Catherine Austen's Blog, page 2

Funding for Writing Workshops in 2024-25

Back to school and bored already? Liven up the year with a visit to your school from a teaching artist — like me.

In Quebec, we have two great programs to help fund an author or artist visit to your school: Culture in the Schools and ArtistsInspire.

Culture in the Schools

The Ministry of Education’s Culture in the Schools Program provides funding to bring an artist or author into your school for a single day of workshops, several days of workshops, or even several weeks of workshops with an artist-in-residence. (They also fund field trips to cultural events outside the school.)

The program funds the artist’s fee, travel costs, material costs, even administrative costs. Check out all the details on the Ministry of Education website. (For info in English, check out the Culture in the Schools Brochure.)

Each public school board has its own deadline to apply for Culture in the Schools funding. Private schools must apply by October 15th. Check out the Repertoire of available artists and authors to see who you might invite into your school. (NB: The Repertoire is in French only — even for artists like me who offer workshops in English only.)

Check out my (slightly outdated) Repertoire listing here. Also peruse my workshop listings on my website. Then get in touch if you want to apply for funding to have me in your school at no cost to you. (I’ll help with the application paperwork.)

ArtistsInspire

The ArtistsInspire program is now in its sixth year, financed by the federal government to support minority language education (English in Quebec and French elsewhere). If you’re in an English school board in Quebec, you’re eligible for funding to bring an artist or author — like me — into your school for 2-4 days of connected workshops.

The program funds $1500 in artists’ fees and material costs, for 6-10 hours of in-person or virtual workshops (2-3 workshops with 2-3 classes or so), with an option for an additional one-day event at the school. See details on the ArtistsInspire website.

The deadline to apply for ArtistsInspire funding is February 28th. So no rush. But why dally? Search the ArtistsInspire directory to see who’s available in your area, then contact your preferred artist to confirm availability and workshop details.

Check out my ArtistsInspire profile here. I’d love to come to your school to lead a series of short story or fractured fairy tale workshops. So get in touch.

Beyond the School Day

There’s a third program in Quebec, funded by the Ministry of Education, that brings authors or artists listed in the cultural Repertoire (like me!) into schools, daycares, and educational institutions outside of school hours.

This is a fabulous program that supports long-term projects that might involve more than one artist (or more than one institution). Artists and institutions work out the details together in advance and apply for funding by October 7th. Check out the call for applications (in French).

I’ve never worked with a school or daycare through this program, but I’d love to try a 6- or 8-week after-school series of workshops, expanding my Fracture Fairy Tale series into a full unit for younger writers and illustrators. If any Gatineau schools or day cares are interested, get in touch.

Check out other sources of Funding for Author Visits in Canada. And check out my Workshops and Presentations to see if one grabs your interest.

The arts are an important part of education, and all of these programs fund all of the arts — writing, music, visual arts, film-making, performance — there’s no end to the art that students could be making! So take advantage of these fabulous funding opportunities and bring some art into your school.

It makes the return to school a little easier.

Tarot Prompts for Writers

I am not a believer. But I sometimes read tarot cards for fun, and I’m a little creeped out by how accurate they can be. Sure, I interpret based on what I know of people. And yes, where someone is heading is usually obvious to everyone but them. And of course, I forget about all the times a fortune is completely wrong.

But the cards can be freaky.

Why does the loveless friend never draw a cup? Why does the friend with the backstabbing colleague get the tower and a line of swords? Why does the friend with the domineering parter always get the devil when she asks how her couples retreat will go? Seriously. I don’t deal from the bottom of the deck. What is going on here?

Uncanny things unnerve me. (I was raised Catholic. I may not believe in the supernatural, but I’m afraid it wants my soul. ) So I rarely take my tarot cards out of the wooden box where I keep them wrapped in a purple scarf. (I read somewhere that’s tradition? Don’t make the cards angry!)

But recently, a fellow writer suggested using tarot cards as free-writing prompts for some write-in-silence sessions. He said he’d bring a book of interpretations. To which I said, “My dude, no book necessary.”

