came. She became increasingly obsessed with finding out as much as she could about all four parents and their families, hiring researchers and spending hours poring through newspaper morgues, municipal archives and genealogical Web sites. This brave, daring, and funny book is a story about what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity and how all of us define our sense of self and family.

I am helping to organize a new reading series at Zemra's. Come on out this Sunday Nov. 19th!!!!

Thursday, November 16 and Friday, November 17, 2006
Insider Guide to Getting Published
Presented by the Humber School of Creative & Performing Arts

You’ve written and revised a manuscript you’re proud of. Or you’ve got a great idea you would like to develop. What’s the next step? Whether your work is fiction or non-fiction, for children or adults, this two day workshop will tell you everything you need to know to start you on the path to publication. Workshop leader Cynthia Good will share what publishers look for when they accept a manuscript, what outside influences affect publishers’ choices and provide some insights into the internal decision-making process. She will show you how to prepare cover letters and book proposals that get results and look at the pros and cons of working with a literary agent. She will cover what happens after your manuscript has been acquired by a publisher; what your contract might look like, the editorial process, the marketing of your book and more.

Cynthia Good is the Director of Humber College’s Creative Book Publishing Program and was the President and Publisher of Penguin Books for 20 years.

Time: 9:30 am to 4:00 pm
Cost: $329 for non-members, $299. for TWC members
Place: Toronto Writers' Centre, 101 Yorkville Avenue, Toronto
For information: Cynthia Good
                        (416) 675-6622 ext 3462
                        cynthia.good@humber.ca
To register: Hilary Higgins
   (416) 675-6622 ext 3449
   hilary.higgins@humber.ca

Enter the 3rd Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

1st Prize: $250, 2nd Prize: $150, 3rd Prize: $100

Send a postcard along with a story that relates to the image. The relationship can be as tangential as you like, so long as there is a clear connection to the image or place. Maximum 500 words, fiction or non-fiction.

Entries must be postmarked no later than December 1, 2006.

The three winning entries will be published in Geist magazine.

Entry fee: $20 for the first entry, This includes a 1-year subscription or subscription extension (value: $15). $5 for each additional entry.

For more details and to read last year’s winning entries visit www.geist.com.