A while back, I compiled my notes on tarot divination — from decades of reading in all senses — into a binder with descriptive narratives to review every now and then as a memory aid. They’re great stories in themselves. And, since I write, and teach creative writing, why not add some writing prompts to each card description?

So here, every few weeks, I’ll post my tarot notes, one card at a time, with writing prompts. (And divination suggestions — why leave that out?)

It’s never a bad thing to contemplate your life’s journey. Whether you want to learn about tarot, read a fortune, write a story, or just think about the odd things people get up to trying to keep their blogs current, I hope you enjoy these posts.

Feel free to join in with tarot-prompted writing sessions in your own time on your own terms. I hope the cards inspire some great stories for you!

We’ll start where we always start (and end), with The Fool.

the foolthe promptsthe tarot

The Fool above and all images in the banner are from Tarot Balbi by Domenico Balbi.

Writers’ Markets: Read the Fine Print

I just updated my list of Short Fiction Markets and Young Writers Markets, so it’s only fitting to add a post on the fine print. Before you submit your work to any contest or magazine, double-check the rights you’re selling or giving away.

The best magazine publishers buy first world serial rights to the pieces they publish. (That means they have the right to publish it first anywhere in the world). If they have much online presence, they’ll also buy a non-exclusive right to archive your work on their website. (That means they can keep your piece on their site even if you later republish it elsewhere. Many magazines will remove your piece on request after a couple of years).

Some period of exclusivity is reasonable (e.g., you can’t publish that piece elsewhere for, e.g, one year), and some recognition of the first publisher is expected (e.g., if you republish the piece in an anthology, you mention that it was first published in this magazine). Whether the publisher pays cash or glory, these are the minimum rights they usually buy. And any writer is happy to grant them.

If you keep all other rights to that work, you can submit it to anthologies or include it in your collected works, or do whatever you want with it, including get paid for republishing it — because you own the rights.

A publisher that wants more than first serial rights should ideally purchase only non-exclusive rights to the work. So, even if they can reprint it in an anthology later without your permission, you can reprint it without their permission. (Just don’t try to sell exclusive rights to it later, because you no longer own exclusive rights to it.)

For young writers, especially for contests, it doesn’t always work that way. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for publishers to buy all rights to the work that young writers submit to contests or magazines. Sometimes a publisher will say that just by submitting to them, you are giving them all rights to your work.

It’s not that they’re greedy. They’re avoiding potential legal headaches by buying your rights to that work. (Because you would not believe how many people claim their ideas were stolen. “I sent a story about a lost dog to your contest and now someone else published a story about a lost dog. I’m suing!” Seriously, no one wants to steal your ideas. If your story was worth stealing, it would be worth publishing.)

Buying all rights frees the publisher from keeping track of authors — and kids are hard to keep track of. If a contest wants to do a “Best of…” anthology with the first-place winners of the past ten years, they won’t have to track down all the grown-and-gone no-longer-young writers to get permission to reprint their work if they own all rights.

I get it. I understand the motivation for a blanket rights claim. And it’s the way that rights are purchased in most kids’ contests that I’ve judged. (And I’m a staunch supporter of those contests — they’re fabulous!). But I believe that authors of any age should retain the rights to their work — at least non-exclusive rights — unless they’re extremely well paid (and a $50 prize is not well paid, though it’s way better than a $0 prize).

If you give away all your rights to, say, a poem, then you can’t include that poem in your collection five years from now, you can’t read it aloud on your podcast, you can’t even include it in the autobiography you write 40 years later when you’re a famous author — unless you get permission from the publisher.

You can write the original publisher and ask for permission for any of those things and they will likely say yes, because they’re nice people who want you to succeed — which is why they’re involved in children’s publishing in the first place — but still, you’d have to get permission to publish your own poem that you sold for $10 when you were 12, and they can say no if they want, and you can’t do anything about it — because you no longer have any right to your own work.

Chances are, you will never want to republish a story you wrote in your youth, so it could be worth any price. $10? Take it! Let me write you another dozen! Just know what you’re getting into. Read the terms before you submit anything. Writers have rights. (Till they give them away without reading the fine print.)

Now you can get back to selling your work. Check out my list of Canadian Short Fiction Markets for adults, Print and Online Magazines open to Canadians under 18, and Contests open to Canadian Writers under 18.

Good luck!

Young Writers’ Markets

Short Fiction Markets

Awesome Authors 2024 Winners

The Ottawa Public Library’s Awesome Authors Youth Writing Contest was another great success this year, and I was thrilled to be part of it.

The winners will be honoured this fall, with the publication of this year’s Pot-pourri, but you can read the list of winning Awesome Author 2024 entries right now on the OPL website.

If you entered the contest but did not win, please don’t feel bad! There are just too many good pieces to honour them all. As a judge of 9-12 English fiction, I read over 200 short stories this year and had a top-50 long-list. It was incredibly difficult to narrow them down to 3 winners and 3 honourable mentions. So many great stories had to be left out — with no way to tell their authors how awesome they are.

I know all the other judges feel the same way — there are just too many good pieces! But this is life in the world of publishing. And that’s a world we all want to keep spinning.

Please enter the contest again next year. It’s open to Ottawa students working in English or French, aged 9-18, writing poetry, short fiction, and comics. I’ll post again when the 2025 contest opens (whether I’m a judge or not — I’m a staunch supporter). That’s usually in late December or early January.

In the meantime, a huge congratulations to this year’s winners. I hope to meet you at the ceremony this fall.

I’ll post an update when the 2024 Pot-pourri anthology is published. In the meantime, check out the winning pieces from past years of Pot-pourri, published annually by the Friends of the Ottawa Public Library Association.

And keep writing!

New Short Stories

As I compiled my first short story collection this winter, thanks to a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, I was pleased to have a couple of new stories published in print and online.

“Welcome to the Margins” — about an aging librarian obsessed with marginalia — was published in The Humber Literary Review, my first time in its pages. (The full issue is available to read free online for a limited time — so check out my story and all the other great pieces in HLR Volume 11, Issue 2.)

“Social Animals” — about a bully brother who discovers how his family really feels about him — was published in DarkWinter Literary Magazine, a newish online magazine that offers prose and poetry with a dark twist. It’s always available to read free, so check out my story and get lost in all the twisty pieces published this year.

I wrote short fiction for adults in my youth and published about a dozen stories in literary journals in the 1990s. (The New Quarterly, one of the few greats that survived the decades since, was actually new back then!)

After I had children and read a thousand great kids’ books, I started writing for young people. And I still do. I treasure the time I spend in schools and libraries teaching creative writing to young people — because my own kids are long grown and I need the inspiration of energetic modern youth.

But I also write for adults these days. Ten years ago, I wrote a story for Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast, and I’ve written a couple of stories a year since then. I’ve published about half of them in literary journals.

This fall and winter, I compiled 18 of my recent stories into my first collection, “Alone in the World,” which I’m now sending out into the world, submitting the manuscript to a few of my favourite Canadian publishers. Fingers crossed that it finds a good home.

In the meantime, I’ll keep submitting individual pieces to literary journals.

If you also write short fiction, check out my Canadian LitMag List and submit something today.

Oops

I’ve just changed WordPress themes and lost my way a smidge (along with several images, links, draft pages, and my mojo). I’ll get the site updated, with news, links, and more resources for aspiring authors, by the beginning of summer.

In the meantime, if there’s anything new you want to see here, drop me a line.

Virtual Writing Workshop

Next Saturday, I’ll be leading a writing workshop for adults, “Feeling your Way into Fiction,” hosted by the Regina Public Library.

This is a real treat for me because I rarely work with adult writers — and even more rarely with Saskatchewan-based adult writers. Gotta love Zoom.

This will be a prompt-based workshop where we start with reality — real emotions, real settings, real yearnings for characters a bit like ourselves — and leap away from reality into fiction. I’m so looking forward to it. Who doesn’t love a leap away from reality?

USA WPA (Work Projects Administration) poster from 1940 — and still awesome.

I’ve been blessed this spring to lead many creative writing workshops with kids and teens, and to read hundreds of student stories as a judge of the Ottawa Public Library’s Awesome Authors contest. But sometimes it’s nice to work with adults.

I read some great stories by emerging adult writers this spring, as a second reader for The Writers’ Union of Canada’s annual Short Prose Competition. But there’s nothing like reading works fresh out of a writer’s mind in a prompt-based workshop. Something brilliant inevitably materializes out of nowhere, or at least a diamond in the rough, and it’s always magical to see that happen.

If you are a writer living in Regina who’d like to leap away from reality with me, there are still spots available in the workshop — 10am your time on May 11th; register on the RPL website.

If you live elsewhere, check out your own local library for other writing workshops — libraries are the best places in the world for writers looking to connect.

Happy Spring!

It’s on! Awesome Authors 2024

The Ottawa Public Library’s Awesome Authors Youth Writing Contest is open for entries! Young writers of the nation’s capital, we want to read your stories, poems, and comics. Send them in before midnight on February 23rd for a chance to win prizes and publication.

The contest is open to Ottawa students writing in English or French, in two age groups: 9-12 and 13-18. There are seven submission categories: short story; nouvelle; poetry; poésie; comic; bande dessinée; and book cover. Ambitious writers and artists can submit one of everything!

I’ll be judging English fiction in the 9-12 age category again this year — and I want to read your story!

Other judges this year are Apollo the Child; Amelinda Bérubé; Pierre-Luc Bélanger; and Éric Péladeau. (Yes, it’s the same awesome crew as last year — why mess with a good thing?) Check everyone out on the Ottawa Public Library’s YouTube channel.

All judges are offering free writing workshops to help you get started, at library branches across the city. Find the full schedule and registration links on the OPL Events page. My short story workshop will be held at 2:00 pm this Saturday, January 20th, at the Greenboro branch. I hope to see you there.

The contest deadline is just over a month away, which gives you lots of time to make your writing shine. Be sure to read all the rules before submitting. (Don’t go over the 1000-word limit!) Details are on the Awesome Authors page of the Ottawa Public Library website.

And check out the winning pieces and covers from past years anthologized in Pot-pourri, published annually by the Friends of the Ottawa Public Library Association. Your work could be in this year’s anthology. Good luck!

Short Story Markets

I was thrilled to receive a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec this fall to compile my short story collection, “Alone in the World.” (The title sounds depressing, but there will be a lonely laugh or two in there amongst the tears.) I’ll be spending the next few months finishing the book while sending out individual stories for publication in literary journals.

To that end, I’ve again updated my Canadian LitMag List, which I’ve linked to below. It has 55 journals listed with their submissions openings, word count limits, payment offerings, and notes on where to read sample copies. Check it out.

I’m pleased to announce that my latest short story, “Welcome to the Margins,” will be featured in The Humber Literary Review this fall. I’ll post and boast more here when it’s out.

And while I’m on the topic of short stories… I’m honoured to be asked to return as a judge of the Ottawa Public Library’s Awesome Authors youth writing contest this year, and I look forward to reading short stories by local talent in the months to come. The contest launches in December, when I’ll post more about it here.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a litmag to publish your latest story, check out my list, linked below. Good luck!

Short Fiction Markets – Canadian Lit Mags A-Z

Short Story News and Markets

I was thrilled to receive a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec this fall to compile my short story collection, “Alone in the World.” (The title sounds depressing, but there will be a lonely laugh or two in there amongst the tears.) I’ll be spending the next few months finishing the book while sending out individual stories for publication in literary journals.

To that end, I’ve again updated my Canadian LitMag List, which I’ve linked to below. It has 55 journals listed with their submissions openings, word count limits, payment offerings, and notes on where to read sample copies. Check it out.

I’m pleased to announce that my latest short story, “Welcome to the Margins,” will be featured in The Humber Literary Review this fall. I’ll post and boast more here when it’s out.

And while I’m on the topic of short stories… I’m honoured to be asked to return as a judge of the Ottawa Public Library’s Awesome Authors youth writing contest this year, and I look forward to reading short stories by local talent in the months to come. The contest launches in December, when I’ll post more about it here.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a litmag to publish your latest story, check out my list, linked below. Good luck!

Short Fiction Markets – Canadian Lit Mags A-Z